Friday was the third day in a single week that I was in the air. Wednesday barely counts because I was only in the plane to go straight up and jump out of it, but I still think it counts.
This trip was for business, and to be honest, it was a lot of time traveling with not much purpose to the trip. We were going to Ft. Lewis, which is an Army base, to see a demo of some modeling software we might be able to use for one of the projects on which I work. So I caught my 8am flight (with plenty of time to spare), then we drove down to Ft. Lewis, which is near Tacoma, then we took a while getting through security to get on the base, and then driving to where the demo was. By this time it was already 10:30. We got the demo for an hour and a half, and then went to a lunch meeting until 1:30. After that, we drove back to the airport and stood around for 45 minutes waiting for our flight. We took the 4pm flight back and were back in the Tri-Cities by 5. So the day, which was 9 hours from leaving to returning, only had 3 hours of meetings included. To be fair, there was some conversation in the car trip, so you could say some work got done there, but really, the travel/work ratio was a little disappointing. I’m over-committed already, so it was frustrating to be not getting things done while I was traveling.
I did have a nice conversation with a social worker on the way back. I noticed she was reading the New Yorker, and struck up a conversation with her. As people who read the New Yorker are often interesting, it was fairly likely that she would be, and indeed I was not disappointed. As I told her about some of the things I do in my job, I could feel my own excitement in my speech, and she noticed it too. She remarked, and I agreed, that I must love what I do.