I’ve been on quite a few business trips in my day, but this one takes the cake for being the worst. It even managed to surpass my usual fear and paranoia.
“Any chance it might go smoothly?” I asked our team lead on Monday, as helicopters flew over our building, 2 hours before police came in with guns drawn after a riot broke out because people who had been waiting in line for 3 hours were turned away.
“No,” she said. “It will not go smoothly.”
And she was right! I had all my ducks in a row, though. We started out Tuesday at 5am, and I went to each of my locations and made sure everything was set up properly, printers working, machines daisy-chained in the right direction. Yet still, I was bombarded with call after call for one problem after another, hour upon hour. There was not a single moment of peace. Still, it would not have been so bad if the call before my final one had been the last one.
I was asked as a favor to go to a location outside of my area by one of our contractors. I have replayed that moment in my mind and wish I could go back in time and say no. As it was, I said yes.
For starters, the location was several miles from where I was, and was impossible to find. My GPS had me going to a house, so I had to call the location directly and have them lead me step by step out to the middle of some building hidden behind a grove of trees a mile from the main road past a field. They finally had to bring a car with flashing lights out to the main road so I could find it. As a result of this obscurity, the tech whose location it was had not been there all day, and they were in an apoplectic fit over it.
As soon as I stepped in the building, the lead guy started yelling at me that no one had shown up all day. It was not my territory, it was the territory of one of our senior executives, but he'd not been there. Their setup was afright! The machines were in the wrong order, they didn’t even have their communications pack up, and the reason they had called was because one was running off battery power and it had died.
I knew what the problem was before I even looked at the machine: the cord was not plugged in the back of the monitor. So I plugged it in, got their printer running, checked the daisy chain. While doing that, I didn’t notice that the lead guy was closing the results with the wrong reader! “The yellow!” I shouted when I saw him put in the red one. “You don’t close with the red!” But it was too late and I had to put in a call to the main office. It was such a big fuck-up that even they didn’t know how to advise me. I had no choice but to have them pack up the one closed incorrectly and have them take it to the main office to be closed there, along with the red reader.
Everyone at that location was yelling at me, because no one from the company had shown up earlier in the day, and because apparently they called at 4:30 about the battery issue and I showed up at 7pm, but they were in a long queue call line so I had not gotten the call until 15 minutes before I got there. But of course all of it was my fault! Never mind the fact that my own locations were problem-free at closing because I had hammered home the proper procedures to them all day long.
By that point I had been at this for 15 hours straight and I was ready to snap. On the drive back to the main office, I was so shaken that the only thing keeping me from driving over a bridge was the promise to myself that I will never go on another business trip again. I loath business travel and the millions of inconveniences that come with it. Not to mention missing my boys so much.
Later that night I saw the executive in the elevator whose location it was. He felt bad, but said he had driven around forever and could not find it. When I arrived at my floor I saw that there were huge parties in every room next to mine, so I switched to a quiet suite. It took two white russians, a sleeping pill, and a hot bath to calm down.
On the flight home, we hit bad turbulence and went through a terrifying lightening storm. Then when I got home I accidently threw my jacket in the wash with my mp3 player still in it.
“Any chance it might go smoothly?” I asked our team lead on Monday, as helicopters flew over our building, 2 hours before police came in with guns drawn after a riot broke out because people who had been waiting in line for 3 hours were turned away.
“No,” she said. “It will not go smoothly.”
And she was right! I had all my ducks in a row, though. We started out Tuesday at 5am, and I went to each of my locations and made sure everything was set up properly, printers working, machines daisy-chained in the right direction. Yet still, I was bombarded with call after call for one problem after another, hour upon hour. There was not a single moment of peace. Still, it would not have been so bad if the call before my final one had been the last one.
I was asked as a favor to go to a location outside of my area by one of our contractors. I have replayed that moment in my mind and wish I could go back in time and say no. As it was, I said yes.
For starters, the location was several miles from where I was, and was impossible to find. My GPS had me going to a house, so I had to call the location directly and have them lead me step by step out to the middle of some building hidden behind a grove of trees a mile from the main road past a field. They finally had to bring a car with flashing lights out to the main road so I could find it. As a result of this obscurity, the tech whose location it was had not been there all day, and they were in an apoplectic fit over it.
As soon as I stepped in the building, the lead guy started yelling at me that no one had shown up all day. It was not my territory, it was the territory of one of our senior executives, but he'd not been there. Their setup was afright! The machines were in the wrong order, they didn’t even have their communications pack up, and the reason they had called was because one was running off battery power and it had died.
I knew what the problem was before I even looked at the machine: the cord was not plugged in the back of the monitor. So I plugged it in, got their printer running, checked the daisy chain. While doing that, I didn’t notice that the lead guy was closing the results with the wrong reader! “The yellow!” I shouted when I saw him put in the red one. “You don’t close with the red!” But it was too late and I had to put in a call to the main office. It was such a big fuck-up that even they didn’t know how to advise me. I had no choice but to have them pack up the one closed incorrectly and have them take it to the main office to be closed there, along with the red reader.
Everyone at that location was yelling at me, because no one from the company had shown up earlier in the day, and because apparently they called at 4:30 about the battery issue and I showed up at 7pm, but they were in a long queue call line so I had not gotten the call until 15 minutes before I got there. But of course all of it was my fault! Never mind the fact that my own locations were problem-free at closing because I had hammered home the proper procedures to them all day long.
By that point I had been at this for 15 hours straight and I was ready to snap. On the drive back to the main office, I was so shaken that the only thing keeping me from driving over a bridge was the promise to myself that I will never go on another business trip again. I loath business travel and the millions of inconveniences that come with it. Not to mention missing my boys so much.
Later that night I saw the executive in the elevator whose location it was. He felt bad, but said he had driven around forever and could not find it. When I arrived at my floor I saw that there were huge parties in every room next to mine, so I switched to a quiet suite. It took two white russians, a sleeping pill, and a hot bath to calm down.
On the flight home, we hit bad turbulence and went through a terrifying lightening storm. Then when I got home I accidently threw my jacket in the wash with my mp3 player still in it.
2 comments:
Sounds like some good times....
omg, Terri! I can't believe what a bad time you had! I'm so sorry for you!
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