A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

18 April 1999 - The Oys of Corporate Travel

This was an absurdly hectic week. There wasn't really much going on at work - the usual round of telecons and one particularly long, tedious and contentious meeting where the argument had more to do with approach than with substance. But I ended up spending hours trying to straighten out my travel for next week. In the course of doing that, I was so frustrated that I drafted three different mental versions of a letter of resignation.

The problem comes about because the geniuses in our corporate travel services group negotiated an airline rate that puts us in the same category as leisure travelers booking a month or more in advance. Since we are lucky to get a week's notice on meetings, all of the seats at our fare are always sold out on any flight we might conceivably want to travel on. The impact of getting home at midnight, when it is perfectly feasible to get home before 8 p.m. by taking the earlier flight, is lost on people who never travel but merely impose restrictions on those of us who do. Normally I wouldn't make an issue of it as I can usually get standby on an earlier flight anyway. But I had already made plans to go to Portland for the weekend before this meeting got moved from its original date. And one can't guarantee getting standby and making a connection that leaves before the flight they were trying to book me on arrives violates the laws of physics. In the end, it turned out I could do it by flying on a different airline. It took several hours of rather vitriolic discussion with the travel agent before they even mentioned this possibility. But I am still furious at the whole situation. The fact of the matter is that people do have lives outside work and it isn't as if frequent business travel isn't stressful enough without the absurdity of these restrictions.

Don't even get me started on dealing with hotels. Our travel services folks refuse to try to negotiate a rate with a nice new major hotel that opened up in a city we travel to a lot. "There are plenty of hotels already in our hotel guide there" they claim. There are three, only one of which is actually in the same city. And that is a place I try to avoid since half the times I've been there, I've had rooms with some major maintenance problem (e.g. no hot water, doors that didn't lock properly, etc..) One of the others is not too inconvenient in that it's a short drive, but it's right next to the railroad tracks and I don't enjoy getting woken by freight train whistles at 4 a.m. every morning. The third is actually a nice place - but is a half hour drive away in good weather, so I hesitate to stay there in winter. It's a moot point as they can't get us rooms at any of these more than half the time. I'm not all that picky for a night or two at a time, but it does seem that it would be reasonable for them to try to negotiate our rate with other hotels given the circumstances.

There's a lot of other stuff I am frustrated about at work, but I am not really ready yet to leave. Maybe I am just a wimp, but I've only been back just under 6 months and it doesn't seem fair to reassess things quite yet. And I think I can find ways to work out some of the other issues, which mostly have to do with precisely which tasks I am spending my time working on.

The weekend was a particularly busy one. The annual Southern California Storyswapping Festival was Saturday, out in Palm Desert. They did a fairly miserable job on the publicity and the attendance was maybe 1/3 of what it normally is. Getting there was rather a pain, too, as Audrey had created directions from the map they said. Only she left out a crucial turn (and had another turn in the wrong direction), which made it a bit challenging to find the place. So everyone from Community Storytellers (well, me and Lynn) and everyone from Long Beach Storytellers (which had a better turnout) got lost. Still, it was a reasonably enjoyable day. Long Beach gets the swap next year and should do a better job of getting people there, particularly as the more central location helps a lot.

I was too tired when I got home to do anything much. I did stir up some trouble on one MUD I play. Really, the trouble is not my fault. As a joke, one of the implementors (the people who run the game) promoted me to his level. This has pretty much everyone except my friends there majorly pissed off. It's not like I could actually do anything since he didn't do something really dumb like giving me the root password. Or that I would do anything much. Just being there and having people see me with IMP next to my name (even though my title clarifies that I am an IMP-oster) is enough to rile them. It's just a game, but, of course, the people who are upset don't see it that way.

While I am being philosophical, I can also be philosophical about losing half the people who were on my walk this morning. Giving them all maps may have been a mistake. But, still, when I told people to wait at a particular corner for the slower members of the group to catch up, I kind of expected that they would. I know that two of them paid the price and got lost, as we caught up with them later. (Oddly, one of those two phoned me later to thank me for organizing the walk!) I'm just assuming the other three are adults and, well, if they are still wandering lost around Cheviot Hills or got eaten by coyotes, they did sign the liability waiver before we left! And the other five of us had a good outing. In fact, one of them asked me at the end if I was going to lead any more walks in the neighborhood. I need to send Kerry info for next month in the next day or so, but I figure I will give it another shot.

Finally, I went to a fundraiser party at Vicki's for LARP, which is an adult literacy program. There were a few people there I knew from storytelling, of course, and I met several other interesting folks. There was a woman I recognized but couldn't place; she turned out to be Ron Lancaster's wife. Ron was one of the original Bards but moved to Tucson years ago, so it wasn't all that surprising that I couldn't place her. At any rate, she is interested in developing more storytelling venues, primarily in the Valley (alas) and I will give her a call to talk about that.

The most intersting thing at the party was a brief talk by one of the LARP students. This guy had gotten through high school and Los Angeles City College and, while he scored well on reading comprehension tests, he couldn't spell and writing was difficult for him. He talked about how he got by at work and how he covered up his problem for years. Reading and writing are so much a part of my life that I find it thoroughly appalling someone could get through school without a teacher noticing that he hadn't mastered those basics. It made me glad I voted against the school board incumbent on Tuesday.