Traveling for work, for many of us, is extremely important
to maintain relationships with customers and to cultivate relationships with
future customers. Additionally, traveling
is rewarding by allowing you to experience different environments and local
foods and to see many exciting and interesting places that you may never see. This is truly the good of traveling.
As I speak about the bad of traveling, I am not
complaining. The majority of my travels
can be categorized in the “good” category.
After all, how would you know what is good, if you don’t have something
bad to compare it to, right? In fact,
the bad of traveling would be better described as the inconvenience of
traveling, but I wanted to use the old western movie description I used in the title. Traveling by plane can’t be described as luxury
travel. You are cramped into an ever
shrinking seat with a curious stranger next to you, hoping the person doesn’t
have to disturb you with bathroom issues or speak to you about his multiple
medical afflictions. As the plane takes
off, you are hoping, if you have a connecting flight, that the plane is close
to being on time so you can make your next flight. After all, 35 minutes in Chicago between
flights is a piece of cake, right? After
finally arriving at your destination, you deplane in a non-orderly, slow
fashion and find your way to baggage claim.
Nervousness arrives as you watch the baggage carousel rotate and your
bag is not appearing while a large group of people are picking up seemingly
anybody’s bag and walking away. You breathe
a sigh of relief as your bag appears on the carousel and grab it to go and find
transportation. As you exit the airport
and follow the direction for ground transportation you look for a taxi. In many locations, you rush to find ground
transportation only to find a line of people from multiple baggage carousels
waiting in front of you. After you wait,
like cattle in a processing line, you get a reward. That reward is a rickety taxi cab driven by a
person that has trouble with the spoken language and you trust the person
understands where to take you. The drive
to your location can typically be described as a cross between an Indianapolis
500 race and ride on a white water raft.
Upon arriving at your hotel and checking in you finally get to the room
you will be staying at for the next few days.
This is some of the bad of traveling.
Now I have to talk about the ugly. These ugly situations actually happened to me
so they may happen to you as well.
Beware!
Ugly travels – The Suitcase. I traveled to Orlando a few years back
for a convention and was pleasantry surprised by the airlines ability to take
care of my clothes within my suitcase.
As I waited for my luggage to come around the carousel at baggage claim
in the airport I noticed a suitcase taped up with silver duct tape and thought
that poor person with that suitcase. I
soon discovered that the poor person was me.
My suitcase seemed to explode in the airplane between Milwaukee and
Chicago and the airline was kind enough to wrap duct tape around it multiple
times. I shrugged my shoulders and
thought that at least I still received my luggage. I arrived at my hotel and began unpacking the
duct tape so I could get to my clothes in order to hang up. I reached in and pulled out my white dress
shirt I was planning on wearing the next day.
I noticed that my dress shirt had a large black tire mark across the
front of it as if someone took a vehicle and ran over it multiple times. Now I realized what happened to my suitcase.
Ugly Travels – The Entrance. I had just checked into my hotel in
Minneapolis and entered my room. I
headed over to the bed, lifted my suitcase and began unpacking it. It was an extremely warm day of travel so I
wanted to change and get some new clothes on.
I undressed to my birthday suit and began heading towards the bathroom
which was next to the entrance door. As
I neared the bathroom door, my entrance door suddenly swung open and an elderly
man and woman starred at me with wide eyes and mouths agape. I was stunned that I was staring at possible
attendees from my conference wearing nothing but the socks on my feet. They rapidly closed the door and I learned
from that point on to always, always dead bolt my door.
Ugly Travels – The
Fuel Dump. I was never a comfortable
airplane traveler but it was the quickest way to get from point A to point B
and it is safer than driving, right?
Well my trip from Green Bay to Chicago tested that belief. We were to take off at 6:30 am to arrive in
Chicago an hour later in order to connect to a flight to Phoenix at 12:30
pm. It left me quite a bit of time to
get to the connecting flight I thought.
Well upon arriving at the airport, I noticed storms developing in Green
Bay and thought this could be an issue.
The airplane carrier let all of us know that the plane was delayed and
would leave in an hour or so when the weather cleared. I immediately checked a weather website I use
and noticed that the storms seemed to be building at our destination of
Chicago. In an hour, as you may have
guessed, they did not board the plane.
They didn’t start boarding the plane until 8:30. I thought I still have time to make my
connecting flight so it was better safe to wait. When I finally boarded the plane I overheard the
flight attendant tell another passenger that they hoped to make it to Chicago. I didn’t like the term hoped but they are the
experts. The Captain began to speak over
the intercom and let us know that they were going to add more fuel to the plane
and fly around the storms. The only
drawback was that an hour flight would now be a 2 ½ hour flight and the Captain
hoped to make it to Chicago. Again, the Captain
used that ugly hope word. After the Captain
said the hope word, some of the passengers began to get up from their seat and
deplane. I texted my good friend who was
sitting a few seats in front of me and asked her if she wanted to leave the
flight. She texted me back and asked
what I thought and I decided we should leave the flight. We left the flight and spoke to the agent at
the counter about our options and suddenly all the people began exiting the airplane. The flight has now officially been
delayed. We decided to wait to see what
happened and if we would board the plane once again after the delay. Approximately 2 hours later they began boarding
the plane once again. We decided at this
point it was the only way we would make our connecting flight so we decided to roll
the dice and board the plane. The Captain
spoke on the intercom once again and let us know the same plan, which was to
have extra fuel to fly around the storms.
After we took off and 10 minutes into the flight, the Captain came on
the intercom and let us know that there is a window to land relatively soon,
however there was an issue with landing because of the extra weight from the
added fuel we were carrying. The
solution to this extra weight was to lower our landing gear at 30,000 feet and
burn the fuel weight off the plane.
Also, there was going to be a large noise as this was happening. There wasn’t anything I could do so I just
decided to be happy this adventure was soon to end, hopefully successfully. As the Captain lowered the landing gear, the
plane began to shake violently and an extremely loud vibrating sound began that
was akin to a blender with rocks in it. This
went on for 15 minutes above Lake Michigan.
The skin color of many of the passengers began to turn a ghostly white
as I am sure my skin did as well. I kept
repeating in my head that flying is safer than driving so this is going to be
just fine. As the landing gear touched
down on the landing strip a huge relief came over me. We finally made it to Chicago and make our
way to Phoenix but I will never forget the look of the passengers on that
flight. It was an ugly experience.
These are just three of the many ugly experiences of travel
I have endured. Next time someone says
how lucky you are to travel for work, remember these experiences and ask them
how lucky you truly are.
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