Business trips are, to me, a manic cycle between three psychological states: intense action, nervous preparation for intense action, and sheer boredom. Sometimes they combine; on Wednesday afternoon, for instance, I was bored as hell waiting for my focus groups to get started, but also incredibly nervous because I knew my clients would show up in the back room of the focus group facility any minute. Anyway, in an attempt to turn the nervousness and boredom into something productive, I took some notes on observations I made during the trip, which I plan to share below.
It's a story that seems simplistic but it's actually kind of an outline of what I do, how I manage to do it, and what business trips can be like at the present time.
Let's get to it:
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WEDNESDAY, 5:30 am: Alarm clock goes off. Exhausted, I do some mental math and realize I've greatly overestimated the time it will take to get to the airport. My flight doesn't leave until 10:15 am, and even though I'm flying out of Philadelphia (NOTE: flying out of Philly always seems like a good idea when price shopping, and is always a terrible idea the morning of the flight itself), I have more time to sleep. I'm the world's worst sleeper (more on this later), and I rarely snooze after the alarm clock, but this time, I manage to fall back asleep.
6:00 am: Alarm clock goes off. I do more mental math and convince myself I can sleep until 6:30 am. I set the alarm for 6:30 but my travel anxiety rears its ugly head and after ten minutes of tossing and turning, get out of bed at 6:10, instead.
8:45 am: Parked at PHL - it took an hour and and a half to get here, which is a comical amount of time to travel to an airport, given EWR is only 45 minutes away, but at least there was no traffic.
8:54 am: Through security at PHL. There's a little known security line in front of terminal B that often has a much shorter line than the main security lines at the other terminals. I don't avail myself of this travel hack often enough, but this morning it works out. I'm not kidding when I say I was out of my car and through security at one of the country's most clusterfuckiest airports in nine minutes flat. Now, time to grab coffee...
10:30 am: Waiting on the tarmac, in 14th position to takeoff (NOTE: I always appreciate pilots willing to tell you the bad news. Hearing bad news always beats the living crap out of hearing nothing at all), because a runway was temporarily shut down due to a bird strike. I read somewhere once that birds are a leading cause of plane crashes; we all know about the plane that landed in the Hudson in 2009 - that plane was impacted by a bird strike. I'm not the most nervous flier (though I certainly used to be, before I flew all the time), but I'd be lying if I didn't say that plane wasn't on my mind as we take off.
10:55 am: I was in something like boarding zone 17 on US Airways for this flight, which most people hate but I actually sort of like. You get to spend less overall time on the airplane, and more time standing to get to your seat. In 2012, I flew enough to earn Silver status on US Airways, which earned me nothing in 2013 except (a) access to the front part of coach and (b) the ability to board super early in the process. Access to the front part of coach was nice enough, I suppose, but boarding early in the process is highly overrated. You just sit there and wait for other people to herp and derp their way down the aisle for 20-30 minutes. Not fun.
11:30 am: Grateful for the window seat, since I actually feel like dozing this time and I can rest my head against the additional three inches of space between my seat and the window. I catch a couple of winks, then work on studying my discussion guide for tonight's focus groups. Moderating focus groups is one of the more challenging things I'm asked to do in my work, and the typical difficulty is, in this case, is somewhat amplified by the groups being for a brand-new client, and with a challenging demographic (small business owners). Small business owners aren't like you (most likely) and me. They're successful by the very virtue of their business continuing to remain open in this environment, and they tend to be high-energy and aggressive people (even in Charlotte). There are no guarantees these folks will be easy to interview in a group environment.12:45 pm: I am amazed at the line at this airport Burger King. They called out order #82 as I placed my order, which was #8. This is the type of comment which reeks of classist hegemony and guilt, but I'm surprised at how smart the person who took my order sounded. They sounded like a professor or poet or something. I felt, legitimately, like I couldn't sound that intelligent in a random interaction with a stranger - and that Burger King attendant earns $7.25 an hour. The world is a really strange place, it strikes me, as I sit down and munch on some french fries and chicken tenders.
4:00 pm: T-minus 90 minutes until the first group starts. My boss' boss, one of the greatest focus group moderators I've ever seen, once told me that when he was starting out "doing groups" (as we like to say), he would get so nervous he'd sometimes have to throw up beforehand. I never look, or feel, that nervous before groups - but man, do I wish it were 5:30 pm. It's always a breeze once the research gets started.
4:30 pm: What's difficult about moderating a focus group? Well, nothing, I suppose, except for (1) keeping the discussion on topic; (2) making sure Quiet Jim in the seat directly to my right is speaking up enough, so the clients don't complain; (3) making sure Veronica the Dominator, sitting at the rear of the group, doesn't speak up first with every question I ask; (4) making sure the group is running on schedule and speeding up or slowing down the pace of the discussion, as needed, to make the group run exactly two hours; (5) wondering if the clients in the back room are getting what they need from the research; (6) trying to remember what someone said 25 minutes ago, in order to tie it into a question I'm going to ask ten minutes from now; (7) making a funny joke on occasion and keeping everyone having some semblance of fun and engagement (difficult when the topic of the group is insurance).
5:30 pm: The first group files in, and we get started.
6:30 pm: Feeling pretty good...
7:30 pm: Group one is finished - clients seem happy. Group two files in AS group one files out, and I really have to pee. This is going to be a fun two hours...
8:30 pm: The participants must think I'm acting kind of funny, walking around like crazy around the room while I ask questions. It's really just a Modified Pee-Pee Dance, but hey, no one has to know this.
9:30 pm: Oh thank goodness, group two is finished. I'm going to give someone back at the office a very hard time for scheduling these groups back-to-back, without a 15 minute break in between.
9:45 pm: Focus group facilities - at least, the very good ones - are supposed to take good care of moderators and make sure they don't go hungry throughout the process. This facility in Charlotte, which is actually typically very good, make a crucial faux pas - they forgot to make sure I had something to eat for dinner. I don't eat between groups, and tend to subsist on caffeinated beverages (e.g., coffee, Diet Coke), so I was REALLY looking forward to having some food after these groups. Now it looks like I'm going to have to scrounge something up around the hotel.
10:20 pm: Thankfully for me, the hotel's "bistro" was open. My dinner tonight was not very bistro-y: it consists of what appears to be a microwaved bacon cheeseburger and french fries. I also grab a Sam Adams because, YOLO. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to need to eat something healthy and nutritious, or else I'm going to come down with something.
THURSDAY, 6:20 am: Rise and shine. The first thought through my mind is, this will be over with at noon today.
12:05 pm: DONE! As cranky and nervous as I get before being "on stage," as it were, I feel like a million bucks right now. The good feelings are amplified further by the client complimenting me on the job I did after finishing the research - never expected, and always nice to hear.
1:00 pm: As I sip a Corona with lime and eat a salad for lunch (healthy food, for the win) at the airport restaurant, I watch and listen to the group of suited-up alpha males next to me getting pumped up for their big sales meeting, and think to myself how grateful I am to not have their job. There's an element of our good friend, the Fundamental Attribution Error, in what I'm about to write - these people aren't me, I don't know them and I don't know their life stories, so by default they're boring people - but I'm going to assume based on their conversation they probably sell industrial PVC supplies, storage solutions, customer retention software, or some other kind of widget where the only differentiators between their ability to sell and some other competitor's ability to sell are their aggression and salesmanship. That's gotta be tough and also dehumanizing, as it sort of turns you into a bottom line-driven sales machine. You might end up being good at it, but at what cost? Your spouse leaving you? A heart attack at 48? At least, doing what I get to do, I get to win sometimes on the merits of my intelligence, creativity, and guile.
1:02 pm: I think a lot these days about income inequality and specifically the sense I get that we're becoming a sort of caste society in America, where the privileged ones are increasingly the "creative class" people who get to think independently and make active decisions as part of their day to day work (except for academics, who aren't privileged because grad school is an awful life choice). It's been a long time for me since high school, the most recent extended period of time in my life when I was surrounded by a group of people who largely either did not want to - or could not - think deeply about stuff. So I tend to assume that most people want more responsibility, and want to have more ownership of things in their world, but they simply can't, and this bothers me more than it (perhaps) should. I don't think there's a solution to this issue; it's like solving world poverty. But suffice to say people watching at the airport has got me thinking about too much deep shit. Maybe I can order a second beer...
1:15 pm: The airport bar is an awesome place, when you think about it. Other people have said this more eloquently than me, but airports are places where everyone has an origin and a destination, and they're in between those two places at the present time. Thankfully there exists the airport bar, a watering hole where people from all over the place can congregate to sip adult beverages and make small talk with people they'll never see again. I find the "Carolina Beer Company" in an out-of-the-way section of CLT's international terminal and sit down at the nearly empty bar for a delicious local IPA. It turns out there is no actual "Carolina Beer Company" brewery, and there are no other locations for the "Carolina Beer Company" besides Terminal D at the Charlotte Airport. I can't get over this fact, and probably annoy the hell out of my bartender with my disbelief that something like this would exist solely as a single location to serve local beers to travelers stopping through the international terminal in Charlotte, NC. Let's say you're traveling from California to Munich, with a layover in Charlotte. Are you really going to care that much about North Carolina beer to stop in for a drink? I don't know, but the place stays afloat, so I guess people do this. Anyway, I'm probably annoying you as much as I annoyed the bartender, so I'll shut up.
2:45 pm: This is a big airplane, specifically a Boeing 767 Extended Range, which is (oddly) taking me and about two hundred other passengers on a 474-mile journey from CLT to PHL. I haven't traveled on a plane this huge since my honeymoon, and the aviation geek in me is thrilled to look around and see something other than a 6-foot maximum ceiling. You can actually stretch out in one of these planes and relax, if you wanted to. I look around and watch lots of people sleeping in oddball ways - some are sitting straight up with no recline; others are resting their heads against the window (like I did on the flight down, yesterday); others have their tray tables down and are sleeping curled over, with their heads in their arms. I know I just slept on a plane the day before, but I can't help but wonder, how can people fall asleep so easily? I alluded to this earlier in the post, but I am an awful sleeper - I don't need to be 100% comfortable to fall asleep, but unless I'm dead tired, I need to be at least 90% comfortable. Other people I know, like my wife and some friends, can fall asleep under any set of circumstances - it's like a switch they can turn on and off. I am envious of having this switch; I can only sleep when my body tells me to, otherwise I am completely awake.
4:30 pm: Landed in PHL.
5:00 pm: On the road again...
7:00 pm: HOME. Business trip: pWned.
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