In and Out

Excuse the blog silence, won't you? I usually try to do my bit to keep the blogosphere alive on the weekends, but not this week. Yesterday I was feeling poorly, today I am packing, and from tonight on will be out of pocket until at least tomorrow night, maybe another couple of days, depending on how much of my ass gets handed back to me in the first meeting. Business trip, you know. Boring, but there it is.

I really dread this trip. It's a short one, but I don't like to travel for business anymore, unless I absolutely cannot fob it off upon someone lower on the corporate totem pole than yours truly. I've already played the road warrior game, traveling for business twenty-one days, or more, a month. I did it, for several companies, for several years. I know what it's like to come home to dusty sheets and believe me, it ain't glamorous, and it isn't all that enjoyable, either.

When you tell your friends that you're going to exotic and potentially fun places, like Paris or Honolulu or New Orleans, they usually throw back some lip like "nice work if you can get it!" or "damn. sucks to be you.", all dripping with sarcasm. What most people don't realize - unless they, too, have done a lot of business travel - is that you don't get to actually enjoy any of the fun shit while you're in cool places on company time. Every minute that you spend on-site is a dollah bill, shareholder value, ticking down the drain like sands through the hourglass. You go from office to hotel, hotel to office, perhaps stopping to eat. Yeah, sometimes you get cool scenery - when you aren't in Paramus for a week, that is - but nobody's going to let you go home before the sun sets just so you can lay by the pool. You don't have time to go to that museum you've always wanted to see. You're too fucking exhausted at the end of the day to go to that four-star restaurant across town, because you've worked since six in the morning. Business travel is, largely, annoying, tiring, and tantalizing, in that order. Unless you have an obnoxious spouse at home, or something. Then, I understand that business travel is the nectar of the gods. I wouldn't know about that; me and Mister MacFarland get along pretty good, comparatively.

So. If I were eighteen, here is the place where I would mumble "peace out" and slouch away. I am not eighteen, as my stretch-marks and crows-feet can testify, so this is the part where Queenie say bye.