Travelling Incognito

You may be wondering what I'm doing up this late, well it's not insomnia or too much caffeine nor a badly set clock, I am in fact sitting some 6000 miles away from merry old England in Sunnyvale California. At the moment it's hardly living up to its name and I think the weather is probably better back home since it is unseasonably cold and wet with temperatures sub 10 degC and fairly heavy if infrequent rain. I even heard mention of snow!.

Still being a brit I am of course hardened to such conditions and since I'm spending almost all my time in an air conditioned office building it only has an impact when walking to lunch, dinner, or back to the hotel.

I've not done this sort of trip that often maybe three times total since I started work and some have been better than others. One trip I was basically left to fend for myself in the middle of an industrial estate with no car in a country where legs are used exclusively for pushing gas peddles and where so few people walk they don't bother to have pavements and the equivalent of the green cross man doesn't actually stop the traffic it just means you only get run over from one direction. The more recent trips have been better with more conveniently placed hotels and people actually making sure I get taken out for a meal rather than having to dodge traffic on a busy interstate to get to an all night gas station where they stock some unappealing sandwiches and packs of ham flavoured breath mints.

It's funny when people see this sort of thing as a perk, it's not really. You loose a couple of days of your weekend to travelling and or jet lag. You loose several days of productive work just from getting ready and so forth which then puts you behind making any tight deadlines even tighter. You spend the best part of a day bounced around in a tin can, in my case drugged up to the eyeballs on Jimson Weed derived travel meds, with the amount of space and comfort that would have animal rights protesters calling for blood if they shipped cattle that way. Then you suffer through US immigration at the other end (Though San Francisco is massively better than LA if you can help it never fly into LAX it is as close as you can get to hell on earth. SFO was speedy and polite). Once you are done with that you spend a week living out of a hotel room and working most of your time. It's assumed you work weekends and overtime since you have nothing better to do. The only good thing is you can get a few nice meals out of it, though not always (see above mmm ham!). And you do get to meet face to face the people that have been making your life difficult for the past few months and pay them back in kind (by ordering the most expensive thing on the menu when they take you to lunch and then stealing all their coffee cups pens equipment and in extreme cases furniture).

At least this sort of thing is the exception rather than the rule for me some people do this sort of thing for a living constantly travelling about. It's a bit of fun if it's a few weeks out of the year but I can't imagine what it would be like full time.

I also get to see some of the films I couldn't be arsed with or missed at the cinema this trip I saw "30 days of night" which I liked as a comic book but I'm not sure works as a film, "Stardust" that was quite fun, and then the simpsons movie just to get something I knew was good under my belt. Modern video on demand systems make flying just a little bit more tolerable than they were back in the 7 looped vhs machines days (Which BA still operate on some of their long haul flights and last time all they had was Ghostrider!). I also got to see some new Mythbusters and some of the new band wagon shows like "smash labs!" a show for people that find Mythbusters too intellectual and want to cut straight to the explosions yet still pretend this is science.

So you have to take the rough with the smooth.