This just in...

A little less than a week ago, my boss (who is also my good friend, Scott) came up with a fabulous idea on how to really stick it to some groups with whom we had an ax to grind. Long story short, his fabulous idea morphed into a letter we wrote to our members, which worked its way into a conversation I had at lunch with the Wall Street Journal last Friday, which turned into an article that ran in today's paper, which led to appearances on CNBC and Fox and an Associated Press article and a Reuters story and a bunch of other things.

It also morphed into an entire Sunday worth of work for me, but I am not complaining. It's so fun to be the person behind the scenes pulling the strings with otherwise totally clean hands.

At any rate, after I had spent about 12 hours working on this yesterday, coordinating interviews and talking through messaging with our spokespeople and finding data and uploading things to our website, I was finished. And then I waited. For three hours.

That window of time, where you've done everything you can to get a story perfectly right but the magic hour of seeing the finished product has not yet arrived, can be a bit paralyzing. Little pieces of doubt start to creep into your mind: Did they find a retailer who is against our stance? Did our spokesperson say something that will be taken totally out of context? Did the "other" group or company or person say something that will just take us to the cleaners? Is this reporter out to get me or us...am I sure we have a good relationship? Are there any typos in my letter? Yikes, perhaps I should read it again...

So anyway, as I sat up last night watching the Cards beat the Cubs (sorry, Chad, it happened...) I was wondering how this manifesto in the Wall Street Journal would turn out. I hoped for a slow news day (if it wasn't, the piece might get bumped or put into a really crappy spot in the paper) and a good article. I got both.

At 12:17 a.m., as I went online, I saw our story in all its glory on their front page, the article call us "the retailers' trade group" (with no mention of the "other" group that we almost merged with -- ha!), a link to the blessed letter I had just posted on our website and, oh, a quote from one of our retail CEOs completely supporting our position. A magnificent sense of euphoria flooded my entire being.

And then I couldn't sleep. But it was worth it!