Business Trips: all business, no trip.
Apr. 22nd, 2002 02:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikNew Jersey, as a state goes... is just fine. It's a nice place for folks who live there.
However, the business trip was best described as less than stellar. I will not go into the gory details of precisely why I had heaping quantities of No Fun, save to say that the untyped rant would get me into a lot of trouble with work if they ever found this LJ. Instead, I'll just tap out a few highlights and impressions.
The actual tasks that were required were completed within acceptable margins. We were supposed to (a) build out a new colocation center and (b) repair/upgrade the little New Jersey office where all the execs work. Enough was done to qualify the new center as being online, and the Jersey office as being acceptably upgraded. There's a bit more fiddling and tweaking to do, but it can all be done by phone. For this... I'm glad. The trip was a success.
The travel sucked. I Don't Fly Well. I love airplanes, but only when I'm flying them. As I never had the money for the air-time back when I took ground school, this means the only flying I truely enjoy is in simulators. The trip there required a 4am wake time, and 4.5 hours in the air. The trip back required 3 hours delay in the airport, 2.5 hours in the plane on the tarmac due to weather/tower delays, and 7.5 hours in the air fighting a 160kt headwind all the way home.
New York Pizza is actually as good as all the New Yorkers I've met have told me it is. I'm impressed.
Everywhere in Weehawken, NJ and the areas of the NJ Turnpike nearby look like you're on the set of the Sopranos (an HBO show that my housemates enjoy). Surprisingly, it's the locals who keep mentioning this, not the tourists.
California has spoiled me. I could smell smoke in every single taxi, airport-limo, restaurant, convenience store, lobby, elevator, and office I went into. Well, smell isn't the right word. Become bodily revolted by, to the point of feeling queasy, is more accurate. I used to be able to take it with only a wrinkle of the nose. Now it physically makes me ill. Weird. Thankfully, my natural habitat (data centers) are all super-purified-air, so the bulk of my install days provided safe refuge.
Ground Zero Hurts. Do not go there. Unless you have a personal need for closure or some other tie to the site, just avoid it. I can not stress this enough. We stumbled upon it by accident while going around doing the oooo! and aaah! thing at Tall Buildings and other touristy crap. None of us in our little group wanted to go there. But once at the site, you can't just look away. I think![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
traveller_blues will best understand me when I say that there's just no words to properly describe the visceral tangle of negative emotion the passing humans twine around the site every day. I could feel it long before we actually got there, and if I trusted more in my senses while amongst emotionally-unfamiliar co-workers I would have followed my instincts and steered the group away from the site before ever reaching it.
I hope they finish the memorial or new buildings or whatever they're going to do soon. It's just the gaping emptiness of the giant damnable hole that keeps snagging at people's souls as they file past, day in and day out.
Everything is smaller than it is on TV, when it comes to distances. Driving through NYC, while large, was just not nearly as big as my mind had made it out to be. Individual buildings were bigger than imagined, though. Funny how scale works.
NYC and Nothern-NJ drivers are indeed more agressive, by a long-shot. As the co-worker I was travelling with was from that area, this applied to him as well. This starts to touch on the employment-challenging topics again, and I'll let this one trail off...
Pillow-top mattresses have also spoiled me. Having gotten used to mine, I now find hotel beds to be as hard and unwelcoming as a sagging blackboard propped on saw-horses and draped with a sleeping bag.
The thought I had while the plane was lifting away from the Newark airport for the trip home: The difference between a business trip and a vacation is in the level of detachment from the place visited. When getting the job done has precedence over all else, everything around you feels slightly fake. It's like standing on a huge blue-screen set, doing your job, while the editor patches in random locations for the viewers at home to watch. I didn't visit New Jersey and NYC. I visited the inside of yet another Exodus center, and yet another micro-sized Startup Company office. The two hours we actually got for that NYC touristing feels more like watching a quick show on the tele than something we actually did.
Someday I'll take a vacation there, and see what the place really feels like. For now, I'm glad to be home. I think I'll more actively fight against business travel if I can do so without threatening my job status. I can do my company more good from the home-office, instructing remote-a-techs by phone.
However, the business trip was best described as less than stellar. I will not go into the gory details of precisely why I had heaping quantities of No Fun, save to say that the untyped rant would get me into a lot of trouble with work if they ever found this LJ. Instead, I'll just tap out a few highlights and impressions.
The actual tasks that were required were completed within acceptable margins. We were supposed to (a) build out a new colocation center and (b) repair/upgrade the little New Jersey office where all the execs work. Enough was done to qualify the new center as being online, and the Jersey office as being acceptably upgraded. There's a bit more fiddling and tweaking to do, but it can all be done by phone. For this... I'm glad. The trip was a success.
The travel sucked. I Don't Fly Well. I love airplanes, but only when I'm flying them. As I never had the money for the air-time back when I took ground school, this means the only flying I truely enjoy is in simulators. The trip there required a 4am wake time, and 4.5 hours in the air. The trip back required 3 hours delay in the airport, 2.5 hours in the plane on the tarmac due to weather/tower delays, and 7.5 hours in the air fighting a 160kt headwind all the way home.
New York Pizza is actually as good as all the New Yorkers I've met have told me it is. I'm impressed.
Everywhere in Weehawken, NJ and the areas of the NJ Turnpike nearby look like you're on the set of the Sopranos (an HBO show that my housemates enjoy). Surprisingly, it's the locals who keep mentioning this, not the tourists.
California has spoiled me. I could smell smoke in every single taxi, airport-limo, restaurant, convenience store, lobby, elevator, and office I went into. Well, smell isn't the right word. Become bodily revolted by, to the point of feeling queasy, is more accurate. I used to be able to take it with only a wrinkle of the nose. Now it physically makes me ill. Weird. Thankfully, my natural habitat (data centers) are all super-purified-air, so the bulk of my install days provided safe refuge.
Ground Zero Hurts. Do not go there. Unless you have a personal need for closure or some other tie to the site, just avoid it. I can not stress this enough. We stumbled upon it by accident while going around doing the oooo! and aaah! thing at Tall Buildings and other touristy crap. None of us in our little group wanted to go there. But once at the site, you can't just look away. I think
traveller_blues will best understand me when I say that there's just no words to properly describe the visceral tangle of negative emotion the passing humans twine around the site every day. I could feel it long before we actually got there, and if I trusted more in my senses while amongst emotionally-unfamiliar co-workers I would have followed my instincts and steered the group away from the site before ever reaching it. I hope they finish the memorial or new buildings or whatever they're going to do soon. It's just the gaping emptiness of the giant damnable hole that keeps snagging at people's souls as they file past, day in and day out.
Everything is smaller than it is on TV, when it comes to distances. Driving through NYC, while large, was just not nearly as big as my mind had made it out to be. Individual buildings were bigger than imagined, though. Funny how scale works.
NYC and Nothern-NJ drivers are indeed more agressive, by a long-shot. As the co-worker I was travelling with was from that area, this applied to him as well. This starts to touch on the employment-challenging topics again, and I'll let this one trail off...
Pillow-top mattresses have also spoiled me. Having gotten used to mine, I now find hotel beds to be as hard and unwelcoming as a sagging blackboard propped on saw-horses and draped with a sleeping bag.
The thought I had while the plane was lifting away from the Newark airport for the trip home: The difference between a business trip and a vacation is in the level of detachment from the place visited. When getting the job done has precedence over all else, everything around you feels slightly fake. It's like standing on a huge blue-screen set, doing your job, while the editor patches in random locations for the viewers at home to watch. I didn't visit New Jersey and NYC. I visited the inside of yet another Exodus center, and yet another micro-sized Startup Company office. The two hours we actually got for that NYC touristing feels more like watching a quick show on the tele than something we actually did.
Someday I'll take a vacation there, and see what the place really feels like. For now, I'm glad to be home. I think I'll more actively fight against business travel if I can do so without threatening my job status. I can do my company more good from the home-office, instructing remote-a-techs by phone.
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Ursula