Farewell to Mike and Welcome to Rudy and Yuliana! Or, How We Spent Our Summer.

By Rebecca Smith

This year, our fiscal year kicked off with an extra special party – we combined our New Year’s bash with an Independence Day celebration, plus Mike Gottschalk let us roll out the red carpet and sparklers for a champagne toast to celebrate his retirement!  Talk about a party – we had a circus theme for the event and several people came in costume! 

Here we see Mike Gottschalk, retiring in style! Judy Pickering and Jim Murphy are ready for the fantastic BBQ catered lunch. Several people took advantage of the photo props, including Sareeta Nerkar, Gloria Garcia and Rebecca Smith. Also, we wanted to share plenty shots of President Murphy clowning around!

Everyone had a great time and we sincerely wish Mike all the best of luck in his retirement – Mike, may you delight in spending time with your grandkids and still find plenty of hours for golf!  Cheers and thank you for your many years of service!

The Pickering staff came back from the long holiday weekend recharged and ready for the start of the fiscal year!  New hire Maureen was just hitting her 90-days at Pickering and we thought the excitement was winding down around the lab…  That is, until we jumped headfirst into the deep-end of the hiring pool once more! 

With Mike’s retirement fresh in our minds, we began our search for a new Customer Service Manager to join our team.  We searched high, we searched low, we searched Indeed. 

As a result, we’d now like to introduce you to Rudy Suez, the newest – scratch that, second newest – employee to join Pickering!  Rudy joins us from his previous employer, where he managed the Inside Sales and Customer Service team that supported Veterinary Chemistry and Hematology customers for the last several years.  For our team, Rudy will be managing our Customer Service team as well as looking for new ways to impact our sales and customer experiences. 

When he has free time, Rudy enjoys hitting the gym on weeknights and road-tripping down to Disneyland whenever he can get away for a weekend.  You might have already spoken with him on the phone over the last couple of weeks, but next time feel free to ask him about Space Mountain while placing your order!

Here is Rudy while on a trip to Santiago, Chile.

Rudy got a chance to meet some of you at this year’s AOAC International conference and he can’t wait to continue building relationships with more of our customers.  He’s still has plenty to learn but he’s friendly and enthusiastic, so don’t be shy to share a little bit about your company and post-column application of choice, if you have the time!  Rudy would welcome contact via email or feel free to call him up and have a chat.

Rudy Suez, looking friendly as he represented Pickering at this year’s AOAC meeting in Denver!

And finally, speaking of new employees, we’d also like to briefly introduce Yuliana Lopez, our brand-new admin-of-all-trades!  Yuliana will be cross-training with Diana over the next several weeks and learning how to route your calls, take your orders, send your invoices and generally provide full-service customer support!

Yuliana Lopez and Diana Ancira, seen here mind-melding and being fabulous!

In her spare time, Yuliana enjoys watching anime, reading books and unleashing her creative genius on hair and makeup as a licensed cosmetologist!  If you’d like to say hello and welcome her to the team, she can be reached by email or by walking through the Pickering front door!  Otherwise, she can be reached along with Diana and Gloria at our orders@pickeringlabs.com email address!