mobites - ideas, inspiration, insight

I remember when traveling on business was somewhat enjoyable.

Of course, that was a few years after the Mad Men era during the fall of the three-martini lunch.

It was a time when you could travel in the middle of the day. You didn’t have to squeeze every possible hour in at the office before you headed for the airport so you could fly at night to get to a client meeting first thing the next morning so you could get back on the plane and get home in time to squeeze a few more hours in at the office.

It was a time before airports started looking, feeling and sounding like Greyhound Bus Terminals.

It was the golden age before business travel became the modern-day equivalent of the Bataan death march with Samsonites.

Enjoy your trip, you swine

Now you reserve a non-smoking room and you get a suite that smells like Dennis Leary’s index finger. Complete with Nazi maids who don’t give a shitzen about the “Do Not Disturb” sign and storm your room like the Feds raiding the kitchen for green cards at EL Polo Loco.

And God forbid that you should ever have to board an airplane.

You’re in for the fight of your life. Charging your way through not just the people but also their oversized trunks full of every possession that has cluttered their pathetic lives, clogging the aisles like pieces of human cholesterol jammed into the passengerial artery of time. Each trying to wedge refrigerator-freezer boxes they’ve gaffer-taped a twine handle onto so it would pass for carry-on into the overheads with hydraulic jacks.

The same overhead that you carefully just folded your suit coat into.

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Right? Maybe it should be what doesn’t kill us makes us look like hell at client meetings.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.