The Glamour STRESS of international business travel.
I write this posting at 10am
on a Wednesday morning over the middle of the Atlantic on my 5th
flight of the week. On Monday my work
started at 6:30AM as I have clients in the Middle East and it was already 8AM
on the second working day of the week for them. It was one of those unexpected
busy days where the e-mail was spewing out incoming mail faster than I could
deal with this. I was working at home and took the opportunity for a family
lunch at the local pub. At 3:30PM my wife dropped me off at the airport and I
caught a flight to Dublin arriving at 6PM. I met my client for the night (that
just sounds sooooooo wrong on sooooooo many levels) at 7PM. I was tasked to accompany a flight my company
had chartered to ensure that there were no hiccups along the way. The flight
departed at 1AM on Tuesday morning and I managed to sleep for most of the 4hours
40 minute duration, so far so good. Due to a minor clerical error by a
subcontractor the return flight then took an hours delay in Beirut and
everything started to go wrong with my week.
This meant that, as the flight
time was also longer than planned, my connection for the flight back home was
now 30 minutes and not the 1:45 planned. I knew I had to clear immigration,
customs and security and that Ryanair are very prompt at closing the gate so I
sprinted through Dublin airport and arrived at the gate 10 minutes before the
departure time to find that the flight was delayed for 15 minutes. This had the
knock on effect that I was 15 minutes late home and I had only allowed an hour
to get to my sons school for his parents evening, the traffic was awful and we
arrived 2 minutes before the start. The appointments overran by 40 minutes
(being a very proud parent I can say it was because they all wanted to say nice
things about him). I had to visit a supermarket on the way home to buy some
porridge for a friend in Canada (which could be the subject of a posting all of
its own about the weirdest thing you have carried onto an aircraft as hand
baggage, although my mother would knock everyone else out of the park on that
one as many years ago she had took a lawnmower into the cabin). I arrived home at 8:10PM. Between 8 and 10PM I
had to, in no particular order ….
1) Eat
2) Assist
my son with his homework
3) Assist
my other son with formatting his work experience letters
4) Shower
5) Repack
the bags
6) Attend
to some work e-mails and prepare for a conference call the next morning.
7) Attend
to the home e-mails
8) Read
the mail
9) Check
in for the next day’s flight
10) Order
a taxi.
11) Spend
some time with the family
12) Sleep
… bearing in mind I had not seen a bed for 38 hours at this point
At 3:45 AM I woke 15 minutes
before the alarm clock was due to go off and the taxi arrived at 4:30AM my
connecting bus left for the airport at 5AM and At 5:45 whilst still on the bus
I started a complicated conference call with a customer, this call lasted for
45 minutes after which I passed through security and purchased my first coffee
of the morning. I am now on the way to
Canada where I have two days of meetings and will leave on the overnight flight
on Friday night arriving back at Heathrow at 7:30am on Saturday which means I
should be home at about 9:30AM. the kids football training starts at 10AM and
we have family friends for lunch the same day and dependant on how this all
pans out I have to take my son to his swimming class at 5PM and I should be
home about 6:30PM.
I love my job and achieving so
much in a single week gives me a real buzz. I do however have to recognise the
amazing job that my wife does keeping the house and family running whilst I am
running abut like this.
