Traveling on Business is never a "Trip"

I’ve written before about the uh…challenges I’ve experienced while visiting Dallas; my least favorite city in the U.S. I’m not going to go over them again, suffice to say that I seem to experience problems every time I visit. And this time was exactly the same, only more so.

The first problem was that my flight was at the undoGly hour of 6:00am. Living as I do, some distance from the airport, this would have required me to get out of bed at 3:30am, obviously a ridiculous proposition. Instead, I booked myself a bed in a hotel just a few minutes from the terminal, thus gaining an extra hour of sleep. Even so, that’s no time to be getting up. Like most normal people, I don’t function well in the mornings so I took care to unpack nothing. My clothes for the day were on a hanger and all I had to do was get up, shower, dress and tootle over to the airport. With luck, I would be aboard the plane before I’d woken up.

Except I forgot that two things I should have unpacked, were my toothbrush and razor. The few minutes it took me to run down to the car to fetch it from my made me a little late. Not enough to be a problem – that didn’t happen until I locked the car keys in the room and had to get the night clerk to let me back in. Still not drastically late, but enough to give that little stressful feeling that if anything else went wrong, I could be in trouble. No worries though; I found a parking space close to the terminal, there was no line at check in and security looked to be a breeze.

Until they ran my bag through the x-ray and discovered my Swiss Army Knife. I was momentarily thrilled because I’d lost it a while ago but then it dawned on me that while they may have found it; they weren’t going to give it back. It would only have taken 20 minutes or so to run back to the car with it, but that was 20 minutes more than I had to spare and with sadness, I watched it go into the bin.

The flight was just boarding as I huffed up to the gate and in no time, I was parked in my seat and sipping pseudo-coffee. The pilots seemed to know what they were doing and before I was much further along in my book, we were touching down at Dallas-Fort Worth. It looked as though the glitches were over for this mission. Once on the ground I gave Dear Wife a quick call to get her out of bed (it was still very early in Denver) then hopped in a cab to head over to meet a client. Yes, I had an extra meeting to squeeze in before going to my own company’s office to start the 3-day conference there.

The clients’ office is based in a hotel, albeit far more upscale than the one in which I’d spent the previous night, so as we pulled up, bell-hops scurried forward in the hopes of being allowed to touch my bag and thus earn a tip. Shaking them off, I was soon through the revolving doors and heading for the escalators out the back. At this point I thought of another call I needed to make and started patting my pockets to find my cell phone. And I patted, and I patted and I stopped walking and rummaged, then I put down my bags and searched in earnest. But to no avail.

The taxi firm couldn’t have been less helpful but after calling my phone a few times, the cab driver eventually answered and reluctantly agreed to bring it back. Despite my priming the hotel staff and giving them a number at which I could be reached, the poor guy still sat in the lobby for 15 minutes before some got around to letting me know he was there. He ‘did’ get a tip – a big one.

He would also be able to tell his friends the story of how I then got myself stuck in the revolving doors with a member of the L.A. Clippers basketball team. I was going through the doors, he was in the segment behind me and must have pushed a bit too hard and the thing jammed, trapping me inside for what seemed like days, although it was probably only a minute or two before the security guard came and released me. I’m no basketball fan and have no idea who this guy was but he thought the whole thing was funnier than I did. And he didn’t even offer me free tickets, or a wad of cash, or anything.

Anyway, back to the client meeting, which overran by about an hour. This was OK because we were covering some good material but it meant had now missed the start of my own company’s meeting and as I still had another long cab ride to get there, my hopes of squeezing in lunch beforehand, went out the window. Especially because the cab ride took longer than planned because we couldn’t find the bloody office.
My company’s corporate office employs literally thousands of people, housed in multiple buildings across a large campus. I’d been before, more than once and knew that our meeting wasn’t in the first building off the highway, but another, some 3/4 of a mile away.

Except I got it into my head that I was supposed to be in the other direction and had the driver take me to a different set of buildings altogether. We cruised for several minutes before asking a passing office worker for directions. That would have been a good plan had she not sent us off even further in the wrong direction. The second office worker we asked cheerfully pointed to a large building in the middle distance and as that had my company’s name emblazoned on the outside, I paid off the driver and raced up to the door. To find it locked. Because my company hasn’t used this building in some time and it’s currently sitting empty. And now my cab was gone.

So, here I was, stuck in a faceless office complex, miles from anywhere and with no way of knowing how to get to my own office. My newly found cell-phone was of little use because all my co-workers had their own phones switched off. I know, because I tried calling every number I had. I ended up walking into the reception area of a completely different company to see if they could call me a cab and wondering how long that would take to arrive. One thing was sure, I was verrrrrrrrrry late, sweaty and only a short step away from hyper-ventilating.

Fortunately, I struck gold with two employees who bent over backwards to calm me down. They summoned their own security guard who bundled me into an SUV and in moments, had me where I needed to be. It took another 10 minutes to find the right conference room, a few more to track down a chair (and I dropped that, with a clatter that woke the cubicle dwellers!) But eventually I was ensconced in the meeting room, scarfing down the candy and peanuts and wondering what I’d missed.

Dallas and a 4:30am start all on one trip. I should have known better.