Small Pleasures

Jen said, “That's the thing about traveling for business that sucks. They send you to all these awesome places, then lock you in an office so you can't really see them.”

But there is a positive side. As a tourist, who do you interact with? Hotel and restaurant staff and the tourism people. Workers in the service industry, in other words, and that's about it (unless you're really outgoing and can go to pubs and add local drunks to the list, but that unfortunately isn't me).

But when on business you interact with locals all day long. Eight plus hours in a conference room working out myriad details, the day leavened with moments of shared humor and side conversations. This creates bonds between people. You go to lunch together, you go to dinner together … You drink too much and the bonds are cemented after a fashion. I feel as though I have friends of a sort (though I suppose that could change with one bad business decision) in Italy, in Belgium, in England, in Taiwan, in China … With luck more will be added to the list. (Note re Belgium, I’ve never been there but one of the team flew down from there, and I also met him in Oregon a few months ago and we talked Burning Man so now we’re fast friends. Antwerp and Milan are about the same distance as Portland and Sacramento, so the nature of his commute was easy to grasp.)

You also get to ride around in private cars to strange places. In Taiwan it was to a manufacturer of miniature cameras. In Italy it was to be to a plastics factory this afternoon, but some of us begged out in order to stay in and hash out more real work. Still, could have been, and that fits the point. Last night we caravanned to possibly the best restaurant overall that I have ever been to … But that’s for another post, if it’s to be written at all (for which the odds right now are less than even).

Tonight, one more oversized meal, in all likelihood, and then airports again tomorrow. Another good thing about the business travel: someone else is paying for it. This might tempt some people to feel as if they are important somehow, that they get to go here and they get to go there and they're really special because someone else is paying them to. Surely there are people who develop such an attitude. It is part of my personal jihad that I never do that and I guess we’ll see how that goes; because of course in truth, all these small pleasures can be found anywhere, and so can people like me.