I don’t usually consider work trips to be much of a travel but my current New York trip is a perfect example of how bad things can get  – because when things roll, they roll.

Setting: simple trip to Armonk, NY – a Westchester county suburb in New York for a week. Been here about 20x, short flight to small airport, literally 5 mins of car ride from the very wooded IBM Learning Center. Dark dark woods – no kidding!

Reality: Still very very dark woods, now very freezing too – a tundra like, minus 10C. Mostly because I get here at 2 am, instead of 10 pm. Flight delayed because of a medical issue on the arriving flight, picking up bags in dark, super cold 1 am at the ramp (mine is the last, would you guess?). Hertz announcing my manager’s special (thought he was joking with me) which is a Nissan pick up truck – a pick up truck, in Greenwich, CT – the wealthiest town in America. I come from Georgia, the land of pick up trucks to the schwanky hedge fund town and somehow end up with a truck. Did I mention that my laptop decided to crash completely into recovery mode somewhere over Washington DC so a subsequent hour long helpdesk call at 1 am was the icing?

Cheers for some better aligned trips in the future – I am coming back in 2 weeks!