Lox's Ramblings over Business Trips

Posted on 2007/01/28 07:36:19 (January 2007).

The golden gates of five star hotels have never been so "brown"... The true soul of a business trip.

Business trips are a relatively new thing to the world of human beings.

There were business men that would travel the world to get things from a side to another of the globe (see Marco Polo, or the traders going up and down the "silk road"), even in ancient times there was a population, the Phoenicians, who were pretty good at travelling for business, but nothing compared to what we get now.

If in the past business trips were a thing restricted to few sailors today even in small companies, there is at least one person that globe trots in order to sell his/her services or products.

It has to be said that prior than 1980 there weren't quite as many people traveling from a side to the other of the world.
These new needs are changing the way we live our life and generally the way society works.

Needless to say that the change is against nature, against what the old animal instinct would tell us...

I remember a friend of mine going to New York with his father, that was quite an occurrence for the time, I must have been ten, which makes it 1985.

I guess that to people who do not get the chance to travel a lot even a small business trip might seem quite a great thing, getting on planes, visiting expensive hotels, eating in nice restaurants.

It is good at first I must admit it. I remember having dinner at the Royal Garden Hotel in Hong Kong once, immersed in this 30 floors building, eating in the restaurant at the first floor, looking at the ceiling a good four hundred meters above me (the structure was built so that all the rooms would have the main door on a sort of balcony overlooking the restaurant/disco downstairs).

Marble interiors, huge pillars and perfect Chinese service, all dressed with a jazzy piano player and food that I couldn't possibly have in Italy, lost in a bliss of luxury, calm and satisfaction, I am sure that you can picture me quite enjoying that evening.

I remember that day vividly, for it was one of the few "calm" days that I lived in the last six years.

It's easy to get used to these situations, these sensations, but although it might seem that it is always like that reality tells us quite the contrary.

Travel, and I know something about it, is a bloody drug.
Sometimes you crave for a short break abroad when life back home is not as good as you intended it to be, when there are problems with colleagues, when you just want to go away from the same old place.

As many aspect of modern life business trips are just an abuse to the people that are required to spend a significant time of their lives abroad, like it or not.

Human beings are getting more and more like postal packs, torn away from their families and friends to be engaged in the "bustle rustle" company profit earning activities that we like so much nowadays.

I finally see this after I made the decision to go back to my home town because I wanted to be there, to get back a life that I missed for five years...
Well, what I can say is that in the last six months, I have spent more or less 10 weeks away from home.
You can do the maths, you can draw conclusions... Now that I would like a bit of a pause, they (the trips) are intensifying!!

On the top of that there is another aspect to business trips that seems to strike me at least.

I do not speak

Yes, the absence of noise coming out of my mouth can be quite crazy at times. Saturdays and Sundays spent abroad doing nothing special, mostly being by myself, talking to myself, thinking, having a minimal interaction with shopkeepers, but generally saying very little.

As I said the whole thing with business trips is completely antithetic with our nature. We are not really made to travel so much and for such long distances. It's just not how we were meant to be. Birds can do that, migrations and all of that.
We are not made to remain in silence, to suffer from jet lag (no wonder why birds take 2 weeks to cover distances...), we are not made to forsake everything we care for to sacrifice it to the altar of profit.

Our need of a social life is also affected, we end up striking very superficial relationships, over a work lunch or a work related piss up.
I say superficial because even if the people that you meet are great, there is only a brief time to spend together, so in the end, even if you wanted to see them during the weekend, you can't.

Would I exchange that with a night in with my mates watching football, or a night at the cinema, or even a short trip around the countryside? Any time.

In short I have had enough of business hotels, planes, cheap purple/gray carpets, junk food, airports and taxies.
I have had enough of hotel lobbies, tickets, passports, mobile phones, stolen internet connections.

When travelling gets repetitive and mechanical, it looses all the adventure to it all the anticipation, all the fun. It becomes a flat brain wave, it's there but it's dead.

The funny side of it all? Sometimes you even end up tricking yourself into thinking that you are going back "home".

Before, going abroad for business could be profitable at least, now it's paid just like another day at work (which I find unfair) and it's considered quite "normal".

Marco Polo jailed when he came back to Venice, wrote the “Million�, a book on the story of his trip, or so the legend wants us to believe.
At that time, it was an extraordinary trip after all.

Today a book on business trips must be a stroke of genius (and I am working on it!!), because if it is not it would be branded as too normal, and therefore discarded.

So, do not envy the flesh parcels that travel for work, it's only good the first two times, then it becomes like a day in the office, with a lot of negative sides and very superficial positive ones... Not a great bargain!

When I get back home, the thing that makes me happy the most is being able to sleep in my bed...

Lox

A very touching aricle, Lox. Not happy, but heart-felt. You've probably said what a thousand other travellers wish to say... Splendid work...

Posted by Nigel at 2007/01/28 17:40:01.

Lox I totally, utterly and completely agree! Well said!

Posted by John at 2007/01/28 18:10:41.

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