I don’t know who it is that spreads the wicked rumour that business travel is exotic, but if it’s supposed to be, I’m clearly doing something wrong.
Admittedly, my travel is is usually little and too far from glamorous places. A night here or there in small-town Ontario, or if I’m lucky, to another province, all I get. So what could possibly go awry?Plenty, it seems. I don’t think I’ve had a single excursion out of the office without a story to come home with.
One evening at a conference, I was woken by someone slipping a piece of paper under the door. Grumbling, I got out of bed to find out why the checkout receipt had been delivered a couple of days early. It turns out a water main had broken outside the hotel. No water. The hotel was offering to put us in cabs to go to a sister hotel for showers in the morning. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever considered meeting your colleagues bleary-eyed and unshowered, but I was NOT about to let that happen. Fortunately, I’m creative. I padded down the hall to the ice machine. After a few hours, I had a bucket of water. And it turns out if you run that cold water through the coffee maker, you can get just enough to wash your hair and face. We didn’t get water back until later that afternoon.
And then there was the time I got locked out of my room. You know that security latch that you pull over so the door can’t be opened from the outside? Somehow, it closed itself while I was out. When I arrived back at my room in the evening, it was clear I wasn’t getting in by myself. It took the hotel’s service person a LONG time to finally figure out how to pry the door open – he was desperate enough at one point to consider getting a ladder and breaking in through the window of my second floor room.
I’ve had “crispy” carpets, delayed flights and lost reservations and so I’ve learned to expect hiccoughs. The short trip I’m on now to work at a conference has proven no exception. A huge downpour in Toronto delayed our little plane to New Brunswick, where I finally landed late yesterday. Unfortunately, the luggage truck that brought our bags to the little “puddle-jumper” left them on the cart, just before a ground stop was called. That meant they sat in the rain – for well over an hour. When I finally arrived in Saint John and got unpacked, the worst had come true. Clothes were wet through and through. In fact, the sweater on the top could almost be wrung out. What was there to do but laugh!
But it’s morning now and almost everything is almost dry. I’ve enjoyed a quiet morning and the fog that hid the Saint John harbor earlier today is lifting, and I have a few hours left until booth setup time. This trip’s hiccough has already happened, so it’s time to enjoy — before I start worrying whether bigger mishaps will accompany the international travel I have lined up in June!
