Business Trips - Then vs. Now

Work has been reeeeally slow since I started on Monday. So I've basically been looking for an excuse to post something and it just hit me.

From an outsider's perspective, I think my current business trip (technically called a "secondment") is pretty glamorous. Round-trip business class flight. Three months in one of the biggest, most exciting cities in the world. Corporate housing in a hotel-like building. A per diem that more than covers my food and transportation expenses. A healthy, guaranteed bonus at the end of the stint (I can not emphasize the guaranteed part of this enough as it makes me very unmotivated at work).

So yesterday afternoon as I watched the clock waiting for an appropriate go time, my mind just started wandering, and I thought about my very first business trip. I was a first year analyst at Wasserstein, and it was October 2001. My MD and a Director had a meeting in Seattle, and I was working on the pitchbook. For a West Coast trip, standard practice would be to work all night, finish the books late morning/early afternoon, print them and then bring them up to my bosses' office before their late afternoon/early evening flight.

Problem was, my bosses had a meeting in Boston the day before their meeting in Seattle, and were flying straight from Boston. So, after pulling an all-nighter finishing the books, scrambling to get them printed in the late morning, and then having to bind them myself for some reason I can't recall right now - you guessed it. I hopped in a car and headed for La Guardia. Delta Shuttle to Logan. After being "randomly selected" for additional security screening (granted, this was a month after 9/11 and I was a brown person who hadn't shaved in over 24 hours), I boarded the plane, passed out since I hadn't slept yet, and woke up in Boston. Since my bosses were flying out of a different terminal than I was, I literally had to run from my terminal to theirs carrying a bunch of pitchbooks. I found my bosses, gave them the books, and even got a couple "trooper" compliments for making the trip.

Fortunately the trip wasn't a complete waste, i.e. I DID manage to leave the airport and grab dinner with a friend in Boston. Nevertheless, it was one crappy trip, and it makes me realize how far I've come in the last 4 1/2 years.

Gotta love being a first year analyst. Memories to last a lifetime.