I’m out to dinner with 2 coworkers and several of the client’s IT staff.  We’re talking about all kinds of stuff that people talk about after work (OK, mostly complaining about the coworkers who aren’t present) when we get to the subject of travelling for work.  I won’t bore you with the details of the conversation except for the part where my potential travel to foreign ports of call were discussed.  Specifically Paris and Hong Kong.  I would love to travel to those places like you wouldn’t believe.  Even if some of the time there was for work, I’d love to go. I’ve been overseas to London as a teenager, but as an adult I’ve never been further out of country than the Caribbean.

Let’s go into story swapping mode.  Tell me about the coolest place you’ve ever visited (and let’s stick to the places you go for work related purposes – I don’t want to hear about how your vacations are better than mine).

I’ve been to several decent American cities for work, including Nashville (Gibson cafe = cool) but the best place I went to was Chicago.  I was consulting for Amoco Oil and got to go to all kinds of great restaurants and whatnot while I was there.  I even got to sit near Jerry Springer at dinner once (while he was there with some girl who absolutely had to be a stripper).  The work was decent, the pizza was good, the beer was better, and I got to be friends with a guy born on leap year.  Every leap year I get an e-mail about the other (famous) people born on leap year from my 36 year old friend celebrating his 9th birthday.  I had fun in Nashville (the work environment sucked but the fun I had after work was great – I saw a bunch of bands and hung out talking to the lead singer of once of them (hot chick) for a while) but I have to rate my time in Chicago as tops while at that job.  I’ve also spent a lot of time down in Orlando working for a client who could get me into Disney World for free.  While the people were nice and Disney World is Disney World, I think I spent so much time down there that it kind of lost the magic.  But of all the places I’ve travelled, I’ve never gotten to/had to travel internationally for work.

So let’s share some stories.  Here’s mine.  While in Chicago I met a guy who worked for Amoco.  He was part of the lab team responsible for wiring the network cables and whatnot.  I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, but that job can be filled with union people in large companies.  This is the case at Amoco – I would get in trouble if I plugged a machine into the hub right next to it if I didn’t call a union guy to do it for me.  Anyway, this guy was part of the union.  Great guy personally, I don’t know how he kept his job.  He shared a story about how he went on vacation one time for two or three weeks without telling the company that he was going.  He paid for the entire $15,000 trip with the company card.  This was three years before I met him.  He STILL had his job!!!!  Amazing!

— Matt Ranlett

Note – this post was written at 12:30 am after 3 beers and 4 glasses of whiskey.  Aaaah, there’s no travel like business on the road!