Travelling Sucks

At the risk of sounding like a hokey stand-up comic, I’ve gotta rant about airline travel.

Travelling for work sucks.  This past year my job “description” changed, requiring me to travel twice a month to customers’ sites for my company.  I’m a Research and Development Manager for one of the world’s largest chocolate manufacturing companies.  And by “largest” I mean we make so much chocolate that if you’ve eaten chocolate in some form in the past week, there’s a better than 40% chance that you’ve eaten our chocolate.  The odd thing is, nobody outside the industry knows who we are, because we don’t have a retail line in the US.  So when I tell people what I do for a living, I also get to explain about the “who” as well as the “what”.  But I digress, back to the travel thing.

I’m not a tiny fella, I’m 6’5”, 350 lbs, built like a linebacker, cuddly like a teddy bear.  My wife loves me, my son loves me, my parents, brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephew all love me.  The airlines, however, most decidedly do NOT love me.  What jack-a-ninny designed an airline seat assuming that every rear end that sits in it is going to be 19 ½” wide?  Every time I get on a plane, it’s like playing Russian roulette.  I squeeze into a seat, aisle preferably, so I’m not crammed against the bulkhead for the duration of the flight.  Now comes the fun part, watching everyone pass down the aisle, chanting “don’t stop here, keep on moving” in my head, hoping beyond hope that nobody has to sit next to me and I can actually breathe during the flight. 

Once the cabin door is closed and nobody’s had the unfortunate luck to be placed in the seat next to me, I can relax a little.  At this point I usually reach for the in-flight magazine that I’ve read 10 times in the past few weeks.  What I’m really doing is killing time until the flight crew decides it’s safe enough for me to risk turning on my video ipod without causing us to burst into flames or simply vanish into some space-time vortex that is obviously created every time someone uses an “approved portable electronic device” prior to the “ding” at 10,000 feet.  What could possibly happen if I decide to listen to my audio book or watch and episode of Brisco County Jr. at 9,000 feet? 

Then the hotel fun begins.  The only thing that bugs me about sleeping in hotels is the sleeping part.  I swear if I have to sleep on another 12 dollar queen sized mattress with marshmallow box springs and sheets that wouldn’t stay on the mattress if you stapled them there, I’m going to set fire to the building and run away into the night, giggling like a schoolgirl on an all-night milkshake and French fry bender. 

Eating alone in restaurants is fun too, conversations going all around you while you sit in the corner like a mob boss, scarfing down your steak so you can get back to your crappy mattress in your non-descript hotel room and sleep for 2 hours at a clip before getting up before the sun rises to visit some dairy in the middle of Indiana.  I do like eating for free though, but now my company has set a 50 dollar per day limit on meals.  50 bucks a day to eat sounds like a lot, and it is, depending on where you’re trying to eat.  I can eat for 20-30 bucks a day in the states, small town, fast food stuff.  However, if I’m staying in Paris, Zurich, or New York City for example, dinner alone will run you 30-40 bucks.  This leaves 10 bucks for breakfast and lunch.  The best part is that my company decided that they shouldn’t have to reimburse us for lunch, as they don’t pay for our lunch when we work at home.  My argument to that brilliant piece of deductive reasoning is that it’s fairly hard for me to pack my lunch and bring it to work when I’m 2,500 miles from my kitchen. 

Having said all this, I do like visiting customers.  I’m not in sales, so I couldn’t care less if they’re buying a lot or a little.  They usually have a lot of interesting questions for me, so the visits aren’t boring.  I like solving problems, and when I do, the customers are normally really appreciative.  Not “here’s a 100 gift card to Best Buy for flying out here and saving us $50,000 a month on our process” appreciative, but appreciative nonetheless. 

The major downside to all of this is two-fold.  I’m away from home, which means I’m away from my family (wife – gestating a second kid, and my 18 month old son, slowly and methodically destroying my house).  The other problem with being away from home is being away from gaming.  I have a DS, which is fine for killing time in the airport, but I can’t play that for long stretches without splitting headaches and hand cramps.  I also miss out on launch day goodness with my clanmates, GRAW 2 most recently, as I usually travel Tuesday-Thursday.  

Well enough of my whining.  The “blogging” thing is cathartic, but I’m not sure if it’s entertaining to read on your part.  If you made it this far, I leave you with a brilliant statement by Groucho Marx:

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read”.