Catching Some Air

Today, I’m blogging from 33,000 feet, high above...oh, probably Utah or Nevada currently, heading to San Francisco on business for a few days. Today will be a very long day, as there’s a three-hour time zone difference between Florida and California. So I just backed my watch up from 3:00 pm to noon, and the flight attendants are serving us ‘lunch’ again. I say ‘lunch’, but what I really mean is a snack – peanut butter crackers specifically – to at least try to acclimate us to the Pacific time zone, meal-wise.

It won’t make much difference, really. I won’t be out here long enough to reset my time clock. It’ll just be a few days of waking up at 4am and falling asleep on my feet at 8pm, and then I’ll be back on a plane headed eastbound again on Wednesday afternoon.

I’m attending a trade show in downtown San Francisco. Going to SFO usually excites me, but this time it just feels so functional, so non-entertaining and work-related, it may as well be Detroit. I won’t see anything, except on the cab rides to and from the airport. So it’s not like I’ll be able to enjoy the city. I’ll just exist in it for a couple of days, and it probably won’t even know I’m here. And that’s the glamour of business travel. Sometimes you go cool places to work. And all you do is work. That’s what happens when someone else is footing the bill. You’re on their time and dime, not yours. So work, it is.

I am meeting four work colleagues out here. It’s a bit uncomfortable, because they all know each other, and I’m the newbie. And they each fear that I am somehow here to replace them. As an ‘FOJ’ (friend of Jim, the new CEO), I’m quite sure they’re not sure what my presence here is all about. So I expect them to be disingenuous, on guard, worried…studying me. The truth is that I have no agenda, other than to try to help create some new business. We’re all on the same team and have the same mission, but I’m not sure they believe that. It’s a period of change for the company, and they’re all a little insecure about their jobs. Some of them should be. Things are definitely changing. But I don’t think my presence has anything to do with it, truly.

Landing in a few minutes. Hope my bags made it. I don’t wish to spend more than one day in today’s business suit. I had an hour layover back in Atlanta. Surely that was enough time for someone working on union pay to move my bags from gate A19 to gate A9, but don’t ever bet on it.

More later…...