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{1.1} ROAD RULES
This chapter contains my accumulated road rules from thirty years
of business travel. But first I want to share some of the process
by which I have acquired these rules: it is by learning from
mistakes.
Imagine a maze you are exploring, looking for where
the cheese has been moved this time.
You've brought your black felt marker,
and every time you reach a dead end, you go back to the last choice
you made in the maze, and mark the choice that leads to the dead end
with an "X."
Initially there are many perhaps frustrating mistakes. But eventually,
walking through the maze while avoiding the choices having the accumulated
X-marks will guide you straight to the cheese.
This chapter on travel is a narrative based on my internal "map"
of the X-marks at the choice points in that maze called business travel.
Over time you create your own as you learn from your own
experiences, and occasionally you merge in knowledge gained from
studying other people's experiences, as I invite you to with
this information.
For example, coming from a technical background I began my career with
a tendency to pay more attention to machines than people.
Back when the cheapest computer in the world cost more than $100,000,
I was never in the presence of a computer without learning what make
and model it was, and closely examining all the equipment I could get near.
But I didn't always know whose computer it was, or who used it.
Later, as I began to learn my way around a sales team, I began
to get better at paying attention to people first. I began at
trade shows, learning to make eye contact with the people working the
booth, talk to them, and then take a look at the demos on the screens.
This evolved into one of my first Road Rules:
Then, on one of my early business trips, I was at a training class
for new employees (in
job H),
and a station-wagon-load of us were on our way back to the hotel.
I assumed that everyone in the car was a fellow-employee.
During an animated conversation I candidly expressed some concerns about
our product and one of my coworkers piped up: "Hey! There's a customer
here!" Oops. I came up with a new Road Rule that day:
Gradually it evolved into:
This served me well for about four years. Then one day I was traveling in a
van full of sales people and techies on our way to a customer site.
I didn't know everybody in the vehicle, but I was sure none of them
were customers, prospects, reporters, competitors, or other company outsiders.
Someone asked me how things were going with a joint project I was doing
with a techie from one of our partner companies. "Well," I said, "he hasn't
returned my calls, and when I finally got him on the phone he seemed kind of
unmotivated."
"Alan," one of my coworkers announced, "he's sitting right here." Oops.
That day my Road Rule evolved into:
This has served me well and has not needed further modification.
Here I present my collection of highly-evolved Road Rules.
You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by.
— Graham Nash, Teach Your Children, from
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's Deja Vu (1969, music album)
[ASIN:
B000002J0L]
Road Rule:
Greet people,
and engage them
in conversation
before you check out
their stuff.
Road Rule:
Know when you are
talking in front of
customers.
Road Rule:
Know when you are
talking in front of
customers, prospects,
reporters, competitors,
and other company outsiders.
Road Rule:
Know who you
are talking to.
 Two of Cubicles
It's your first day at the new job. See how fast you can learn the
maze. Run, rat, run! Confusion, ambiguity. Reversed: certainty, vindication.
Silicon Valley Tarot
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{1.2} WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE
I have found that the greatest single factor in my ability to succeed
at travel — to get me and my stuff safely where I'm going without delay or
undue stress — is a positive attitude.
It is important to cultivate a joi de vivre, a love of life,
and to mentally celebrate the opportunity to travel, to explore,
to meet people, to face challenges, to learn, and to grow.
There is a well known Zen koan — a riddle that is contemplated
to aid in finding enlightenment — which says, "When you wake up, get up,
make breakfast, eat breakfast, and wash the dishes." This is usually
taken to mean that it is in the ordinary things that we find true
satisfaction and fulfillment in life.
This book is called a "survival guide" but it is really about more
than that. In the 1980s, transformation guru Werner Erhard said the
important question is not "Will we survive?" but
"What if we survive?"
We need to occasionally ask ourselves, "What difference do I want to make?"
There is a tendency of very accomplished people to sometimes focus too
much on short term goals, at the expense of the bigger picture.
This story from my travels illustrates what I mean. By way of background,
it was 1995 and I was the Systems Engineer for a startup company headquartered
in the Route 128 Massachusetts "Brain Belt" area, selling a software product for
scientists and engineers; I provided technical support for several sales people
in the western United States and Canada, working out of the office in Irvine, California, a high-tech and commercial enclave in Orange County.
(This was
job J.)
I had been working in high gear
for the company for three years, with an Initial Public Offering
(IPO) always "six months away" and
stock options for everybody. Actually, I had been in high gear for
seven years — the current company had morphed out of several previous
ones, each with its own success-is-just-around-the-corner scenario. I
was approaching burnout and had let my "zest" for the work slip away from me.
One night while commuting home from the Irvine office I flipped
on the radio and heard a woman with a guitar, tuning up and telling
stories of her childhood in Saskatchewan. I didn't recognize who it
was right away. Then she began to play and sing. The music was
beautiful, spellbinding. I realized it had been a long time since I simply
sat and enjoyed something beautiful. I pulled off of the freeway and into
a random office complex parking lot. I parked the car and stopped the
engine, and sat just listening to and enjoying the music.
She began to sing:
It was Joni Mitchell, singing a live version of a song
from her new album
Turbulent Indigo (1994, music album) [ASIN: B000002MVH].
She was one of my favorite singer/songwriters from the seventies and eighties,
and I was glad she was recording and performing again.
The music washed over me and overwhelmed me with a bittersweet beauty.
I normally thought of my life in the Los Angeles basin as some kind
of "paying of dues" until my career could take me back to my home
town of San Diego. Suddenly the life I was living seemed right for
once, even perfect in its own way. For a moment I was happy.
But the moment didn't last. I went back to a "grind" mentality
shortly. Soon I found myself on a long, hard trip to Calgary, Alberta,
with our Northwestern Sales Agent. Our company had bought a European concern
that made graphing software recently, and we had inherited their customer
base, so we were going to visit some of them. What I didn't know yet was
that one of them had a grievance with the billing of their license fees
left over from the previous regime.
At this particular customer site I made a mistake I hadn't made in
a dozen years as a traveling techie: I became visibly impatient
with a customer (who was, in fact, jerking us around) and made a
sarcastic remark. After a brief, shocked moment, the customer threw
the salesman and me out. I had never before (or since) been ejected
from a customer's office.
This mistake of course was another strike against our company in the customer's
book, but also it damaged my relationship with the salesman,
who I'd worked closely with and got along well for six years;
we'd been guests in each other's homes and had growing trust
and respect. This was a big setback in that process.
He dropped me at the Calgary airport about four hours early for my flight.
(This itself
was unusual — in the past we would've had a meal together and debriefed
from the customer visits). I wasn't to the point yet of acknowledging
I'd made a mistake, so I sat and stewed and thought of other people who
were to blame: the salesman, for taking me in to the site without warning
me about the prior grievances, the customer, for being so thin skinned, our
company's management, for buying the European company to begin with. I
bought a copy of
Star Trek Creator (1995, book) by David Alexander [ISBN/ASIN: 0451454405],
the biography of Gene Roddenberry,
and was reading about the struggles he had with Canadian actor William
Shatner. I decided it was Canadians who were to blame for my woes.
Eventually I ended up in a long line to go through security, and was
standing there fuming about the darned Canadians. Everywhere I went
in this airport Canadians were getting in my way. Earlier in the day I'd
overheard a fragment of conversation in an elevator: "...he just ticked
me right off, eh?" I found myself thinking, "The next Canadian who ticks
me right off I'm going to tell them right off."
Then, in my last clear chance to redeem myself, I heard another little
voice in my head. It said, "Alan, listen to yourself. Is this the kind
of person you want to become?" I realized I needed to "chill out,"
as we say in California, before I became some kind of monster.
And just at that moment a Canadian ahead of me in line stumbled backwards
and fell over onto me. Because I'd made an effort to calm down, I
responded by being polite and helpful. It was a woman in a tweed jacket
and a long blonde pony tail. I made sure she was all right. She looked
very familiar. I saw her pick up a guitar case and put it on the security
conveyor, and I suddenly recognized her.
"You're Joni Mitchell, aren't you?"
"Yes, I am," she offered a little reluctantly.
I told her I was a big fan. She asked me where I was traveling. I told
her I was on my way home to the Los Angeles area after a business trip in
Calgary. She told me she was also coming back to her home in LA, after
visiting "her people" in Saskatchewan, and was just changing planes in Calgary.
We spent about 45 minutes talking while walking to the gate and waiting in
the departure lounge for our flight to board.
I told her I was especially fond of her album
Hejira (1976, music album) [ASIN: B000002GYC],
which is all
about road trips, and how I'd listened to the song "Amelia"
from that album for 15 years before realizing it was a message to Amelia
Earhart. Also I told her how I'd loved the verse,
But I had only very recently realized "the hexagram of the heavens"
refers to the
I Ching (~4000 B.C., book) [ISBN/ASIN: 069109750X],
the ancient Chinese book of philosophy
and fortunetelling which has the first written record of a binary
number system being used. (There are 64 six-bit "hexagrams," each
formed of six lines — each line either solid or broken — representing an
image for mediation and inspiration. "The Heavens" was formed by
six solid lines, not unlike six guitar strings.)
She confirmed that this was the image she had intended.
I told her I was glad she was recording and touring again. She said
it was hard to get the record company to take the risk on an album.
She explained to me that huge sums of money were involved promoting
an album, and it was very much an open question whether
Turbulent Indigo would
make a profit. (It did go on to win a Grammy later that year.)
She said promoting was a job she had to do to gain time to do what she
liked — she'd rather just stay at home and work on her oil
paintings.
The point of this story is that I almost missed the chance to have this
serendipitous experience because I was too busy grumbling about how "they
can't do this to me," in other words, being a jerk.
It also helped me realize that happiness wasn't something I was going
to get later after I achieved all of my goals. If Joni
Mitchell — as talented and famous as she was — didn't find
her success a guaranteed bringer of happiness, then why did I think it
would be any different for me? I decided I might as well just be happy now.
Of course, with my positive attitude regained, I patched things up with
the salesman, and he went on to actually sell more software to the company
we'd been thrown out of, and it even turned out that the stock option
was worth a nice chunk of change later on after all, which made it possible
for me to move back to San Diego and buy a house for my family.
But I didn't wait for all that to happen before I could allow myself
to enjoy the journey.
An even more striking contrast between positive and negative attitudes
and their consequences is illustrated in two hilarious road trip comedies:
John Hughes's Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987, movie) [ASIN: B00003CXC0]
starring Steve Martin and John Candy, and
Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day (1993, movie) [ASIN: B00005U8EM]
starring Bill Murray. Both of these movies can be
studied almost as textbooks of what to do and what not to do with your
attitude on the road.
In Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Steve Martin demonstrates the bad attitude while John Candy
has the good one, and fate brings them together as reluctant travel
companions. Almost like "instant karma" we see side-by-side the effects
of each man's approach to life.
(This movie
can also be especially useful in helping your family to understand why
travel sometimes takes so much
out of you. It is a tradition in our family to watch it every Wednesday
before Thanksgiving, the busiest travel day of the year as well as one
of the days the movie takes place.)
In Groundhog Day Bill Murray is a
weather man on a remote broadcast who begins the movie as a jerk, especially
hard on his associates and the townspeople he meets, until through
a bit of "movie magic" he must relive the same day over and over until he
transforms his attitude into one of a great human being. In this artificial
laboratory of human behavior it becomes very clear that "what goes around
comes around."
Three waitresses all wearing black diamond earrings
Talking about zombies and Singapore slings
No trouble in their faces not one anxious voice
None of the crazy you get from too much choice
The thumb and the satchel or the rented Rolls-Royce
— Joni Mitchell, Barangrill, from
For the Roses (1972, music album) [ASIN: B000002GYQ]
All that is gold does not glitter.
— J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954
The Fellowship of the Ring [ISBN/ASIN: 0618002227]
Road Rule:
Cultivate a joi de vivre.
I pulled up behind a Cadillac;
We were waiting for the light;
And I took a look at his license plate
It said, "JUST ICE"
Is justice just ice?
Governed by greed and lust?
Just the strong doing what they can
And the weak suffering what they must?
I was driving across the burning desert
when I spotted six jet planes
leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
it was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
 The Guru
Thirty years in the business and he's neither bitter nor burned
out. He's already forgotten more than you know. He has the answers to all your
questions, but more importantly, he knows which questions are fruitful to ask.
He's got a PhD., but he owes more to the Marx Brothers than Stanford. He keeps
irregular hours. Appears grudgingly at conferences. Has troubling personal life.
Wisdom, perspective, style, good humor. Reversed: lack of direction, stagnation.
Silicon Valley Tarot
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{1.3} PLANNING
In my dot-com job (job N), we evolved a very
robust procedure for planning trade shows. We began with a meeting of
all the stakeholders at least six to eight weeks in advance. This included
marketing communications (who normally booked the show), sales reps and
systems engineers (who along with marketing staffed the booth),
technical sales support (who coded and installed demos and also did booth
staffing), and information technology (IT) and operations folk (who needed
to be involved in preparing and shipping computers and other equipment).
{1.3.1} The Planning Timeline
We collaborated on a timeline of deadlines which afterwards was emailed
to everyone to confirm. The timeline included:
When I got the email I printed it out and put it in a new file folder for
that trade show; the tab would say something like "USENIX Summit for Educators
in System Administration (SESA '13) — Washington, D.C. —
Nov. 5, 2013" This folder would become my central
repository for my own planning information. The staging area, in our case
a square area bound by a set
of four adjoining unused cubicles, became the central repository for our group
understanding of what we were doing. Literature, tools, and important
accessories like paper towels and Windex® (for screen cleaning)
would accumulate there.
We had both a small trade show booth (10 by 10 foot) that we set up
ourselves and a big one (20 by 20 feet) that we had a contractor set up.
The first time we used the small one we set it up first at headquarters,
which had several benefits. We were able to train everyone who might
need the experience on how to set it up, we were able to share the booth
with folks in engineering, customer service, quality assurance, accounting,
etc., who normally didn't make it to trade shows, which builds excitement
also just helps make the whole process real for people ("wow, they really
are selling this code I write!"), and we were able to photograph the booth
from all angles so we had pictures to send along and help remind the people
setting up what the end product looked like.
Even if you are unable to set up a booth in advance at headquarters,
I highly recommend that you photograph it the first time it is assembled
and include the pictures with the booth parts.
{1.3.2} Allow Time For the Probable Bad Case Scenarios
As you plan a trip, think about what things can go wrong and how you will
respond if they do. Then, within reason, allow enough time to salvage
the situation.
It is useful to have a prioritized list of goals in mind as you think
about this. For example, for a typical trade show I would have this list:
So my thinking would run something like this:
"Ship the literature directly to the show, and have each person take a small
stack as well. That way if nobody makes it and the shipment arrives there
is still literature. And if any one person arrives and the shipment doesn't
arrive, we still have some literature. Don't have everyone fly in
on the same plane. It could be diverted due to bad weather, or worse.
Bring a laptop with a copy of demo; if all other equipment is lost we can
still rent a monitor from show services and have one demo." And so on.
Similarly, for a sales call with demo, it is handy to have the salesperson
and the techie each bring their own laptop with the same demo on it.
Also, bring your own projector. They're cheap enough now that every
team of road warriors should have one. Even if the people you're visiting
tell you they have a projector, a third of the time there will be some
problem with it or with compatibility with your laptop. Bring your own
as a backup.
I have a metaphor I use in thinking about things that can wrong.
In Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) type role-playing games, a player will often
encounter a hazard with a certain risk factor. For example,
when a player encounters a treacherous rope bridge over a chasm, the
Dungeonmaster will say,
"You have to roll under 76 to cross safely." The player has two dice
that can be used to roll any number from 00 to 99. (Visit any mall
game store to learn more about the dice.) So the player knows that 76%
of the time one can cross this bridge safely, and 24% of the time the
attempt is fatal. He or she then must evaluate if the risk is worth the
potential benefit. The player might say, "Yes, it's worth it,"
roll an 88, and fall into the chasm.
I have found business travel to resemble the D&D games, except that
you never get to find out what the percentages are exactly. You learn them
approximately from your successes and failures.
So I am constantly trying to keep my accumulated risk factors low,
and to have contingency plans for the most likely failure modes.
You can reduce risk by examining all of your equipment before a trip.
Charge phones and laptops, inventory
cables and adapters, and repack everything. If a chocolate bar got
loose in your laptop case, you don't want to discover it when you
reach into it on a plane. Repack everything when you're done checking it.
A likely failure mode for trade shows is equipment showing up late.
That's why I like to look at alternatives, such as shipping the equipment
to a nearby sales office (or the office of a friendly business
partner) a few days early and then renting a van to drive it to the show.
If a show is 50 to 500 miles away people often just assume they should
ship equipment by air. I am a big fan of driving it. Even 500 miles
is usually just an eight hour drive. The time can be well spent;
if two people go together they can talk about accounts, tech tips,
or other work-related subjects. You can make cell phone calls.
You can listen to books on tape, for both inspiration and education.
Also, you can often get conference proceedings on tape, and who
usually has time to listen to that stuff, great though it may be?
If you have someone who can provide transcription services (or you
are willing to do it yourself), bring a hand-held digital
or cassette audio recorder, and it can be a great way to get writing done.
It is always wonderful to have the peace of mind of knowing where the
equipment is, but the
benefits of driving the equipment really become clear when you arrive at
the show. No time is spent at the booth waiting for equipment to show up,
or trying to track it. You just roll it in from the loading dock and
begin setting up. After everything is unpacked the crates can be loaded
back into the truck or van, and you know right where they are.
When it comes time to tear down, you bring you own crates back in through
the loading dock and begin packing them up, while everyone else on the show
floor sits and waits for the forklifts to bring their empties back out.
(People used to think I was crazy for volunteering to make these long
drives — usually from San Diego to places like Las Vegas or San Jose.
I have found that since 9/11/01, however, I get a lot more agreement.)
Be sure to join the
American Automobile Association (AAA) [LINK_1-12]
if you drive on business. One or two emergency road service calls will
easily pay for it, and they have the best maps, free for members.
If there is someone you rely on at headquarters for technical support
or backup, tell them your schedule. Make sure they know when you will
be doing setup, and will be at their desk at that time. If they can't,
have them designate someone else to help you. And if setup goes great,
be sure to call them and thank them, and let them know they can go to
lunch.
Plan to set up as early as the convention center will let you.
What will you do if a hard disk fails? How long will it take to
ship a replacement? What if a keyboard is missing? Where can
you buy another, and how long will that take?
Also, for every technology I've ever worked with there has been
a specific failure mode or problem that I've needed to allow for.
Once I had to demo mini-supercomputers that ran on 220 Volts.
Before every trade show I would call the show office and tell them
we needed 220 Volts, and they would promise to inform the electrician.
I would also FAX them the technical specs: Volts, Amps, and a drawing
of the socket we needed and its standardized part number.
Guess what percentage of the time we found the correct power
waiting for us? Zero percent. We'd always need to have the electrician
paged, and he or she would say "Why didn't anybody tell me about this?" and then
we'd have to wait for the power line to be installed. They didn't
always have the right socket for our plug, either, and after a while
I ended up carrying every known 220 Volt plug and the tools to
splice the right one onto the power cord. I'd hold up my plug collection
and say, "just give us a socket to match any of these."
During the dial-up era I've had the need to carry a 100 foot phone
cord (to reach the phone jack the FAX machine plugs into, so I could
dial out to internet to do a demo), and more recently, before "plug and play"
actually worked, I've needed a recent
Windows installation CD (to install device drivers when I've needed to add a
device on the road, or even to replace a device if the upgrade uses a different
driver). Most recently I find I need to be able to charge other
people's phones to save the day. It's always something. Learn the
failure modes and plan how you
will respond. And don't kid yourself: every technology has failure modes.
Power supplies fry, hard disk heads crash, CDs skip, thumb drives get
bit-rot, and even the transporter on
Star Trek (1966, TV show) [ASIN: 6305513406]
sometimes scrambles life forms.
A tip on shipping stuff ahead: never ship anything to a hotel.
The hotel will lose the shipment. This happened to me
on one of my very first business trips (the package was diverted
to the hotel's catering office by mistake, which was closed until Monday),
and it happened twice last year. I already knew better by then, but despite my
strident request somebody overnighted two critical packages to my
hotel in Orlando and the hotel bell staff immediately lost them. The hotel
chain, knowing this was a big issue with its customers, had installed
a new computerized tracking system for packages sent to hotel guests,
and my packages weren't in their system. But I knew who'd signed for
them thanks to the shipper's web site. After about a day of harassing the bell staff
they finally produced the packages. The next morning someone called my
room and said they had 27 packages for me. The tracking system said so.
When I went down to the bell desk, they had nothing. It had been some
kind of glitch, or typo.
On a subsequent trip to San Jose, someone again overnighted a critical
package to me at my hotel despite my begging them not to. I sat glued
to the web in my hotel room, trying to log on to the
Federal Express web site [LINK_1-15],
which was — very unusually — down for a few hours due to a power outage (the
California power crisis was going on). Finally it came back up and I
kept hitting "refresh" in my browser until I saw the package show up
at my hotel, and who signed for it. I immediately copied down the information,
logged off and dashed
down to the lobby, and asked the front desk, "Where's the loading dock?"
I would follow the package in and grab it before they could lose it.
Of course, somebody accosted me as I tried to walk in. "FedEx just delivered
my package! Who has it?" I demanded. They took me into the package room
and looked through a paper-and-pencil list on a clip board of all the
packages they had just logged in from FedEx. Nope, mine wasn't on the list.
I demanded to talk to the person who had signed for it, and gave his name.
He had gone on a break. Somebody tracked him down. They asked him if
he'd brought in all the FedEx packages. He said he had. I showed him my
info I'd copied off the web site which showed his name and when he'd signed.
He retraced his steps,
and found my package sitting on top of a water cooler in the warehouse.
I hope you get the point here.
The hotel will lose the shipment. The solution is to ship to
FedEx or UPS and have them "hold for pickup." Just drive to the
local FedEx or UPS office and get the package. The web will tell you
where it is, and the shipper won't lose it.
Another shipping tip: before you ship equipment, search the outside
of the crate for old shipping labels and remove them.
I've been the guy who ended up at an air freight office at dawn
on day two of a trade show,
eating their donuts and waiting for the first flight in from the
place our crates got shipped by mistake.
And if you have to get something someplace in hours, not overnight,
consider counter to counter air freight. In can be expensive,
and I recommend the receiving party meet the flight because they sometimes
lose things too, but on the other hand you have to ask how expensive failure is.
A lot of people are fond of quoting Clint Eastwood's line from
Dirty Harry (1971, movie) [ASIN: B001EC0OQI],
in which he admits to a punk that he doesn't remember how many bullets
he's fired from his gun, so he doesn't know if it's empty.
He suggests the punk ask himself if he feels lucky.
In planning a trip, and assessing the risk of various alternatives,
you have to ask yourself questions like: "How bad would it be if the hotel
lost my package?" and then: "Do I feel lucky?"
So with plenty of slack planned in, here is a typical trade show
schedule:
The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps.
Road Rule:
Make sure everyone involved
knows the plan and the schedule
well in advance.
Road Rule:
Use a staging area.
When there's a bluebird singing on your window pane,
And the sun shines bright the whole day through,
Don't forget, boy, look over you shoulder,
'Cause you'll find that someone's coming after you.
Road Rule:
Manage risk with
contingency plans.
Road Rule:
Never ship what
you can hand-deliver.
Road Rule:
Ask for help
before you need it.
Road Rule:
Know your technology's
failure modes
and plan for them.
Perhaps the most unusual instance of hotel-operator dumbth was
this brief exchange, which occurred in September 1981.
OPERATOR:
We have a message for you to call Celia Black at (number).
JANE:
I'm sorry, what was that name again?
OPERATOR:
They didn't leave a name.
Road Rule:
Never ship anything to a hotel.
Have the shipper hold it for pickup
at the destination city.
 Spam
Frustration, stupidity, mindless repetition, wasted effort, lost bandwidth.
The Spamee is consumed in fiery indignation, but the Spammer also wastes
time and resources - nobody cares about his message. Lose/lose royale.
Reversed: unenlightened self-interest, failure to comprehend the
appropriate use of the Network.
Silicon Valley Tarot
|
{1.3.3} Focus on the Best Case Scenario
The best case scenario is not just the absence of disaster, it is
realizing ultimate goals of your activity. At a trade show, the fabulous
leads and great press, attracting industry buzz and meeting with key
prospects are the goals; it never hurts to get some immediate orders as well.
When teaching a seminar, the goal is not just making it through without
embarrassing yourself, but also creating enthusiasm for the subject matter,
and bringing more business as a result. For an on-site programming
project, it is important not only to get the job done and make a good
impression, but to instill confidence in your company and its products,
and again to bring more business as a result. I find that if, during
your travel preparations, you vividly imagine these outcomes, it helps
you prepare for situations that will enable you to bring them closer.
{1.3.4} Gather Information Before You Go
As your departure time approaches, visit a weather website such as
Intellicast
[LINK_1-19]
and keep tabs on the weather at your destination. I like the animations
of infrared (showing cloud cover) and radar (showing precipitation) the best.
Or, if you are away from the web but near cable TV, watch The Weather Channel.
Think about the resources you may have to locate while you still have
high bandwidth and a printer. Even if you have a smart phone, you may not
not have coverage when you need it. Do you feel lucky?
For example, if I'm about to leave for Las Vegas and I may need copying
services when I get there, I go to my favorite business directory on the web,
Yellow Pages directory
[LINK_1-20]
and look up all the photocopying and businesses center sites (such as FedEx
Office, formerly Kinko's) in the 702 area code, print out the entire list,
then pick the one or two locations I'll probably use and print
out their maps. These pages go in my planning folder for this trip.
Likewise I'll look up Federal Express offices, Radio Shacks, drug stores,
and any other business I might need.
If I'll need to find a facility I've never been to before,
I go to my favorite mapping and directions site, Google Maps
[LINK_1-21]
for directions from my hotel.
For example,
try getting directions starting from Arizona Charlie's (a reasonable off-strip hotel),
740 S Decatur Blvd., Las Vegas, NV 89107, driving to the Young Electric Sign
Company (YESCO), 5119 Cameron St, Las Vegas, NV 89118.
If time permits, there can be unexpected benefits to checking the
web for the local newspaper for the city you are visiting, and reading
the local news. For example, the Las Vegas Sun daily newspaper
has a web site
[LINK_1-22].
Checking the local news page one day I found that Clark County was about
to open its new Paseo Verde Library devoted to genealogy, at
280 S. Green Valley Parkway, at the southeast corner of Interstate 215.
That may prove useful to you at some point, if only as a conversation-starter
with a local. Or, if you have free time in Vegas, researching your
family history probably beats gambling as a self-improving activity,
and it's free.
Now, I know what you're thinking: What if you have a GPS-equipped device?
Then you might think you don't need a hard copy of the directions.
Well, once again, you have to ask yourself if you feel lucky.
{1.3.5} Sales Calls and Other Customer Visits
Mostly this chapter has been using the trade show as a convenient example
to talk about planning for a typical trip. A similar expedition is presenting
an informational
seminar to potential prospects. The same issues of equipment arrival and
setup occur, though less severe; more time must be allowed to polish the
presentation, since it will last much longer and be more highly scrutinized,
by prospects and coworkers.
But for every trade show or seminar, there will — if things are going well
— be dozens of visits to customer sites, for sales presentations,
consultations, onsite programming, installation and customization,
and other small meetings. These visits must also be well planned. Here
are the most common problems to avoid:
Most of the above problems can be eliminated by having all
members of the team meet early nearby (at a fast food or coffee shop,
for example) and talk about the account, and then proceed to the customer
site together, and also by making absolutely sure your host meets you 30 to
60 minutes before the time they tell people to show up in the conference room.
(If a salesperson refuses to do this, and they are at zero per cent of their
quota for the last two quarters, they may be trying to make sure you mess up so
they can blame you for their problems. If you think this is the case,
update your resume.)
If a sales manager is on a call with a sales person the manager should decide
whether their role will be moderator or observer. If they don't say, ask.
Rules of precedence between peers need to be settled also — otherwise,
the call is a minefield.
Projector problems are best solved by always bringing your own projector.
Installation problems are best fended off by A) the techie insisting that
they be given the phone number of the host's techie (usually their network
administrator) and then calling ahead a few days in advance, B) following
up with an email or FAX with all system prerequisites, and C) scheduling
the installation for several hours before the meeting — preferably a
before lunch installation, and an after lunch meeting
(so lunch itself supplies additional slack).
Preventing the curve ball pitch from corporate requires that you demand
that marketing — or anybody — gives you the pitch and answers your questions
before they can get in front of your prospects and customers.
It is also handy if the sales person for that account introduces
the marketing person, and puts the whole pitch in context (i.e., explains why
the prospect should still process their pending big order).
Preventing the snake pit scenario is always tricky, but there are some
proactive things you can do to reduce the chance. (If you find yourself
in a snake pit, I recommend you follow the advice of President Lyndon Johnson
regarding bad press: "Just stand there and take it like a jackass in a Texas
hailstorm.") First of all, find out what's going on before you show up.
If this an existing customer,
call customer support and find out if there are any outstanding technical
issues that you can help resolve while you are there. Phone support
folks are often frustrated by the lack of an objective pair of eyes
at the customer site to help them resolve long-standing odd problems.
You can help them, and later on they may be able to help you.
Best case outcome is everybody wins: you, the phone support folks and the
customer. This ties in with the "early miracle" strategy, which is that
if you are a new techie introduced into an environment, you need to perform
an early miracle to gain credibility, trust, support and slack.
This is easier to do if you have done your homework. (Or, as I once saw
on a sign in a space shuttle research lab, "First you have to put the rabbit
into the hat.")
{1.3.6} Predictability and Communication
I asked my friend Dave, who travels an incredible amount worldwide working
on applying technology to social problems like improving refugee camps,
what rules of thumb he uses increase his security and comfort while traveling.
He said the most important thing is to not vary your routine.
If you fly to Washington, D.C. area often, and you've frequently stayed
at the Budget Inn in Falls Church, Virginia, keep staying there. As long
as the quality is acceptable, it reduces stress and increases slack
if you know the way to the freeways, know where you can exercise,
where you can buy socks, eat dinner, etc.
Another reason to not vary your routine is that it makes it easier on
other people. If your coworkers know where you always stay they can plan
more easily. This reduces stress on them and increases their slack.
An important corollary is that if your plans change, communicate as soon
as you know. Always remember that you don't know what you don't know.
You don't know who is counting on you to be someplace for reasons
you're not yet aware of. You don't know who is desperately trying to
reach you to tell you about a complication you didn't anticipate.
A meeting may have been moved. Someone may have missed a flight.
A bridge may have washed out. In all these cases stress is reduced
and slack increased if you follow this Road Rule:
Senior employees have an expression for the behavior of the newbie who fails
to heed this advice: it's called "going south" and it's a sign that one
is not yet ready for the life of a Road Warrior.
For example, early in my career, in job E, we had a bench
tech who'd been doing a good job of fixing hard to find glitches in computers
we were manufacturing, and we thought he might make a good field repair
tech as well. I sent him to Houston to service a computer at NASA. He
left town one evening with a plane ticket, rental car reservation, hotel
reservation, and the address and phone number of the customer at NASA.
The next morning the customer was calling me to ask where my tech was.
This was in the pre-cell phone era, so after failing to reach him
at his hotel, I just had to wait.
Finally, shortly before noon Texas time he sauntered in to NASA.
His goof-ball story was that when he flew in the night before the car
rental agency was out of cars, even though he had a reservation, so he
took a taxi to the hotel, and then in the morning took a taxi back to
the rental car agency at the airport, who were still out of cars, so
he took a taxi to another airport where they had cars and rented one
there, and then drove to the customer site.
My boss decided for me that this guy wasn't going on the road again,
at least not at this company.
And that reminds me, check your phone. Pull it out and look at it
a couple of times a day. Check voicemail. Check for text messages,
emails and/or pages. Whatever
you can get, check for it. Even in the third millennium this stuff isn't
reliable. Ringers, message alerts and audible alarms turn themselves off,
even when you have key-lock on. I've seen it. Check your phone.
The future exists first in Imagination, then in Will, then in Reality.
Although it is important to anticipate various disasters and have plans
for addressing them, you need to make sure you don't focus too much
on negative images of undesired outcomes, or talk yourself into a belief
in failure, or dwell on feelings of dread. The best antidote to this I
have found is to vividly imagine the best-case positive outcome: see it,
hear it, and feel it in your imagination.
Road Rule:
Visualize winning.
Road Rule:
Gather information
about your destination
while it's easy to do.
Each member of your team arrives individually in the lobby
and has the guard or receptionist call
for your host to escort them in; most of the time the caller
gets the host's voicemail, because they're still en route with
another guest. Some of your party are ten minutes late
because there are two "north gate" entrances and the only
parking is three blocks away. It takes a long time and a
lot of trips by your host to get everyone in;
the host is a little cranky and the meeting starts late.
Somebody told the host that the team from your company was arriving
at 2:00 PM. He or she sent out an email to 15 people to meet
in a conference room at 2:00 PM. At 2:00 PM the conference
room begins to fill up with about 10 people (including a senior
manager you desperately wanted to meet with who gets impatient and
leaves at 2:05), while the lobby yo-yo is going on to bring
your group in. At 2:22 you finally begin, without the senior
manager, looking somewhat incompetent.
Your host assures you that their conference room has a projector
and it will of course work with your laptop. When you
arrive A) it isn't there, or B) it doesn't work, or C) it doesn't
work at your resolution, or D) the meeting is moved to another
room with no projector, or E) the controls are locked in an AV
closet and the person with the key is on vacation. You end
up 1) walking to your car to get your projector (25 minutes round
trip, and your host gets even crankier), or 2) using a borrowed
monitor which only half the group can see, or 3) using your laptop
screen which nobody can see.
Your visit includes the installation of your company's
software for demo or consulting purposes, and still
word went out that the meeting was at 2:00, so a room full of
people are watching you hassle with: A) not enough disk space,
B) the wrong operating system, C) missing system files,
and/or D) hardware incompatibilities. Of course, this time
the senior manager doesn't leave. In fact, an even
more senior manager pops in "to see how things are going"
and is told by other meeting attendees "there's some problem
installing the software." Everyone assumes you have some
sort of quality problem, even though it's "not your fault"
and not the fault of your software quality, and even though
your host assured the person on your team who organized the
meeting (usually the sales person) that a system
with the right technical prerequisites would be available.
You are the techie who arrives at a meeting at the customer site
attended by two salespeople who are involved in some kind of
account or territory split, or by a salesperson and their sales
manager, or by salespeople from two different partner companies,
and it isn't exactly clear who's leading the meeting or who's agenda
you will be following. This can get ugly, and the prospect ends
up thinking you are all idiots.
Somebody flies in from your own company's headquarters,
usually from marketing, and presents to your prospect or customer
about some product or strategy they dreamed up and want to
"just get some customer feedback on." The problem is, you
never heard of it before, and as soon as the meeting
is over the customer will call you for more information, which
you don't have. Plus, they were about to place a huge order for
multiyear licenses at a volume discount, and this confuses them;
now they are thinking they will "wait and see if the new system
will work better for them."
Because of something you know nothing about — a disputed bill
or an unresolved customer service call or a shipment that didn't
arrive, or just a new manager or expert who wants to throw your
company out and take some other build or buy approach —
you arrive to do a demo or some consulting programming and encounter
a completely hostile environment. Have you ever been ganged
up on by hecklers during a demo? Have you ever been assigned
a room to work in with the air conditioning set to forty-five
degrees Fahrenheit? Have you ever had a stack of heavy
update tapes thrown at you?
Road Rule:
Have all members of your team
meet in advance,
discuss the account
and arrive together.
Road Rule:
Know who's
running the meeting.
Road Rule:
Bring your own projector,
even if they say
they have one.
Road Rule:
Like passing laws
and making sausage,
software installation should not
have an audience.
Road Rule:
Just like in baseball,
the member of your team
closest to the batter
should call the pitch.
Road Rule:
Find out what kind of snakes
you're dealing with
before you jump into the pit.
Showing up on time says a great deal about you and the way you view the
importance of another person. Showing up late is not only bad manners, it is
bad business. Alas, being tardy has become an art form and blaming this on
traffic a given. Promises and appointments made should be kept. Do this
and you are already way ahead of your competition.
Road Rule:
Stick to a routine
and communicate
as soon as you know
that plans have changed.
 El Camino Real
The first road into the Valley, the King's Highway remains the ruling thoroughfare
of commerce. Looking south, it recedes deep into California's lonely hinterlands and
turbulent history. Follow the bells back to its origin, and you'll end up two worlds away
in Mexico City. It's the longest road you know.
New arrivals, perspective, interminable endeavor, distant warning.
Reversed: Exit, termination, retreat from the action.
Silicon Valley Tarot
|
{1.4} WOMEN AND FLYING
My wife has accompanied me on a number of tandem business/vacation trips
(see section 1.10.6)
and she researched the travails of air travel from a woman's perspective.
(Most of this advice is useful for men too, as it turns out.)
An aircraft cabin is a hostile environment because of its low
atmospheric pressure (not enough AIR) and low humidity (not
enough WATER).
{1.4.1} Air
Low air pressure can cause or aggravate varicose veins, as well
as swelling of the ankles, especially during pregnancy. (Of course,
most doctors don't recommend flying during the 1st or 3rd trimester
of pregnancy anyway, due to increased cosmic rays coming through
the thinner atmosphere, resulting in a greater risk of mutation;
ask yours for advice on this.)
The best protection against the perils of low air pressure is support hose.
Yes, thick, ugly, clunky, old-lady-style support hose. Wear it
under a long skirt or pants. Your ankles will thank you.
Of course low air pressure can also cause unpleasant and even painful
pressure in sinuses, especially if you are congested due to illness or
allergies. If so, take the strongest decongestant that works for you
before flying.
Preparation, I have often said, is rightly
two-thirds of any venture.
— Amelia Earhart, record-breaking aviatrix
 Marketeer of Networks
The marketeer clings tightly to one of the few jobs in which her
gender is grudgingly represented in the Silicon Valley. Her smile is forced. She is
relentlessly upbeat. She is well-fortified from slings and arrows by
industrial-weight shoulderpads within her smart Armani frock. Optimism, enthusiasm.
Reversed: Appearances begin to crumble.
Silicon Valley Tarot
|
{1.5} PACKING
A major thing you can do to make packing easier is
to already be packed all the time. At first this seems
absurd, but in fact there is a lot you can do to be nearly packed
all the time. For example, you should have duplicate grooming items
for travel use (toothpaste and floss, hair brush and comb, etc),
in smaller sizes or packages, already packed in your grooming kit.
Likewise your laptop bag can be already packed with everything
but the laptop itself and only what it needs to run docked, or however
you use it in a stationary mode.
If you are organized in your filing, with everything
pertaining to a customer or prospect account in one folder,
you can just grab it when it's time to pack. If you organize
your maps and other travel guides by the airport you fly into
(such as El Paso, Las Cruces and White Sands maps in a Baggie®
labeled "El Paso") it makes it easy to pack them too.
{1.5.1} Luggage
Design your luggage around travel scenarios: the day trip,
the overnight trip, the 3-day trip, the 5-day trip,
each either car or plane. And, will you have the time and
resources to do laundry?
Driving offers the most flexibility in luggage; if you have a van
you can bring cardboard boxes and a hand truck. Flying is
more restrictive and therefore more challenging.
The ideal flying scenario allows you to carry everything on
the plane, with no checked baggage — that way it is virtually
impossible for the airline to lose
any of your luggage. Most airlines today allow one carry on bag
and one "purse or briefcase," which I always take to be a laptop
bag. They also usually allow you to check up to two bags.
So, in order or preference, you can bring one of these combinations:
Bearing in mind that you may end up with more stuff to bring home than you
originally brought along, it's best to try to avoid configuration #6
outbound — you have little room to expand.
For the same reason you'll want to have a spare backpack and duffel
that each fold small and can be brought along to expand into.
So what to do you do if are traveling heavy already and you end up with
three phone books worth
of extra stuff to bring back? Shipping it back (approximately $40.00)
is better than having excess luggage (usually an $80.00 charge by an
airline) but what works even better is:
So, based on the above analysis, my selection of a flexible luggage set is as follows.
{1.5.2} How To Pack
Maybe it's because I'm a personality type INTP in the Meyers-Briggs test
(see section 3.2.3: "Categories of People"), but I like to
have everything assembled in one place before I put anything into my
luggage (except of course for the stuff that's "always packed").
Conversely, I find it very frustrating to pack my toothbrush
in my grooming kit and pack my grooming kit in my garment bag,
then load the garment bag into my car for the trip to the airport,
only to find my toothpaste isn't packed and needs to be added to
grooming kit.
I don't think I'm unique in finding this kind of thing annoying.
There was an episode of the classic TV comedy
I Love Lucy (1951-1957, TV show) [ASIN: B0007TKHF2]
in which the two couples
are packing to drive from New York to California by car. (I believe it is
episode #110, "California, Here We Come!" which aired January 11, 1955.)
Ricky begins loading the car while the other three bring out luggage.
They drop a pile of luggage on the sidewalk. He looks at it,
thinking it is all that must fit in the car. He devises a plan.
He begins loading. Meanwhile, they bring out more and more luggage and
stack it in another, larger pile behind him, which he doesn't see.
When Ricky has finished barely squeezing the original pile of luggage
into the car, he says, "There, I got it all in," and Lucy says, "What about
all this stuff?" pointing to the bigger pile behind him. Ricky's eyes get
big and he begins cursing in Spanish.
The antidote to this annoyance is to assemble gradually, then lastly
pack quickly.
If you've used a staging area of some kind, just collect all the stuff there,
and make sure to get the master file for the trip — that should go in your
portfolio, easily accessible in your laptop bag.
I like to use a large surface like a king sized bed and lay out my clothes
as I plan my days for the trip. I tend to build each outfit from the shoes up.
If I expect unpredictable or variable temperatures and precipitation I will
add optional layers. A typical day for me might go:
Your choices may vary; if you are a woman they definitely will.
I also will add about 20% more clothes than I need, as a hedge against the
unexpected (ever had an iced latte poured into your lap?) after I've
planned each day.
For more detail on clothing selection, see
section 3.3.3: "Your Clothing and Accessories."
Have you ever opened your suitcase the night before a big meeting and found
that your blue mint mouthwash has leaked and dissolved in some cinnamon breath
mints, and then tie-dyed your white shirts with patterns of red, blue and purple?
Experiences like this one have convinced me to avoid fluids.
My original rule was "no fluids" but this proved too severe.
I have never had a factory-sealed bottle of mouthwash or shampoo
leak in my luggage, only the ones I had already opened.
I find it is also okay to carry clear water in an opened bottle
on my person; if some spills it usually dries quickly without a trace.
For mouthwash and shampoo I use travel-size (also sometimes called
sample-size) bottles. A bottle of mouthwash lasts about three days. I
don't know how long the shampoo lasts — I wash my hair about two or three
times a week, and I've never had a bottle run out on a trip. I always like
to wash my hair before a trip begins, so if it's only for a few days I may
not need to open my shampoo.
The key thing is that when you pack up to return home or to fly to another
city, throw away the opened bottles, don't repack them.
For some crazy reason I test this rule by breaking it about ever seven
years, and I'm always very sorry.
Of course I had this all worked out before August 10, 2006, when
airport security was increased due to the announcement by British
authorities of a terror plot aimed at detonating liquid explosives
on a commercial aircraft. I was barely affected by the new rules
against carryon liquids. The only habit I had to modify was to begin
throwing away my water bottle before the security scan (but
keeping my strap!) and then buying a new one inside the "sterile zone."
When you have all the non-clothing stuff assembled, there will typically
be some extra projects in the mix: a report you need to write, or
some competitive literature you need to analyze. A little of this
goes a long way. It is important to be prepared to make use of extra,
unanticipated free time, but don't go overboard. The truth is you usually
won't have any, especially if concentrate on the primary goals of your trip.
You also won't have any extra "energy" for projects in most cases, and
you may find that when you do have time and energy you have no space or
resources (like on a plane temporarily grounded by lightning strikes).
Now there will be occasions when you have several urgent tasks to
complete on the road, and you just have to find time to get them done.
But for your typical trip I recommend you look at the task-related stuff
you're taking, pick the bulkiest, and leave it behind. I also recommend
that you don't bring any non-work-related tasks, unless you're staying over
a weekend. You just won't get to them.
These extra credit tasks are drains on your slack, so don't start on
any of them until you have done every thing you can each day to accomplish
your primary mission.
Since 9/11, it is important to be aware of new travel restrictions.
The following are items I have routinely carried through security in
the past but can't any more:
The simplest solution I have come up with is to have a "blades bag,"
about the size of a small shaving kit, and carry them all in that.
If you are checking luggage this bag goes in the checked luggage; if you
are checking no luggage the blades bag stays home. If you are traveling
with carryon luggage only, and must have a blade, well then, I
guess you're checking some luggage after all.
Lastly, be sure to slip a business card securely inside each piece of luggage,
so that if it loses all of its outer tags it can still get back to you.
{1.5.3} What To Pack
The firmest rule I have about what to bring is to always
have with me clothing for the most extreme conditions I will fly over or drive
through, because you never know when you will become separated from your
transportation.
Once I was flying from Atlanta to San Diego in the early spring,
both of them shirtsleeves environments at that time of year, and
it was a "direct" flight through St. Louis. While on the ground
an "equipment change" was announced, which of course means the
flight wasn't direct any more — we were changing planes. Then while
waiting in the departure lounge I discovered that the flight had been
canceled. Nobody from the airline told me, it was another passenger
who noticed that the flight crew came bursting into the airport from the
jet way, with all their luggage, looking upset, and disappeared through
"employees only" doors. "The fat lady just sang," said the fellow passenger,
and he went to book another flight while I sat and waited for an announcement.
There was no announcement. Finally I went to a counter to ask,
and found that there were no flights out that I could take, my luggage
was gone somewhere, and they were giving me a voucher good for one night's
lodging, and a ladies' grooming kit since they were out of men's. All I had
to do was walk out a door onto the sidewalk in front of the airport and wait for a shuttle to take me to my hotel.
In my shirtsleeves I walked out the door into a raging blizzard in the
Missouri night. I shivered for close to an hour while looking for the shuttle,
which didn't come. Back inside the story was, "Oops, we forgot that we have to
call it for you first..." Then I got to shiver for another 45 minutes
before the shuttle finally came,
and the next morning
shave with a leg razor, and wear socks and underwear I washed out in the
sink — which weren't dry yet for the shuttle ride back to the airport.
Come to think of it, this all sounds like a sequence from Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which I recommend elsewhere in this book. If you see
this movie, notice near the beginning that Steve Martin leaves his gloves
in an office, remembers in the elevator, and says, "What the heck, I'm just
going from the cab to the airport building," and doesn't spend the thirty
seconds to go back for them. Of course, before the movie is over he is
wishing he had those gloves.
This is why I always bring an overcoat with lining on planes, and in the
pockets are a pair of leather gloves and a wool cap.
Below is a superset of what you probably need to take.
Items needed only for plane trips have the airport sign:
I've also provided this appendix at our web site, TravelingTechie.com
[LINK_0-1].
Feel free to cut and paste and edit to create your own ideal checklist.
a. what you need to travel
For wildfires you need a similar ability to survive for several
days on the road, in an evacuation center,
or else at home without power and water. Also for wildfire
preparedness it's important to have the things you'd want to
grab near at hand: pets and their needs, medicines, family photos,
tax and business records, and keepsakes.
b. what you need to wear, and to care for your clothes
c. what you need for grooming and health
(See section 3.3.2 "Accouterments for Grooming and Health," for
more detail on both of these.)
d. what you need to do your job
{1.6} TIME PRESSURE
[Author's note: I would've liked to have used Bukowski's
exact quote, but I was in a hurry and couldn't locate it quickly.]
The ability to execute quickly is what gives small companies, startups
and especially garage operations their inherent advantage.
In the large scale it allowed Microsoft to run rings around
IBM in the 1980s battle for control of the PC standard; in the
small scale it made it possible for my company in
job N
to be the first company to implement an e-commerce XML spec that wasn't
even complete while larger outfits just studied the problem.
As a traveling techie you represent your company, and if you can't
execute quickly it casts aspersions on the high-tech credentials
of your employer. Learn to be quick. There's a reason for
expressions like "one year equals seven web years" and "in a New York second."
{1.6.1} Theory of Delays
Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.
As before."
There's a very important distinction I want to make here, with some obscure
terminology. Bear with me.
In the book
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979, book) [ISBN/ASIN: 0465026567],
Douglas Hofstadter analyzes the fundamental components of logical thought
by creating artificially simple computer languages to study. Two of
them are called BlooP and FlooP. BlooP is a language that only allows
bounded loops, such as "for N equals one to six, print N times N."
Of course for this example the output is:
In contrast, FlooP is a language that allows free loops, such as
"until N repeats anything it's been for the last 20 steps,
print N, and then let N = N * (T - N) / D, rounded down to the next integer."
If you start with T= 89, D = 23 and N = 0, the output is just:
In general, it is very difficult to predict how long this program will run,
and in fact the easiest way to do this is by running the program and
counting its steps. No simple formula based on the values of D, T and N can
give a prediction in a consistently short computation time.
So if you think a given program may take a long time, it may also
take a long time to verify that it will take a long time.
For this reason FlooP is a dangerous language, and it can
"lock up" a computer by working on an intractable problem. (I've found
Javascript in a browser can do this quite nicely as well.) Also
unfortunately, all modern programming languages share this problem
with FlooP, which is why all modern operating systems allow users to
interrupt programs manually. This is also why "progress bars"
on programs are sometimes very wrong.
(Technical footnote: this program is based on the logistic equation,
with which ecologist Robert May discovered one of the first examples of
chaos in 1974. See
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (1985, book) by Douglas Hofstadter [ISBN/ASIN: 0465045669],
chapter 16, and
Chaos: Making a New Science (1987, book) by James Gleick [ISBN/ASIN: 0140092501], chapter 3, "Life's Ups and Downs."
The problem of computing how long a
program will run is fundamentally impossible in the general case, and
this was proved before the first computer was built, by Turing and Church
in 1936. A good summary of this result is in
Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (1988, book) by Rudy Rucker [ISBN/ASIN: 0395468108],
chapter 3.)
Applying this as a metaphor to travel delays, we see that some are like
BlooP programs, for example: an escalator. Just by watching it you can
figure out how fast the steps are rising, and accurately estimate
how long it will take you to ride it up to the next floor.
Other delays are like FlooP programs, such as an elevator.
You wait for it to arrive — how long you don't know — and when
it arrives you get in and it may go to some floors you don't want — how many
you don't know. It may go up and down and come back where you started
without taking you where you wanted to go. You just have to wait and see.
I have found that a fundamental key to avoiding travel delays is stay out
of free loops, even if they offer the chance of taking less time.
(This also true when working on projects and managing technical risk;
see section 2.14.4: "Organization" for more information.)
There was a TV commercial (Sept. '02) that used this
concept humorously. A man in a hurry is wheeling his shopping cart through
a grocery store, looking for a short line at a checkout register. Actually,
they are
all short, with only one party ahead of him. But in each case the clerk
and customer are in some sort of FlooP: a check approval, a price check,
a person who keeps dropping coins and picking them up, etc. This hurried
customer knows better than to line up behind a FlooP if he can help it.
But there is no option (besides going to another store) and he ends up
waiting and eating a candy bar. You know, the one with the slogan that
begins: "Not going anywhere?"
If a FlooP seems like it is dramatically shorter than an alternative BlooP,
your temptation to use it may be high. The safest approach is to turn it
into a BlooP by setting a time limit. For example, if you can are in terminal A
and need to get to terminal B in 30 minutes, and it's a 15-minute walk but
there is a free shuttle that may come, wait 15 minutes for the shuttle, then
walk. Best case: a free ride. Worse case: a 15 minute wait followed by a
15-minute walk.
{1.6.2} Packing Quickly
I don't recommend packing quickly when you're at home, at the beginning of a
trip, since you must make a myriad decision what to bring. See section 1.5.2, "How To Pack"
above for my advice on slowly accumulating stuff in a staging area.
But when you are checking out of a hotel you only need to pack what you've
already brought, and you may need to do this in a hurry.
I discovered this principle when my wife and I were moving out of our
first house, and it seemed like it was taking forever to clean out
the garage. I'd go out there and spend a few hours and then look around,
and it seemed like nothing had changed. Sure, I'd taken all the empty baby
food jars out of a drawer and put them in a dairy crate, but the psychological
impact was of no progress being made. Finally I hit upon an effective method: I
took a rope and stretched it across the back wall of the garage on the floor.
From that point forward my goal was to move the rope to the front of the
garage, leaving nothing on the far side. I managed to move it about a foot
at a time, leaving an increasing square footage of empty space in its wake.
I'd consolidate things, combine boxes, throw stuff away, stack remaining
boxes, and then move the rope forward another foot. It worked. The garage
soon ended up completely empty.
Later I realized the rope wasn't necessary, it was just an aid in the process of
increasing the empty space. This principle can be applied in packing a hotel
room. Start from the point farthest from the door and create empty space
moving towards the door. Be sure to pay particular attention in the bathroom,
and look in the tub. If there is a refrigerator be sure to check it too.
Check under the bed and in any drawers you may have used, and on the closet
shelves. Pull loose items onto a bed, and when they are all assembled
put them in your bags.
During this process, keep checking a clock or watch.
Know how much time you have and gauge if you are making sufficient progress.
If you fall behind, get sloppier. I usually like to wash all of the clothes
from my luggage after a trip whether they've been worn or not, so I don't
worry about folding things nicely for the trip home. Stuff all your papers
in a bag if you must, and worry about sorting them back at the office.
Likewise with computer cables: if you are out of time stuff them willy-nilly
in your laptop bag and sort them out back at the office. (Of course it is
always better in principle to have everything sorted and neat, but the
essence of hurrying is to shed minor goals.) This can be when Baggies® come
in handy — shove things in Baggies® for now.
Sadly, one of my favorite tricks stopped working.
If a hotel got CNN Headline News,
I found I could start getting ready on the hour or half-hour and be ready
30 minutes later, gauging my progress by the news stories. They followed a
fairly fixed format:
By the time they were showing the baby polar bears at Seaworld,
I would be zipping up my luggage. But CNN changed the Headline News
format a while back, and so I have to use other means. Paying
attention to the commercial breaks still works as a rough time indicator.
When you are all done, take another minute and make a final check. Look
everywhere. Now you're done.
{1.6.3} Driving Quickly
If you are done working on the above problem (you're a techie, you couldn't
help yourself, right?) then you know that the answer is infinity miles per
hour. All of the time has been used up, and she needs to be there already.
(The problem is easier if you assume the towns are 30 miles apart, though
the answer holds for any distance.)
The conclusion to draw from this is that some delays cannot be fixed with
increasing speed. Don't count on fast driving or skillful road
maneuvers to get you there on time. The best approach is to leave
lots of time.
By way of preparation, anything you can find out in advance about traffic
and parking, from someone who's familiar with the route, is going
to help you. Be sure to ask both "What's the best way?" and "How long does
it take?"
The lessons of BlooP and FlooP also apply here. I used to live in
Bellflower, California, in the middle of Los Angeles County, and commute
daily to an office right next to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX).
The distance was about 18 miles as the crow flies. The most direct route
by freeway was about 25 miles, with a few miles of surface streets on either
end, and in the dead of night I could get to the office this way
from home in under 35 minutes. But during rush hour (8 to 9 AM) it took
over two hours, and even leaving the house at 9:00 AM the travel time by
freeway ranged from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on accidents.
(For the aficionado, this route covered the Cal-91, I-110, and I-405 freeways
and included the dreaded "south bay curve" which was the inspiration for
the opening sequence of Ridley Scott's 1982 science fiction film dystopia
Blade Runner [ASIN: 0790729628].)
Then I discovered that by driving due west on Imperial Highway or Century
Blvd., through about forty traffic lights, right through "South Central"
and past the Watts Towers, I could get to work in almost exactly an hour
no matter what the freeways were doing, at any time of morning.
This was my BlooP. I wanted to be in the office by 10:00 AM, so in
the end I chose the low-risk approach of leaving at 9:00 AM and
taking the surface streets every day, instead of risking being
a half hour late for that chance at being 15 minutes early. I also
understood that if I left late I would arrive late by the same amount;
there was no way to "make it up" on the way.
(Ironically, the last interstate built in California, I-105, now covers the
exact route I took, reducing travel time to 20 minutes during non-congested
conditions, but I left the job and changed my commute a few months before
it opened.)
On longer trips, one unusual approach to avoiding delays is to never
turn off the engine. I have a friend who swears by it. However, since
it is against Federal law to pump gas while the engine is running, I make that
small exception.
As far as the actual mechanics of driving go, I have a bunch of superstitions
which may or may not be of use to anyone else. I avoid driving behind vehicles
with ladders on the roof and/or lawn mowers in the back. It's not that I fear
falling equipment, I just find them to be sluggishly driven. And speaking
of sluggish, I divide drivers in traffic into two types: laminar and
turbulent. (In fluid dynamics, laminar flow is when each molecule
follows the one ahead of it; in turbulence this is not always the case.
James Bond liked his martinis "shaken, not stirred," because he was after
the more thorough turbulent mixing of water and alcohol due to shaking, not
the laminar stirring.)
Laminar drivers preserve the flow, while turbulent drivers disrupt it.
Laminar drivers are more predictable than turbulent drivers.
Most laminar drivers are pretty much alike, but there are a variety of
turbulent drivers. For amusement I've given them names: snails are
sluggish all the time, darters zip in and out of lanes without warning,
and snail darters are sluggish except when they swerve unexpectedly.
A V2-15 is a vehicle in the number 2 lane (second from left in CalTrans
terminology) going 15 miles per hour below the flow of traffic, so that
vehicles zoom by on both sides of it, and a
V0-5 is a vehicle in the one-lane carpool lane going 5 miles an hour
below the flow of traffic, thereby making the carpool lane useless to drivers
behind as a means of going faster.
I have observed that any driver who will cut you off or otherwise
lurch into your path, will do it twice within a few minutes. As always, as
they used to say on the USENET newsgroups, Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV).
While the above may be of marginal use, I have found it very valuable
as a sort of "Zen" exercise on long drives with light traffic to give
no thought to maximizing my speed, but instead try to keep my vehicle
equally spaced between those ahead and behind me in my lane.
It is very soothing and very laminar as well, making it polite to other
drivers.
And if going with the flow happens to take you above the legal speed limit,
I have found that traffic school is an excellent business networking opportunity.
{1.6.4} Walking Quickly
If you are wearing business wear and speed-walking in the hot sun, you will
end up violating the cardinal rule, "Never let them see you sweat."
(See section 3.3.5, "Your Presentation.")
As with driving, you need to be clever and efficient, not super-fast.
The most important thing is to avoid backtracking, which can be very
demoralizing on foot. Know where you are going.
When moving through a crowd, expect people to impede you. That's just
what they do. I like to pretend that all members of a party are connected
by invisible rubber bands, and though they may separate temporarily they
can "snap back" at any time. Also a group, upon reaching a "pinch point" in
pedestrian flow, will often stop and expand to choke off the passage,
especially if there is a fork in the path ahead and they need to confer, or
if there is any doubt that they are headed in the right direction. There
is no way to prevent this.
If you are trying to make headway in a crowd with small children, especially
toddlers, put your hands out in front of you; otherwise they will tackle
your knees. Don't actively touch them, but if they run into you, make sure they
run in to your hands, not your legs.
One way to reduce the impact of this if you are in a party of more than one
is to split up. This especially makes sense if you are going someplace to
wait in line or make a reservation, or to board a vehicle which
may be about to depart, and whose driver may have to be convinced
to wait for the others.
Three of Hosts
They've put your brain on a pedestal and crowned you King of
Workstations. You're really on top of things. Wait until after the rollout
party to look in the rear-view mirror, though; you'll see Moore's law bearing down
on you. Thirty-six months from now, your precious little risc machine will be
a boat anchor. State of the art, cutting-edge endeavor. Reversed: Obsolescence,
technical nostalgia.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.7} CRITICAL POINTS
In Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001, movie) [ASIN: B00005JKNF],
the character of housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (played by Helen Mirren) explains
how she knew a murder was about to take place before the fact:
This same gift of anticipation makes a great traveling techie.
I've learned to identify a set of critical points in travel when
it's easiest for things to go wrong; these are the points
where I pay closest attention.
Here is my list of 34 critical points with commentary:
Did you get everything? How about screen cleaner and wipes?
How about marketing literature? Power cords? All mice
and keyboards? Video cables? Recovery disks? Did anything get stuck
in a drawer or roll under a desk? What's that unmarked
3-ring notebook on top of that bookcase?
Got all your laptop pieces? Got your file for this trip?
Anything stuck to your bulletin board that you need?
Where's your cell phone?
Have you gotten addresses and directions? Do you have all the
contact phone numbers you might need? (Don't say "They're in
my smartphone/tablet/laptop" or whatever. Then you're only one
failure — bad battery, charger, screen, who knows? — away from
catastrophe.)
Have you forwarded a copy of your travel itinerary to
your spouse or other family member? How about to coworkers who are
meeting you? How about to your boss' administrator, or anybody who
might be looking for you? (Growing up in an airline family I have
found that if there's a plane crash on the day you fly, it can be
important to your family and associates to able to quickly confirm
that you were not on it.)
Got all your luggage? Did you remember your belt? Your coat? Got the
right shoes? Sunglasses? Water bottle? Snack? Still know where your
cell phone is? Did you check the weather where you're going?
Did you give everybody a hug and a kiss?
Have you called the airline or checked the web to make sure your flight
is still on time? Got your tickets or itinerary?
If you are taking a shuttle to the airport, make extra sure you
get all of your luggage as you depart — getting reunited with luggage
lost here can be very time-consuming. If you have driven to the airport,
park at an off-airport lot with its own shuttle; that way you will be
deposited with your luggage at the curb instead of having to schlep
it from the parking lot. (In the old days when traveling in a group we
would drop one person with the luggage to check in with the skycap while
the another person parked the car — post-9/11 this is impossible.)
Get your ID ready, and make sure your bags all have tags on them
with your name, address and phone number. Give your cell phone number
(your cell number should have voicemail included now that we are in the
3rd Millennium) so if they have to call you about lost luggage they get
you wherever you are.
Are your blades in your checked luggage? If there is a line I find this
is a good time to transfer all the metal on my person (keys, coins,
sunglasses, cell phone, etc.) to the pockets of my overcoat, which I
send through the X-ray machine. Security
doesn't care and it saves me time at the metal detector having to empty
my pockets into a plastic tub, and then reload them immediately afterwards.
At this point, to preserve slack, I like to go directly to my gate first.
Along the way I check the electronic board of flight information.
Sometimes the web says a flight is on time, the electronic board says
it's on time, but when you get to the gate it is delayed or canceled
or had a gate change (to another terminal entirely, of course); only the
agents at the gate seem to have the latest information. If you don't
have a boarding pass because you didn't check any luggage, now is when
you will line up to get it. Be sure to find out what time the flight
will begin boarding.
Now's when you can attend to your needs: use the restroom, buy bottled
water and snacks if you need to (I like the apples, San Francisco
sourdough bread and varieties of jerky you can usually find in airports),
and shop for a book to read if you didn't bring one (I especially like
the airport bookstores at San Francisco International and Minneapolis-
St. Paul Airports.) Now is when you still have an advantage if traveling
in a group: one at a time can stay with the luggage while others wander.
Have you got everything? You should never put anything in the seat
pocket in front of you, but check there anyway. Check thoroughly
under the seat in front of you and under your seat, as well as in
the overhead rack. Where's your ticket? Where's your cell phone?
Got your coat? Got your water bottle? Where's that book you were
reading before you fell asleep? Kinda groggy? Snap out of it!
Count your carry on items. Did you also have a shopping bag from
the last airport you were in?
This is a good time to get oriented, as in which way is north,
especially if it is dark or cloudy. The danger is that you
will become disoriented, and "dead reckon" your way from the airport
out into the city, only to wake up in the morning and find the
ocean is on the wrong side of you, or whatever the consequences
are of your disorientation. (See
section 1.8, "NAVIGATION" in this chapter, for more information on getting oriented.)
Make sure you have your confirmation number handy as you get
in line to rent a car. Be sure to know your company's policy on
insurance coverage and select the right coverage. Pull out your
frequent flier cards wallet and see if they accept any of your
cards. And get a map if you don't already have one. Even if you
have, or are renting, a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver,
it pays to have a hard-copy backup.
On the way to your hotel, from the airport, dinner, or your last
appointment, be on the lookout for a convenience store, like Circle K,
7-Eleven or AM/PM, or a drug store, preferably 24-hour, such as Sav-On,
CVS or Walgreens, or a big discount store like K-Mart, Target or Wal-Mart,
for those last-minute purchases: grooming items such as toothpaste and
mouthwash — I'm always losing my last comb — and what have you.
If you don't need it now, you may need it later. See if you can get
a better map than the rental car company gave you. Also look for gas
stations for that fill-up you'll need to get before you turn in your
rental car.
Park under the porte-cochère; that's why it's there.
(Unless you're staying at a valet-controlled facility like the Mirage
in Las Vegas or the Marriott Boston Copley Place — then you just tell
the valet you're checking in, follow instructions, and give them a dollar.
Remember to expense it.)
As with renting a car, have your confirmation number
and frequent flier card wallet handy while you register.
One of my firmest road rules is to go directly to the room without my
luggage, with only my room key, for two reasons: to make sure the key
works (it's a drag to schlep your bags back down to the lobby for
another attempt at a working card-key) and to make sure the room meets
with my approval:
If I have any complaints it is both more convenient and a better
bargaining position to get them resolved before I move in.
Once I've approved the room, I use the restroom (to remove any
impatience I may be feeling), and then call my wife to let her know I
arrived safely and what my room number is.
Then I proceed to go back down for my luggage, and be sure
to rustle up a luggage cart to help me. (In a valet-controlled
facility my luggage will probably already be on its way up with
a bellman, who should be tipped $1 a bag — be sure to expense it.)
When you leave the rental car for the last time in the evening,
make sure to leave the rental contract in the glove compartment, and
take everything else to the room, even the maps. Later, after
retrieving a surprise voice mail, you may be looking through the phone
book trying to figure out which of two FedEx Office locations is closer
to your hotel, and the maps might come in handy.
At last! You are in your room with your luggage.
If there's supposed to be WiFi or other internet, as soon as I have
my laptop I boot up and test connectivity.
Now is the time to
unpack. Hang your grooming kit in the bathroom.
Hang up your clothes on hangers in the closet. I prefer not to use the
drawers in a hotel — it's too easy to leave things in them — and I
assume that I won't be having any visitors to my room (it's very, very
rare) and so I just spread out my non-hanging clothes on the closet
shelf. My papers I spread out on the desk or table in categories.
Be sure to finish setting up your laptop soon, to verify that you
have all of the pieces and it works, and position it where you want
to be while working. Then log into the headquarters network
and get your email. Call for voicemail while you're at it, if you
didn't already while waiting at baggage claim. Now you know if
any emergencies have erupted while you were en route.
In the evening on a road trip you are usually, finally, done with work,
unless there is a coworker dinner planned. (If so, it's part of
the job, and you are still on duty, so go ahead and enjoy it but mind
your manners, don't over drink, and speak with good purpose.
I have more to say on this in
section 3.3, "YOUR PROFESSIONAL PRESENCE.")
If there is no group dinner, your primary mission then becomes to stay
out of trouble. Some suggestions: inventory your grooming kit, and
then go to the drug store or discount store you spotted on the way
in and refill it. Shop for family gifts or cheap souvenirs for
coworkers. If it is still light out, visit a historic district.
(See
section 3.7, "PREDICTING THE FUTURE,"
for more on how and why to appreciate historic sites.)
If you've no errands to run, and no history to see, set up your speakers
and listen to music while getting work done. Compose emails, rehearse
your demo, code, write specs, work on RFQ responses, or whatever it
is you seem to have trouble getting done back at the office because
of interruptions. Also, you can make work-related phone calls to
people still at their desks in other time zones.
If you find you must print something out, you can FAX it from your laptop
to your hotel, or if you need high quality or color, put it on a memory
stick, and use the business center (if present), or else drive to a FedEx
Office or a similar copy shop with computers.
Of course, if your messages revealed an emergency you must handle,
that's the work you're doing tonight.
I also recommend sorting all of your books and papers, etc.,
every night into piles on the other bed (if there is one):
Before you get too tired, do your evening grooming regime: tooth care,
any skin-care you do, vitamins and/or medicines, putting on your PJs
or whatever you wear to bed,
setting your alarm clock/watch and/or the hotel alarm clock and/or
calling for a wake-up call (I've mentioned I do all three) and while
you're at it make sure the hotel clock has the correct time.
I like to read in bed after I've gotten all ready, usually some history
of technology stuff or science fiction.
(See
section 3.7, "PREDICTING THE FUTURE,"
for recommended reading.) When I start to doze off I can
just mark my place, take off my glasses, turn out the light and fall
asleep.
For eight years I worked out of California field offices for several
Boston-area-based companies, and was always flying to Boston four or
six times a year for meetings. The Irvine and Seattle offices always
had the toughest jet-lag problems at these meetings, unless someone
showed up from Japan, Australia or England. The main problem came if
we flew in Monday night for a Tuesday morning meeting. The meeting
usually started at 8:00 AM Boston (Eastern) time, which was 5:00 AM
California (Pacific) time. If I wanted eight hours of sleep I needed to
be asleep by 11:00 PM Eastern time, which still seemed like 8:00 PM
Pacific time to me. I knew that if I found myself watching the nightly
news I was up too late. If I then found myself watching the Letterman
or Leno shows, I was up way too late. If I then found myself watching
Late Night With Conan O'Brien which came on after Letterman —
or anything with that Scottish guy, what's his name? Craig Fugerson —
I was up way, way too late. (Of course over time these late-night
line-ups change frequently. Adapt to field conditions as necessary.)
The punishment came the next day, when it was murder getting up after
five or six hours of sleep, and I was drowsy all afternoon in a boring
meeting after the morning coffee wore off, and then when everybody wanted
to go out for beers that evening, and I just wanted to collapse, I seemed
antisocial.
I finally learned on the first night to turn off the
TV and read technical manuals until I passed out, before it was too late.
Also, I would try not to sleep on the plane in, and maybe take
a brisk walk before bed to tire myself.
Or better yet, I'd fly in a day or two early and spend extra time at
headquarters, which was always quite useful. If I flew in with a
Saturday stayover (and 3-week advanced purchase) it made the accountants
happy because I usually saved the company about a thousand dollars in
air fare. I got enough sleep and I got to walk the Freedom Trail or
see Walden Pond or some such on Sunday to wear myself out, and slept
soundly Sunday night, spent Monday doing extra headquarters stuff (which
you never get enough of) and got to retire early Monday night if I wanted,
and still was able to show up fresh and ready for the Tuesday morning
meeting, and still have energy for Tuesday night beer-bonding
and story-swapping.
Getting out of shape is an occupational hazard for traveling techies
— we spend so much time seated at screens, and then get to travel
and dine on expense account meals. My research convinces me
that the most important thing you can do to counteract these tendencies
is to get regular aerobic exercise. The book,
Make the Connection: Ten Steps to a Better Body — And a Better Life (1996, book) [ISBN/ASIN: 0786882980]
by Bob Greene and Oprah Winfrey, argues that 30 minutes of brisk
walking five times a week can be a sufficient regime, provided it is done
in the morning. (The goal is not to simply burn off unwanted calories
in the exercise, but to raise the level of one's metabolism so that
calories are burned at a higher rate all day.) For this reason on
business trips I like to do my walking first thing in the morning,
before anything else. That way it usually doesn't get postponed or
canceled when other things come up.
I get up, dress in exercise clothes, take only my room key, exit the
hotel and just walk down
the road for 15 minutes, then turn around and walk back. After that
I shower, dress, and join my colleagues (if any) for breakfast.
This applies if you bathe or shower in the morning, which I prefer
because I meet the day fresh. Take a clock or watch into the bathroom,
and gauge how long you are taking. I know it feels so good to wash all
that road grunge off and just relax, but I've found it easier to lose
track of time and get behind schedule here than anywhere else.
One thing you need to be sure to remember when leaving your hotel
room is your room key (although the front desk will gladly give
you another with proper ID). It is probably something you aren't
used to carrying with you. If you are driving away and you valet
parked your car you'll also need the valet receipt, and you may want
to call down before you go. Be sure to grab that stack of stuff you
need today to get you there, that you sorted out last night, including
the maps and phone book, as well as the stuff you need for your
appointment(s). Also, grab something with your hotel's name, address
and number; it's usually on the stationery by the phone. It can be real
frustrating later when you realize you don't know the exact name of
where you are staying — many cities, including New York, Washington,
and San Antonio, have hotels with extremely similar names a few blocks
apart — or that you can't give someone the number to call your room,
or that you don't know how to retrieve voicemail messages left for you
at your hotel.
Some things you can leave behind are your home key and the key to
your own car, the one back in the parking lot of the city you flew out of.
(Though if you have a compass and light on a key chain — like I do —
you may want to remove them and take them with you.)
On road trips, always eat breakfast because you may not get lunch.
The techie is the one who is on the spot to make things work, and
therefore may have to work through lunch to make sure an installation,
demo or deployment is ready on time.
Breakfast is also a good time to "huddle" with your coworkers and
synchronize your plan for prospect and customer visits.
When you park your rental car (what kind of car was it again?),
especially in a parking garage, when you are almost out of sight
of the vehicle — either going around a bend or at a doorway or
elevator — stop and turn around and look back at it. Can you spot
it? If you can't find it now, you surely won't be able to later.
This one habit has saved me a world of grief.
Once, an entire half-hour episode of the TV comedy
Seinfeld (1990, TV show) [ASIN: B00005JLEX]
was devoted to the search for a parked car in a parking garage,
and goodness knows I have on occasion searched longer than that myself.
Find out the score. If you are going on a pre-sales call, as a Systems
Engineer (SE) or one of its synonyms, find who's leading the sales
effort, what their goal is for the meeting, and what the pitch they
plan to give. What problem are we going to solve for the prospect?
If you are going for post-sales support, analysis, development or
deployment, as a Customer Engineer (CE) or one of its synonyms, found out
who in your company sold the product and talk to them, also their
pre-sales technical support person, and find out what the customer
thought they were buying, and what problem it is supposed to solve for
them. On the customer side find out who bought the product, and who
approved the purchase, and see if you can meet with them and get them
to buy off on your implementation plan. In a perfect world this would
already be worked out before you get there, but successful companies are
often too busy, and unsuccessful companies often too resource-starved,
to have formal mechanisms for getting this information to you. Seek
it out proactively and it can save a lot of grief down the road.
When is it "quitting time" for the people you count on for support?
I spent eight years working in the western US for East Coast companies,
and I became acutely aware that at 2:00 PM Pacific Time the customer
support and finance folks at headquarters were all but gone. (Some
engineers stayed later, but not on Friday before a three-day weekend.)
It may frequently happen while you are visiting a prospect or customer
site that your host and you both are quite willing to work as late
as necessary to accomplish your goals. But do notice when 5:00 PM, or
whatever time most people leave, comes. Is there something you need
from someone? A Parking Validation or a Property Pass to get equipment
or software out? Make sure you get it handled while you can.
If you came to solve a problem, talk to the most senior person there
before you go, whether you solved the problem or not. Also call your
boss, and any sales person you are working with, and report.
Of course it's best never to leave a problem unsolved. Is there
a workaround, some kind of Band-Aid you can put on the problem
to buy time? If you must leave a problem unresolved, explain
what the next steps are going to be. Never just say, "I'm stumped,"
and leave without a plan.
See
section 1.6.2 above, "Packing Quickly,"
for detailed notes on evacuating your hotel room.
Often you must do this in the morning, and then spend another
day working before flying out in the evening.
Make sure to keep the stuff you need to work separate
from the rest of your luggage, which can go in the trunk.
Go back to that gas station you found and fill up.
If you have extra time and your bags are in disarray, or you ended up
with extra stuff to fit in somehow, stop in a pleasant location
such as a shady park and repack.
Resist the temptation to think to yourself, "I'm home!" The
true status is that you are probably about 90 minutes from
being able to leave the airport grounds, and hours from home.
Stay patient.
When I come in the door, there are hugs and kisses all around, then if
I have gifts or trade show tchotchkes to give out I do that,
then I unpack my clean clothes and dirty laundry, assemble all receipts
from my pockets and elsewhere and get them into the receipts baggy for
this trip, and gather the stuff I need for my next
trip to the office.
My wife and I have a rule that we don't discuss
any household business for one hour after I arrive. If the water
heater blew up or our neighbor sued us over a fallen tree, it can
wait an hour. I use that time to just be happy to be home.
Double Latte
Humble coffee drink, or wellspring of inspiration and productivity?
Depends what side of the spoon you're on. Vigor, energy, direction. Reversed: torpor,
indecision, cubicle-snoozing.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.8} NAVIGATION
Some of the first traveling techies were navigators.
In the late 1500s and early 1600s Spanish ships used Portuguese pilot-navigators
to help them run the "Black Ships" between Spain and the Philippines.
Portugal had made the explorations first, but its leaders had lost interest
in funding exploration.
When the Dutch attempted to disrupt and displace this trade they
employed English pilot-navigators, for similar reasons.
The documentation of pilots, called "rutters," were small books that
held maps and diaries of sea travels. They were state secrets, and
the uninitiated could be executed for reading them.
The popular historical novel
Shogun by James Clavell (1975), [ISBN/ASIN: 0440178002]
gives a fictionalized account of an English pilot's experiences in Japan during
this era. (See
section 3.7, "PREDICTING THE FUTURE,"
more information on the benefits of historical novels.) He wrote:
Today it is more likely that a traveling techie will be navigating Cyberspace
than sea lanes, but we still carry the navigator's tradition, and therefore
it is especially embarrassing when one can't find his or her way in the world.
Here are my tips on business trip navigation.
{1.8.1} Become a Map Fanatic
As a Boy Scout I learned to love maps, both through the practice of
Orienteering — a competitive event involving overland navigation with maps
and compass, usually at a multi-troop campout called a Camporee — and
through mapmaking I did for scout badges. But initially I only
thought maps were important for back country or wilderness navigation.
In the job I had working for a minicomputer manufacturer in central
Massachusetts (job A),
I was completely new to the area and only knew how to travel up and down one
state highway that connected my job, my apartment and the grocery store.
I investigated the local maps, and discovered that each little New England
village had its own map, published by its Chamber of Commerce, and they
were all at different scales. It was pretty much impossible to mosaic
them into a big map. Another source of confusion was that street names
changed names at town lines, in a backwards kind of way: for example,
starting at the center of Boylston (at what we call a "traffic circle" in
the West but they call a "rotary" in the Northeast), there is a Shrewsbury
Road that leads out of town towards the town of Shrewsbury (see figure),
but as soon as you enter Shrewsbury it changes name to Boylston Road, since
to the Shrewsbury residents it is the road to Boylston. It gets worse when
you add a third town: Grafton is south of Shrewsbury, and to get to it
you take Grafton Road south out of Shrewsbury, until you cross into Grafton
and it becomes Shrewsbury Road. So Shrewsbury is ringed with Shrewsbury Roads,
each on the other side of the town line in some direction.
I finally concluded that the layout and naming of the streets and the
lack of adequate larger-scale maps were all symptomatic of a strong
attitude among the local citizenry that if you didn't know right where
you were going (because you grew up there or were the guest of someone
who did) you didn't belong there.
In an attempt to bring order out of chaos, I went down to a little hunting
supply store and bought all of the
United States Geological Survey [LINK_1-61]
maps for the area and put them together
on my office wall at work (I shared a cubicle that had one sheetrock wall,
conveniently on the north side, about 12 feet high.)
Well, I learned my way around like you wouldn't believe. Not only was I able
to learn how all of the back roads connected by directly studying the maps,
but there was a sociological phenomenon as well. You see, my company was
at that time growing so fast they were doubling in size every 18 months, and
their annual requirement for programmers was more than every Computer
Science and Information Science graduate in the whole country. (This
was in the late 1970s.) They were
recruiting from all over the world, especially English-language countries
like India and Taiwan. It turned out there were a lot of new employees who,
like me, were having trouble with the local maps. Word went out about the
map in our office, and people were always showing up — usually in pairs —
and asking, "Can we use your map for a minute?" Then one would give
the other directions to some place. I learned a lot from those conversations
about interesting, hard-to-find places.
Since then, wherever I have lived, I have always invested in a wall-sized
mosaic of maps. They have always been very useful.
My recommendation is that you collect maps. Every place you go on
business, get a map or two of the town and the region. File
them by the airport you flew into. (Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe
and Gila Bend all go in the PHX file.)
In large "megalopolis" areas, such as Los Angeles, Silicon Valley,
and suburban Virginia and Maryland near Washington, D.C., there
are well-indexed map books you can buy — go ahead and get them.
They will save you time and aggravation. (I'm told they finally
have them even for Massachusetts, especially the Route 128 "Brain Belt.")
Of course, we live in the dawning of the Global Positioning System
(GPS) era. I find my iPhone with GPS to be indispensable. But
don't let your gadgets do your thinking for you.
I recommend you study maps. They have a lot to teach.
Their displays and representations are some of the most dense
concentrations of visual information available.
They can teach where the highest earthquake risk is, and where a hurricane
is headed, where property values are rising and where crime rates are dropping.
I once read ecologist Peter Warshall assert that you are not aware of
your environment if you don't know what watershed you are in. This
is one of the things maps will teach you.
(I have lived in the valley of the Rio Grande River and at the headwaters
of the Everglades, in the flood basin of the Rio Hondo fork of the San Gabriel
River and near the bend in Santa Ana River which the Army Corps. of Engineers
claims has the highest flood risk in the United States — I didn't know this
until I'd moved away — and now I live in the San Diego River valley.
Whatever is poured down the storm drains on my street flows into the ocean
between Ocean Beach and Mission Beach on the western coast of San Diego,
just south of the Mission Bay canal.
Where do your storm drains go?)
Another good reason to pay attention to maps is that they can be beautiful,
just as the Earth is beautiful. When I find an especially pleasing map
I like to hang it on a wall to enjoy. For example, at a community fair a PR
person at my local water company showed me this map, and I had to
get my own copy:
The best place to get maps are
American Automobile Association (AAA) [LINK_1-12],
which has road maps of
everyplace you might want to drive and a few you might not, and the
United States Geological Survey Products and Publications [LINK_1-64],
which sells the
standard 7.5 minute quadrangles for most of the United States,
at a scale of 1 to 24,000, or one inch equals 2,000 feet.
(That's 7.5 minutes of arc: 360 degrees are in a circle, 60 minutes are
in a degree, so eight maps in a row cover one degree in one direction,
and a grid of 64 maps cover one square degree.)
Of course you should get a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver — they're under
$100 now — and learn to use it. The manufacturer's manual as well as
GPS Made Easy: Using Global Positioning Systems in the Outdoors (4th edition) (2003, book) by Lawrence Letham [ISBN/ASIN: 0898868238],
will help. Of course you can also get a GPS-enabled smart phone, but you
should still learn what a DATUM is.
Get a compass. Your GPS doesn't know which way is north. Also,
learn to tell directions without a compass. Forget about the moss growing
on the north side of trees; it barely works, and is not accurate within 30
degrees of slop. At night, be able to find the north star.
The Night Sky: A Guide to Field Identification (Golden Guide Series) (2001, book) by Mark R. Chartrand [ISBN/ASIN:1582381267]
explains how.
By day, when the sun is out, use these two techniques:
Point the hour hand at the sun. (This is best done using a small
straight object like a toothpick held vertically to cast a shadow,
and rotating the watch until the hour hand lines up with the shadow.)
Bisect the angle between the hour hand and twelve o'clock — or one
o'clock if you are on Daylight Savings Time — and that direction is
south (except in the Southern Hemisphere, where it's north).
Practice this a few times and it becomes very quick and easy.
Take a straight stick — a chopstick is about the right size —
and push it firmly into the ground oriented so that it has
no shadow, i.e., it is pointed directly at the sun.
Wait about twenty minutes (five or six songs on the radio,
or time it with your cell phone's digital clock display),
and By then the shadow will have grown long enough to clearly
point east.
Develop a sense of direction. Learn to stay oriented, so you know which
way is north all the time. Anticipate geographical features before you
come to them. Will you be gaining or losing elevation on the way to your
hotel? Will you cross a river? Is the ocean nearby, or a gulf or large lake?
If so, will you catch a glimpse of it?
As I mention above in section 1.7,
"CRITICAL POINTS," if you are on a plane that lands at an airport you've never been to,
especially if it's cloudy or dark and you have no clues from the sun,
it is important to get oriented as soon as possible. Wait until the
plane is at the jet way and then check your compass. Determine the
which way is east, and imagine the sun rising there tomorrow morning.
Now stay oriented as you make your way out of the airport and into the city
or countryside.
I realize as I make these recommendations with glee, having been a map
fanatic since I was about fourteen years old, that there are some people
who are map-challenged. The main hurdle seems to be that some people
walk around all the time making maps in their heads as they roam
the earth, and when they see a physical (paper or computer) map it more or
less matches what they've already constructed mentally, while other people
never draw maps in their heads, and when they see a physical map it doesn't
look the least bit familiar; it just looks like visual gibberish to them.
I don't know if I can even be of help to people in the latter
category, since these mental habits seem to go so far back in most people.
(A friend of mine says this topic is a "whole other book.") Suffice
it to say that if you are map challenged then maybe you don't want a job
that involves frequently being sent to strange cities alone in the dead of
night to find your way.
{1.8.2} Become a Geography Fanatic
Okay, I know I'm already asking a lot of you, but I want to raise the bar again.
I feel an obligation to tell the honest truth about what has helped me
succeed, so here it is. What I'm really recommending is that you become
a geography fanatic. Learn the lay of the land. It tells a story.
Now, maybe you are thinking, "How will this help me do my job?"
Well, for example, almost every city in America has a river running through
it, or an inland seaway next to it, and the oldest core of downtown is right
next to that river or inlet, adjacent to the oldest railroad tracks in the
area. The Convention Center is usually in that downtown core.
I've seen this pattern from Boston to Bakersfield, and from Seattle to
Savannah, from Calgary to Columbus. When you're late to the trade show and
trying to find your way in an unfamiliar city, these patterns can come in
handy. Cities are normally laid out on a simple grid, with exceptions.
The exceptions are usually shaped by the water and railroad tracks,
and more recently freeways.
Think of this as a data-compression algorithm. When you learn your way around
Manhattan, you don't have to remember every street's location. It's a very
rational grid, from East 1st Street and 1st Avenue in the southeast corner
("the lower east side") to at least West 155th Street and 7th Avenue in the
northwest corner ("upper west side") about ten miles away before the grid
begins to unravel. The
exceptions are in the patterns of one-way streets, the diagonal Broadway
slicing through everything and tweaking the rational structure, the
short supply of bridges and tunnels off the island, and of course the
barrier of Central Park.
You also have to watch out for things like Grand Central Station,
er, Terminal
(railroad-related, you see?), which interrupts Park Ave., disrupting
an otherwise excellent northbound route.
So, clearly, the efficient storage of this information in your brain is
as a grid plus a list of exceptions.
(I have more to say about looking at land and figuring out
out its history in
section 3.7, "PREDICTING THE FUTURE.")
{1.8.3} Navigational Hazards
Recently I read someone in a newsgroup complaining that they had never
gotten correct directions from Mapquest.com [LINK_1-68],
"not even once." Well, I must say this has not been my experience, otherwise
I wouldn't recommend it. But then I realized I probably use it differently
than he does.
I treat Mapquest's directions the way I treat anyone's directions: as a
potentially useful theory about how to get there. (It occurs to me that
this is related to the way I treat technical documentation.) I always compare
them with a map, and I always treat them as needing debugging — especially
if they are produced by bots, or come from a source of unknown or low
credibility.
(It's a common stereotype that men won't ask directions. I'll ask,
but then I don't believe the answers.)
If it weren't for the hazards, navigation would be easy. A good
navigator needs to be able to detect and respond to the following hazards:
Often one-way streets are unlabeled or mislabeled.
Sometimes street names are missing, and occasionally
they are wrong. Sometimes gaps in a route will be shown that
don't exist, while gaps won't be shown that do exist.
Promotional maps designed to lead you a certain place are often
distorted and misleading. They want you to think that it's quick
and easy to get to them, but slow and complicated to get to their
competition. Sometimes the choice of scale leaves out
crucial details, especially if you are trying to use the map
to find something they are not promoting. For some reason this
problem is especially rampant in the vicinity of Walt Disney World
in Florida. I have maps of the tourist strips
in Lake Buena Vista, Kissimmee, and on International Drive in
Orlando that are unbelievably distorted and contradictory.
Often if you call a company for directions to their facility,
the person you talk to drives there every morning but isn't quite
capable of listing all of the turns they make and the names of
the streets they drive on. It may be that you have gotten
a map-challenged individual. Often telephone receptionists
are more auditory and feeling-oriented than visual in their
thinking. In a nice way, ask who gives the best directions.
Or, just try to reach someone in technical support or engineering
and then ask them for directions — they are more likely to be
visually oriented. (See
section 3.2, "UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE,"
for more information on sensory modalities.)
My experience is that people will give you directions on the
street even if they don't know how to get where you're going,
because they don't want to admit they don't know and look stupid.
In late 1992 the TV comedy show Saturday Night Live,
[LINK_1-69]
— with actress Glenn Close as the guest host —
had a sketch that
depicted a game show for New Englanders in which they competed at
giving driving directions, called "What's the Best Way?"
Three contestants, "Tony" (Adam Sandler), "Katy" (Glen Close)
and "Wayne" (Phil Hartman) typified three basic types of
direction-givers. Tony was an electrical contractor (he seemed
like a kid from Revere to my Boston friends), who was quick as
a whip, and knew how to get from anywhere to anywhere else.
He would've gotten a perfect score if he'd known about a shortcut
through the Bedford Mall parking lot. Katy was part owner of a
wicker shop who knew some good routes, but tended to go off on
tangents about where to find a good Bed and Breakfast, or a
farm where you can buy fresh Maine blueberries, and kept running out
of time. The only question she got right was "What's the best
way to get from Newport, Rhode Island to
Roxbury, Massachusetts?" She correctly replied, "What do you want
to go there for?" (See the on-line city guides at the
TravelingTechie.com web site
[LINK_0-1]
for why
to avoid Roxbury in the Boston area.) Wayne didn't have a clue.
He was an old retired guy whose hobbies included going out
on the porch and looking up at the stars. He offered
"You can't get there from here," for one of his answers, but
was wrong. The best he could muster for a route from
Quincy, Massachusetts to Bedford, New Hampshire was a shortcut
up Highway 14 following the Merrimac River which used to exist
"before the war."
The point is that you have to make spot judgments about the
quality of directions people give you. An electrical contractor
has to drive all over the place to unfamiliar areas.
A wicker shop part-owner usually drives only where she cares to.
And an old retired guy probably doesn't get out much any more.
Sometimes the map and directions used to be right,
but the territory has since changed. Buildings are demolished,
bridges wash out, new onramps are constructed, and sometimes
whole roads are moved a few dozen yards sideways to make
tricky intersections safer. You never know. Be on
the lookout. Don't be like those people who drove their Acura
off a dock where they were supposed to wait for a ferry because
their On-Star onboard navigation system told them to.
A compass can fail for two reasons. You can be in a place
like a steel-frame building or near a natural iron deposit
where the Earth's magnetic field is being disrupted, or you
can have a cheap compass whose weak magnet has been
demagnetized by exposure to heat. (This is why those
fluid-filled car magnets you suction-cup to your windshield
that show your current heading often last only a few months.)
Car dome lights are extremely dim. You don't usually notice
because your eyes adapt automatically, but the way they adapt
— by opening up your pupils to let in more light — reduces
your ability to focus on the little bitty writing you find
on most road maps. This is a good reason to carry a bright
Halogen flashlight. It's also a good reason to review your
route in a well-lit environment before you hit the road — spread
the map out on your hotel bed if you get a chance.
The GPS equivalent of this problem is screen letters too small
to read. Often when you zoom in they re-render in a smaller
font. Sometimes it plays to have a magnifier handy.
Streets frequently change name when crossing town lines,
or just for no reason, or when they are joined by
another road or highway. Be on the lookout for streets
named after Martin Luther King or César Chávez —
sometimes they were renamed quite recently, and your
directions may refer to the old name.
Sometimes named streets turn corners, or even sort of "start and
stop." I used to live on a street that started and stopped five times
in two miles. Nobody could find my house.
Since most addresses begin at the center of town and work their
way outward, when you cross a town line the numbers usually change,
and the direction of increase changes as well. This is
not such a big deal in rural areas, where towns are far apart,
but in interconnected suburbs or "megalopolis," this can
be very confusing. Signs announcing you are entering a new town
are usually small and easy to miss. Suddenly the numbers
on the buildings that were going 302, 314, 326, are now
going 4490, 4480, 4470, etc.
Usually the numbers are even on one side of the street and odd
on the other, and hopefully that won't change as well at a town line.
Minneapolis has three distinct Washington Avenues —
Southeast Washington Ave. on the northeast side of the Mississippi
River, South Washington Ave. on the southwest side of the river,
and Northeast Washington Ave. up in Dinkytown.
Sometimes there will be a Road, Drive, Blvd. and Place
all with the same name before the suffix.
Sometimes names are just very similar. In my
town we have Via Playa de Cortes, Corte Playa San Juan,
Playa Catalina and Corte Playa Catalina, all within a quarter
mile of each other in a twisty maze of upscale residential streets.
( Obviously the developer didn't want strangers finding it easy to
drive around here.) This brings
us to foreign languages — see
section 1.8.6, "A Note On Hawaii and Other Locales With Foreign Language Street Names"
below.
In a grid every pair of streets, if they cross at all, do so in
only one place. But undulating streets can cross in any number
of places. Did you know that Interstates 5 and 405 intersect
in six places? And yet I have found several press releases and
directions on the web that refer to "the I-5 and I-405 interchange"
as if there was only one. The six places are:
Often an east-west street will have an East
section and a West section, each numbered beginning from a
central north-south street with a name like Front, Main, or Central.
In downtown Los Angeles the dividing street is Broadway. If you
are looking for an address like 750 4th Street make sure you know
whether it's East or West. Otherwise you might end up at the
last minute discovering that you have to drive 15 blocks through
downtown traffic to get where you thought you already were.
(Of course this advice also applies to north-south streets too.)
{1.8.4} Mnemonics
If you travel a terrain frequently, you may reach a point where it's
worth the investment of effort to invent and memorize a mnemonic
for street names. I got this idea from my wife's great aunt.
She grew up in the 1930s near downtown Los Angeles, and her
mother would let her walk downtown alone for a day trip. (Can you
imagine such a world, where a little girl all alone was safe in
downtown Los Angeles?) But first, her mother made her memorize the
mnemonic below, of north-south streets in the downtown area.
(Most of the east-west streets are numbered.)
Here is a silly mnemonic for remembering them:
Los Angeles is the
main
spring to
Broadway.
This little ditty has been of immeasurable value to me,
saving me countless hours of confusion and frustration.
So ultimately I decided to try my hand at it. One time I was
stuck in traffic, actually stopped for about half an hour,
on the I-605 southbound near the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
(People normally think of LA as being north of OC, but in fact it is more
west than north, and the county line runs north-south for most of its
length.) I had noticed on may occasions that almost all of the east-west
streets changed names upon crossing the county line. I attributed this
to the fact that the county line was close to the San Gabriel River,
which flows down from the San Gabriel Mountains south to the
ocean near Long Beach, and originally there had been few if any river
crossings, so streets just grew from both sides. When they were eventually
connected with bridges they already had different names in each county.
The most obvious artifact of this is that the exit signs on I-605 south
all have pairs of streets: Del Amo / La Palma, Carson / Lincoln, etc.
Sitting there stuck in traffic I decided to make up a mnemonic for this
boundary. (The major streets in the LA basin follow a 1/2-mile grid,
with minor streets between them. I concentrated only on the grid streets.)
Here is what I came up with:
Here is a silly mnemonic for remembering them:
South of
Orangethorpe, where the
ammo meets the
palm, Kit
Carson shot Abe
Lincoln with a
Wardlow
ball. When it's
spring-time in
Cerritos a
willow weeps on
Katella.
By the time the traffic began to move I had both created and memorized the
mnemonic, and I've never forgotten it since. It also has saved me countless
hours of confusion and frustration.
Then, a few years later, I found myself working a trade show in San Francisco
without a rental car, but they had put us up at the swank Westin Saint Francis
Hotel across from Union Square, on Powell at Geary. As it worked out I had
to walk from Moscone Center (the convention center) to the hotel with my
luggage. I thought I knew the way, but without a San Francisco map I ended
up going about four blocks in the wrong direction before turning around and
retracing my steps. I realized then that I could use a mnemonic for the
north-south streets north of Market Street. This is what I came up with later
in my room:
Here is a silly mnemonic for remembering them:
They
drummed it into me:
Dave is in
front of a few
batterie
s and some
Montgomery Ward tires.
Unfortunately, this one is so long that it doesn't seem to stick in my mind.
But I am able to "re-memorize" it every time I go to San Francisco,
and it has been of great value as well.
So whenever you find yourself looking up the same streets on a map
again and again, consider a mnemonic. (Of course they are also
useful in other ways. See
section 2.5.5: "Memory Improvement"
for more on mnemonics.)
{1.8.5} Rehearse the Route if You Can
This is one of my best secrets. It may seem like a pain in neck
at first, but after a while as your company and its customer base mature you
will find that you visit the same places over and over more frequently,
and it become less of a chore. The procedure is, if you are visiting
a prospect or customer site for the first time, and have no one to guide you,
then arrange to fly in early the evening before and drive over after dinner.
Find out the "gotchas" in the directions when you have plenty of time.
While you're at it, play with the car radio and see if you can figure out
which station (probably on the AM band) will have morning traffic reports,
or ask a local. If the facility is far from your hotel or through a heavily
trafficked area (how did you let that happen?), pick a place near
the site for breakfast, and target showing up early enough to eat there.
(This of course adds slack.) This activity also contributes to your
goal of staying out of trouble in the evening.
Encryption
Strong computational magic hides sensitive data from prying eyes.
A blindfolded man strands in a sea of encrypted text; he blindly gropes, but
touches nothing. Stealth, caution, jealousy, secrecy. Reverse: subterfuge,
ignorance.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.9} THE BIG EVENT
You made it. You're there. The prospect or customer site,
seminar or trade show that was the main object of your trip.
Now what? If you came without equipment — and you're not
here to demo or write code using their equipment — your job is
to listen and learn, answer questions and clear up
confusions. And otherwise stay out of the way.
If you've come with equipment or software, then it's almost Showtime.
{1.9.1} Continue to Preserve Slack
If you are working a trade show, go directly to the convention
center as soon a security will let you in. Your biggest concern
is, where are the boxes of equipment? Somebody was supposed to ship them here,
and then the "drayage" people (usually GES, who used to be Greyhound
Exhibition Services until they decided it sounded too low-rent) are
going to deliver them to your booth. You have a copy of the shipping
information, right? You know who to call if they don't show up, right?
It's all in your file for this trip, which is in your portfolio, which
is your laptop bag, which you carried on the plane and have with
you right now. Right?
Once the boxes arrive, take everything out and label the empties for
pickup by drayage. If you mess this up you will be in big, big
trouble a few days from now when you want to tear down and pack up.
Then get the demo running. Don't worry yet about putting the computers
where they belong or hiding the cables or cleaning the screens. Assemble
the computers willy nilly, boot them, and bring up the demos. See them
working. Confirm that all mice, keyboards, hard drives, monitors and sound
cards — if you use them — are working. Now you know you don't need
help from your support people. Call them and let them know they can go
to lunch.
Now you can make it look nice. Figure out the booth layout if it isn't
standard. If marketing people are there, get them involved. Help
rearrange monitors, hide cables, clean screens, and lay out literature.
Until all this is done, don't go to lunch. If someone is pressing to
go (someone obviously nonessential), let them. Ask them to bring you
something back. The same rule applies if you are installing software
or a demo on prospects' or customers' computers. Let the salesperson
take the buyer to lunch, while you stay with the local IT person,
and have them bring you something back.
{1.9.2} Teamwork
A lot of the steps of business travel work much, much better with just
two people instead of one. I've mentioned previously how this helps
when flying, taking turns guarding the luggage. It also works very well
at booth setup and tear-down. If you're waiting for an electrician (or
someone like them), one person can go make inquiries while the other
continues to wait, linked by cell phones (which everyone in business must
have nowadays). The largest, heaviest computers can be backbreaking
for one person to lift, but fairly easy for two. Getting
heavy equipment to seat correctly when your loading it back into foam
cases is a lot easier with two — one to lower and one to aim. And
sometimes a second pair of eyes is just what you need to figure out
do-it-yourself booth assembly and disassembly.
After the booth is set up send a gopher out to find a sandwich shop and
bring back a menu, if you haven't already been able to handle this. (Or
have them phone in the menu if time is short.) Have everyone place
orders and send the gopher back to bring lunch around 11:00 AM.
This will allow your people to find somewhere to sit down
(very important) and enjoy a leisurely, nutritious lunch, instead of
spending their whole break time waiting in line for overpriced
low-quality convention center food, or walking blocks away to wait at
a lunch counter or such. Employee time (and morale) is valuable at trade
shows, and this plan has a great return on investment.
If you don't already have any, this is also a good time to take photos
of the booth, for two uses: pack them in the crates to show others
how an assembled booth should look, and stick a set to the fridge
at headquarters so the non-traveling employees can see how good your
booth looks, as well as be reminded that people actually go out every day
and sell this stuff with a straight face. (Sometime that fact is a very
distant abstraction to engineers, for example.)
This is also your last chance to give demo-givers a chance to rehearse
without an audience, if you've already trained them in the staging area
at headquarters. If you haven't, or you have field people coming
in who haven't seen the new demo, this is the first chance they've
had to get trained.
I don't understand why this is such a blind spot to so many (nontechnical)
marketing people. Maybe it's because in the early days of a startup the
demos are often not finished and debugged until minutes before the show
starts, and the technical people just have to wing it somehow, and so
marketing gets used to them winging it. Maybe it's because the techies
keep making it look easy. But in fact, we don't have the ability to absorb
this stuff by osmosis from the keyboard — we actually have to be taught.
Allowing every demo-giver a chance to train, rehearse and ask questions is
another way of reducing risk and increasing polish. (When this stunt
is pulled by a technical person: not training people on new demos and
putting them in situations where they have to demo anyway, it is
clear evidence of coworker sabotage, trying to hoard knowledge and make
others look bad. I think it's a good enough reason to fire the
perpetrator.)
Remember that each department participating in a trade show event has
different goals. Marketing to wants garner leads (which sales is always
bugging them to do), get out the marketing message (and control its
dissemination to the press), do competitive and industry research, do
market research, and (hopefully, post dot-com crash) control costs.
Sales wants to get leads, and bring in prospects to advance the sales
process. The local sales rep, who should be all over your booth if
they've got any sense, will be trying to grab any hot local leads right away.
Business development will be looking for the right companies to
be partnership and reseller candidates. Make sure you know what
each group is looking for, and know where to direct visitors to your
booth. Make sure the press talks only to the press liaison!
You have no idea how much hot water you can get into chatting with
a reporter — everything is on the record to them, and if they garble
or exaggerate what you say, that's your problem; they got their story.
Another way to increase teamwork at a show is to dispense with a schedule
for working the booth and just have two of each job type: two executives,
two press liaisons, two demo-givers, two product marketing people, two
sales people, two booth receptionists, etc. Allow each person
to work out with their partner what
their schedule is going to be, as long as the post is covered during
the entire show. (If someone is looking for a particular individual,
reach them by cell phone.) This way folks can arrange to attend seminars,
panels, competitor's demos, lunch dates with prospects, etc., without
having to go through a central booth scheduler.
{1.9.3} Neatness Counts
If you are giving a technical seminar, keep your workstation area clean
and don't eat there. If you have to eat in the seminar room pull up
a chair and do it in the back.
If at a trade show, check your booth over for clutter frequently.
Hide anything that you don't need in sight. Get rid of scraps, business
cards, napkins, anything that doesn't contribute to a professional image.
Dust horizontal surfaces every day, and clean your screens again.
Dirt unconsciously repulses people.
It only takes one orange peel or coffee ring to make a trade show
booth look like a rat's nest. That's why I think it's a perfectly
reasonable to have a rule against eating or drinking anything except
clear water in the booth. If you use the buddy method I described above,
everyone should have adequate food breaks to able to find a place to chill
out and eat something. Look for an exhibitor's lounge, or a hospitality
suite that your company is invited to. (Advertising and PR firms sometimes
sponsor these.) Or just go to the food service, there are usually a lot of
big round tables and chairs set out.
If something is spilled on your booth carpet (like an iced latte), dilute it
immediately with a whole lot of water, then blot with paper towels, and repeat
until the color is gone.
Think about what you'd do if the iced latte was spilled on you.
(Don't laugh.) Is your hotel in the convention center complex?
If not, is your car parked in a lot nearby? It should have spare clothes
hanging in it. If you don't have a car either, maybe you should just bring
a garment bag to the show. Of course there won't be room at the booth, but
I can't recall a show that didn't have bag check. Remember to expense it.
(I'll have more to say about cleanliness in
section 3.3.1, "Your Body.")
{1.9.4} Get the Most from the Event
Remember that it has cost your company a lot of money — way too much money —
to exhibit at this show, get this booth and fly you all in and put you up.
Remember also
that you can rest later, in fact you may get too much rest, and have too
much time on your hands later tonight. But for now, stay focused.
Stay alert. Treat each new person you meet as the chance to make that big
sale that puts the company on the map, and makes you a hero because you were
the first person to talk to them.
Remember that a lead isn't just someone who wandered by your booth and
said, "So what do you do?" or wanted a free tchotchke.
What makes them a lead is when, after an explanation and/or demo, you
ask, "Do you think you have a use for this?" and they say, "Yes."
Normally these days you capture leads by "swiping" a card with a magnetic
strip, or laser scanning a bar code, and a little printer prints out a
paper tape of the names and contact into. I've found that you should
always capture information about hot leads on the paper. Use a code like
H for hot, W for warm and C for cold. (Every time I've seen 1, 2 and 3
used, people got confused about whether 1 or 3 was hot.) Also, if
they mentioned a need or a time frame, jot that down, and always include
your initials. That helps the person who follows up, if they need more
information, and it also helps you get credit.
How do you recognize a hot lead? They usually come in two varieties:
the assistant, who is trying to take in a the whole show in a
hurry, has specific questions, often has a pad or clipboard and is
writing things down, and is sometimes wearing conservative business wear
with sneakers or other comfortable shoes; and the executive,
who is asking lots of specific questions about his or her company's
pain points, and the specific capabilities of your product in solving them,
and usually is rather casually dressed — unless they work for a large
company, then they're in a gray suit with white shirt and tie, or
equivalent conservative business wear for women.
A third category is the technical recommender, often with beard (only
men, of course), backpack, and/or sandals, who has lots of questions
about your technology and tools but very little that relates to his or her
company's pain points — they are only a "warm" lead. Techies love these
kind of prospects because they can relate to them, but they are usually
not a decision maker, and you ultimately need to get them to lead you to
the decision makers.
It is very important that you do not shut down early, even if the show
is dead. I have both positive and negative confirmation of this.
On the positive side, at a military technology show in Monterey
(home of the Naval Postgraduate School) everybody else started powering off
about half an hour before the scheduled end of the show because there
hadn't been a prospect all afternoon. (It turned out most of the military
buyers and decision makers were in a seminar elsewhere in the complex,
helping to explain a new budgeting procedure to vendor representatives.)
At about one minute until the end of the show, the Admiral everyone wanted
to talk to showed up. He was the senior ranking officer at this conference,
and could practically mandate (or blackball) a product's use by the Navy,
and the only demo still live for him to see was ours. We ended up staying
late another half hour, but — hey! — this was why we came to this show,
to have a shot at this guy.
The negative example happened some years earlier, before I'd learned this
lesson. We were giving a seminar in southern New Mexico, near White
Sands Missile Range, with a mini-supercomputer demo. Almost nobody showed up.
We called and confirmed there was an earlier flight out, and if we shut
down 15 minutes early we could get home that night instead of the next
morning. As an added complication, our mini-supercomputer took an agonizingly
long 25 minutes to reboot. We shut down, and a few minutes later a guy
walked in who had driven down from Albuquerque, about ninety minutes
away. We weren't willing to revise our plans (the salesperson made
that call) and the prospect left annoyed — he'd driven three hours round
trip for nothing. If we'd stayed "up" until the published ending time,
he would've gotten his demo, and we might still have made the early flight.
(Needless to say this prospect never bought from us.)
{1.9.5} Whatever It Takes
Sometimes what you thought would be enough isn't enough, and you face an
apparently unsolvable problem, but you have to solve it anyway.
This is when you have to be resourceful. Draw inspiration from tales
of others who have been successful in the face of adversity. Find a way.
Here are a few tales to add to your inspiration pool:
Our VP of marketing stayed behind alone at a trade
show in New York City to crate up the computers.
Usually folks from pre-sales
and/or marketing communications would be doing this,
but he had meetings in the city the next day and volunteered
to do it. This turned out to be the time the empty
crates never showed up. It was getting later and later
and all his inquiries were getting nowhere, they just kept
telling him to be patient, and he still had
three tower computers with 17 inch monitors to ship back to the west
coast. Finally he went begging among the few other vendors
who were still in the hall, and managed to rustle up six
cardboard boxes of the wrong size, and a bunch of odds and
ends of foam and packing materials. He crammed everything
into the boxes and taped them up like war casualties.
Miraculously everything arrived in good condition with all parts.
The empty crates arrived three weeks later.
This happened to me. I got another employee to help me crate
up our mini-supercomputer at a trade show at an Arizona university,
and then all I had left to do was wheel it over to the freight
elevator, take it down one floor, and wheel it out the loading
dock onto the bed of my parked rental truck, drive the truck to
the air freight office, and they would take it from there.
So I told the other employee he could go. Then I found out the
freight elevator was out of order. (It had been fine coming in
to the show.) The only way out was to wheel my crate down a
cobblestone ramp that had river stones about the size of my
crate's caster wheels. It was a bu-bu-bu-bu-bumpy ride.
I'd brought my truck around first. (I figured nobody was going
to go to the bother of wheeling the crate down the bumpy ramp
while I was gone just to steal the computer; it had a list price
of about $250,000 but it would've been impossible to fence.)
So here I was on the street with the computer, and the truck
bed was about forty inches off the pavement — the height of a
loading dock. The computer was as big as a refrigerator; with
its wooden crate it weighed twice what I did. How was I going
to bench press this thing up into the truck?
I looked around, and saw college students leaving classes and
walking across a lawn and brick quad. I began to shout, "Free
beer! Free beer over here! Come get your free beer!" until I
had a crowd of students. I picked the eight beefiest-looking
guys and offered them $5 a piece ("beer money for your frat or
dorm") for them to help me get the crate into the truck. It was
a piece of cake. I supervised. They boosted it with ease.
I spent $40 in sixty seconds, but you can be sure I expensed it,
and it made a great story. (This also illustrates why you should
carry plenty of cash, in small bills.)
This is part of the heritage of America's moon program, from
the book
Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon (1992) by Mike Gray [ISBN/ASIN: 014023280X].
Harrison Storms was the head of North American Aviation's bid
to build the Apollo moon capsules at their new Space and
Information Systems Division in Downey, CA. He was competing against
several much larger companies, and he hadn't gotten the money
he wanted from his management to do the bid right, so he spent
over as million dollars of unauthorized money, but did it within
30 days of the final proposal so that the North American accountants
wouldn't catch it yet. This was a contract he was betting his
career they would win — they would probably only fire him if
they didn't win it. When the time came to present his proposal
slides to NASA at a meeting in Virginia, he discovered that the
plug on the slide projector he'd brought from California wouldn't
fit the wall socket in the meeting room. He could've asked for
more time, but he didn't want to do anything that hinted of a
reduced technical competence compared to his competition.
Unbeknownst to NASA at the time, under cover of darkness he
whipped out his pocket knife,
sliced off the plug, and jammed the bare wires into the wall
socket just in time to give his presentation.
Marketeer of Disks
Three days to go until COMDEX and the Big Product Launch, yet no
beta version of the Product from engineering. No docs or manuals, either.
Is that a smile, or is she clenching her teeth to keep from screaming?
Regardless, she must create a press release and dog-and-pony show. Thank goodness
for her degree in creative writing. Who says that a Liberal Arts education is wasted in
the Silicon Valley? Clutch performance, tap-dancing under pressure. Reversed: Your cover
is about to be blown.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.10} PSY/OPS
The US Army uses the term "psy/ops" to describe "psychological operations,"
designed to either demoralize an enemy or convince him or her to change their
ideology and support us, the good guys.
I have borrowed it as a mental shorthand for operations I engage
in to re-moralize myself, and strengthen my resolve and commitment.
I distinguish this from "goofing off" in that I do it
on my own time, and after I have kept my commitments,
and my intention is to be a better employee with more stamina.
A key distinction is that a high-tech business is a marathon, not a sprint.
Sometime you have to pace yourself, because you're going to have to keep
going and going, like the Energizer Bunny in the battery commercials.
Below are some specific tips on recharging, to stay on your game.
Four of Cubicles
Don't forget: on the cubicle farm, they're squeezing money
out of your brain. What happens if they squeeze too hard? Burnout,
over-work. Reversed: reflection, insight.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.10.1} Be Where You Are
Twice in the late 1980s I had virtually the same
The Twilight Zone (1960, TV show) [ASIN: B0000714AP]
type of
experience during a business trip. I drove into a city late, after 1:00 AM,
checked into a motel, came into my room exhausted and turned on the TV and
flopped on the bed, where I fell asleep fully clothed; I even had my shoes on.
About 2:00 AM I woke up, and opened my eyes. An LA station was on the TV. But
I lived in Los Angeles County! Why was I in a motel? I couldn't remember where
I was for a moment. Then it came back to me. I had an 8:00 AM appointment
in Santa Barbara, so I had driven in and gotten a motel room the night before.
It was two hours north along the Pacific coast at night (much more during
morning traffic), but still line-of-sight for the LA TV stations.
Less than a month later I drove into another city late, after 1:00 AM,
checked into another motel, came into my room exhausted and turned on the TV
and flopped on the bed again, where I fell asleep fully clothed again; again
I had my shoes on. About 2:00 AM I woke up, as before, and opened my eyes.
An LA station was on the TV again. But I wasn't in Santa Barbara. Why was
I in another motel? I couldn't remember where I was for a moment. Then it
came back to me. I had an 8:00 AM appointment in San Diego,
so I had driven in as before and gotten a motel room the night before.
It was two hours south along the Pacific coast at night (much more during morning traffic),
but still line-of-sight for the LA TV stations.
After that second trip I made a resolution to take steps to be more
aware of where I was on these trips. Here's what I came up with:
On the other extreme,
Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, an inveterate adventurer,
describes in his autobiographical
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character (1985) [ISBN/ASIN: 0393316041]
how he went to Tokyo for a
scientific conference, and was placed in an American-style hotel,
designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and with American amenities.
He asked to be moved to a Japanese-style hotel, so he could
really experience Japan. "I'm afraid that is impossible, Professor
Feynman," his Japanese host told him. He insisted. "Why do you
want to go to a Japanese-style hotel?" he was asked.
"Because in this hotel, I don't feel like I'm in Japan."
"Japanese hotels are no good. You have to sleep on the floor."
"That's what I want. I want to see how it is."
"And there are no chairs — you sit on the floor at the table."
"It's OK. That will be delightful. That is what I'm looking for."
Finally he got his wish, and experienced the daily massages,
boiling hot baths and raw fish sushi of a traditional Japanese hotel.
I find I am somewhere in between these extremes, but that my tolerance
for and craving of novelty fluctuates depending on whether I am
stressed (wanting low novelty) or bored (wanting high novelty).
Learn to vary the novelty in your travels to match your needs.
{1.10.2} Good Deeds
I'm not talking about great deeds here, more like enlightened
self-interest. Focusing on others for a change is a tonic against
self-absorption and the bratty, needy, depressed state it can lead to.
I have a queue of things I'm always looking to do for others —
not random strangers (though it's certainly OK to be nice to them too)
but people who do nice things for me a lot.
These include:
{1.10.3} Appreciate Beauty
From time to time you will come upon beauty in your travels.
Be sure to appreciate it. I've never been that keen on smelling the
roses, but I'm not a very olfactory person. I sure love to look
at the roses, though. I also appreciate:
Most of us seldom buy paintings or sculptures, and only now and then
read a book of poems, or more likely a novel, but one form
of art that is well-accepted and well-funded by just about
everyone in our culture is music. We allow ourselves to spend
time and money on music simply to bring us pleasure, when this is
often not a good enough reason in other arts.
So I take advantage of this. I make CDs, which is very easy to
do these days, of the music I like, and take a selection of them
with me on trips. In working on this book I came up with the following
list of songs that I find extremely beautiful even after repeated listening:
I made a mix of them, as listed, and I find it delightful to listen
to. (Some of my friends really like it too.) Your mileage may vary (YMMV).
Try making a CD or music player mix of the music you find most
beautiful.
{1.10.4} A Change Is As Good As a Rest
I have observed that people who go on vacation expecting it to
carefree and devoid of responsibility are risking a very bad time.
What usually happens for me on vacation is that I trade in
my everyday problems for a whole new and unusual set. And that's
OK. It works for me.
Working backwards from this realization I find that I often
don't need a rest as much as I think, if I can just trade in my problems
for a different set for a while. Sometimes if I work on a totally different
project it refreshes me.
{1.10.5} The Fine Art of the Microvacation
I define a microvacation as a short side trip, measured in minutes
typically, that provides a little burst of Rest and Relaxation (R&R)
and stress reduction. Do this stuff after you've checked voice mail
and returned all calls, phoned everybody you need to reach who may be
leaving work for the day in their time zone, and otherwise proactively gotten
your job done. (Or you can do some of the above during some of the below.)
Typically I go in for this stuff after a trade show or site visit, on the
homeward-bound leg of the trip. Just don't use the microvacation as a way
to avoid unpleasant tasks — then it won't work as advertised.
Here are a few microvacations that work for me:
Many tourist town airports have theme gift shops from their
destination resorts or attractions; Orlando International (MCO)
has stores from Disney, Sea World and Universal Studios, San Diego
(SAN) has a Sea World store, etc., also concessionaires will
have theme businesses relating to the general character of the
region, such as the barbecue restaurants of Memphis, Phoenix's
southwestern clothing shops, Boston's "Cheers" bar, Albuquerque's
chili pepper and hot sauce shops, etc. These interiors are designed by
professional commercial artists, many with great talent, to
seduce you into relaxing and spending money. I like to enjoy
them for the aesthetic qualities of their environments, almost as
if they were museums. (Sometimes I spend money, too.)
Often my travels have taken me to places, many of them
out-of-the-way places, whose
populations seemed to have higher-than average education levels,
especially where there are national labs (Los Alamos,
New Mexico, Richland, Washington, and Idaho Falls, for example)
or University research labs (Pasadena, California,
Tucson, Arizona and Provo,
Utah, for example) or military research labs (Ridgecrest, California
and Fort Huachuca, Arizona, for example); in every case I found
several new and used bookstores full of extremely intriguing
books. This is your chance to do some specialized market research
on "what are the leading edge smart people reading right now?"
I have found some wondrous books this way, including
Future Magic (1988) by Robert L. Forward [ISBN/ASIN: 0380898144],
Dynamics: The Geometry of Behavior (1983) by Ralph Abraham, et. al. [ISBN/ASIN: 0201567172]
and
Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996) by Hafner and Lyon [ISBN/ASIN: 0684832674].
I've
also had some great conversations with some very interesting people.
(For more on the value of bookstores see
section 3.5.1, "Study the Present." )
Often the convention center is in the downtown core next to
some great museums. I usually don't have the time to take
them in, and it seems like a waste of money to buy an admission
and just spend a few minutes, but most large museums — whether
art, science, history, or whatever — have a gift shop/bookstore
attached, and admission is free. An art museum bookstore will
sometimes have the catalog of the current exhibition for sale;
just flip through it, and voilà, instant art show!
I have also found that science museums have some of the best
educational toys (see the Tech in San Jose, the Reuben H. Fleet
Science Center in San Diego, and the Lawrence Hall of Science in
Berkeley.)
I have found that taking an amateur interest in architectural
history has greatly enhanced my enjoyment of business travel,
since I was seeing a lot of buildings anyway. Getting background
from books like:
has made my ability to see buildings more critically refined.
I was overjoyed when I discovered that I can now sometimes
recognize a building's architect on sight, such as:
(Note that every case I did not seek out the building, I just
happened to be passing by.)
If I found out I was taking a trip to Charlotte, North Carolina —
to semi-randomly pick a location — I would go on the web and search
for "history architecture Charlotte" and see what I got.
(In fact, I just tried this, and came up with a
Charlotte Uptown Historical Walking Tour [LINK_1-119].) Then I'd print
out my findings and bring them along, in case I got a chance
use them.
If there's a scenic route, take it when you don't have time pressure.
Look for the old road by the river, or the beach route, or a route
that follows railroad tracks, or has the words "railroad" or
"telegraph" or "electric" or "old highway" in the name. On the
interstate, look for "business route," "scenic" and "national
historic highway" designations. (Always check your map to make
sure it goes where you think it does.)
Sometimes, if I'm feeling a little urban claustrophobia,
I just like to "get out of town." Where's the edge?
Is there a beltway or perimeter road I can use to circumnavigate?
Where's the highest point in town? Is there a view?
Often the highest point in town is on the uphill edge of town,
and takes you into the most expensive residential neighborhood in
the area. This is true in Tucson and San Antonio, for example.
I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again,
but it's a nice microvacation to try to locate the oldest building,
mill, church, train station, dam or waterworks in the area.
See if you can figure out why this place is here.
There was a nearly yearlong period when I had to commute
home from Santa Monica to Lakewood, California five days a week,
and when I left the office — even after working late — traffic
was usually abysmal.
Anything I could do to stall for time would reduce the time
I would spend in stress-inducing bumper-to-bumper driving,
especially on Fridays, and extra-especially on a Friday before
a three-day weekend, when my hour's drive could expand to
two and a half hours.
Since this was before I was a parent, and my wife also worked
into the early evening, I went ahead and stalled frequently.
I embarked upon a project to trace the historic route of one of
the electric trolley lines that connected Santa Monica to downtown
Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s: the Los Angeles railroad.
(These trolleys were given a new burst of fame when they were
featured in the 1988 movie,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?[ASIN: B00007AJGH].) Each day I
explored a mile or two of rail bed, which involved a zigzag route in
and out of a lot of dead-end streets, but it was fascinating, and
enriched my appreciation of the LA area.
{1.10.6} The Tandem Business/Vacation Trip
When I'm trying to convince people that business travel is no picnic,
I tell them that it's sometimes like taking a tour of the great
restaurants of Europe, and seeing people eating all this gourmet food,
but not being able to taste any yourself.
That's what it feels like going to Las Vegas but not seeing a show, going
to Orlando but not visiting a theme park, going to New York but not
taking in a Broadway play, going to Minnesota but not paddling a canoe,
going to Snowbird but not skiing, going to San Francisco but not riding
the cable cars, and so on.
But sometimes you have to break down and "taste the food,"
just avoid feeling excessively deprived. This is when you
cash in your frequent flier miles and vacation days, and
arrange a combination business and pleasure trip, and bring
your loved one(s) along.
There are two ways to do this: have them with you during
the business portion of the trip (concurrent) or have them
join you before or after the business potion (overlapping).
Concurrent is harder to pull off, and I recommend
it only for the seasoned business travel who is a senior
member of the corporate team, since it risks affecting your job performance
and coworkers more. If you do take this approach, be sure to attend any
team dinners that are scheduled — they're part of the job.
Overlapping is easier, especially
if your loved ones join you after an event is over and almost no-one knows
they've come. (Of course you don't want to lie if asked directly, but just don't brag about what a great time you'll be having.)
In either case what you want to do is to minimize coworker envy
(which is only natural if they perceive that you are playing while
they are working). The side trip should have either zero impact on your
performance, or if your coworkers all know about it,
an obvious net positive, like you being able to run an extra
after-show errand for the company or for another employee, or
one of your loved ones bringing lunch for the team or helping with trade-show
tear-down and packing.
Most airlines offer steep discounts for a Saturday stayover with three
weeks advance purchase. What they really want to do is charge a different
price for tourists, who can afford to be picky if and when they go, and
the business travelers, who have to go at a certain time.
But legally they can't do that, so they try to catch the profile of a
business traveler, which is weekday-only, short notice.
So plan ahead and get those cheaper rates for you, and anybody else in
your party you don't have enough frequent flier miles to send for free.
Begin before the trip by talking to your boss, and to the person
in accounting responsible for expense guidelines. Tell them
what you want to do, tell them there will be zero adverse
impact on cost and your job performance, and make sure
they approve what you're doing. Get clear on
what they're paying for. If you rent a car at a weekly rate
and use four days for business and three for vacation, are
they paying 4/7? If you save the company a bunch of money on
airfare by doing a Saturday stayover, will they pay for your
extra hotel nights? Confirm everything by email.
Second, tell others on a need-to-know basis. The person in your company
managing the trade show booth (usually in Marketing Communications, or
"Mar-Comm" for short) needs to know, in case of an emergency or change
in plans.
But don't ever put someone in a position of thinking they are being
a killjoy by asking you to do extra work. You shouldn't expect any
special treatment just because you brought your family. Let your
coworkers know
you are committed to getting the job done first. And make sure your
family knows that you may have to pre-empt them. If they can't deal with
that, maybe the tandem business/vacation trip isn't right for your situation.
After all, you can always take a separate vacation and make them the
highest priority. (And I recommend you do that on occasion as well,
for a change, even if the tandem business/vacation trip works well for
you.)
Once you're off on your own, keep checking email and voicemail.
Some other time, you can take a vacation where you go white water
rafting (or something else remote) and are unreachable for a few days,
which is good to do now and then, but this kind of trip requires that
you keep in touch. What if someone has an urgent question about one
of those hot leads you initialed on the show floor, or how the
computers were shipped to the next event?
Otherwise, have a great time. That's the whole point. I find that
going to a beach or water park very early in the vacation portion
of the trip and hurling myself into the water helps me achieve
"escape velocity."
{1.10.7} The Value of Literature When You Are Stranded
Within the shadow of the ship
O happy living things ! no tongue
The self-same moment I could pray ;
I have found biographies a great read when I want to be inspired,
and histories of technology when I want to see the big
picture, and math puzzle books when I want to be mentally challenged.
and self-help books when I want to grow in my career. But when I'm
trapped somewhere — a flight delayed, or a ride late, or a tow truck
on the way — there's nothing better than literature. I'm not sure why.
Tuck away a copy of any of these:
If you can find one of the small editions, just a few inches on a side,
and slip it into your laptop bag, it can just be just the thing.
Of course, your first use of "found" time should be to get some extra
work done. Start composing emails you need to send as a result of your
trip, or get to work on your expense report. But when the 15-minute delay
expands to half an hour, then to an hour, then to two hours, and you feel
as if your head is going to explode, that's when to pull out the literature.
A little goes a long way. I still haven't finished reading Walden
after carrying it around for fifteen years, but it has saved
my psyche on many an occasion.
The Network
A packet flies through a yellow network - every node attached
to every other node - against an infinite sea of bits. Productivity,
understanding, coordination of effort, unity. Without the network
everything stops, and chaos reigns. Reversed: confusion, misunderstanding,
loss of control.
Silicon Valley Tarot
{1.11} AFTER YOU GET BACK
After a good night's sleep you once again return to the office. A whole
new set of urgencies and interruptions vie for your attention.
But wait! You're actually not done with the trip yet.
{1.11.1} Brush Your Horse, Tend To Your Gear
As a boy, I used to love spending Sunday evening with my family in front
of the (black and white) television, watching an hour of Walt Disney's
Disneyland, which later became Walt Disney's Wonderful World of
Color. A favorite two-part
episode was The Horsemasters (first airdate 10/01/61),
the story of a group of teenagers coming of age at an English
boarding school specializing in horsemanship. In one stirring scene a group
of students, roused to action by Danny (played by Tommy Kirk),
have caught a neighbor's long-loose stallion in a dramatic ride, and they
encounter their teacher Miss Hale (Janet Munro) upon their return.
Danny brags about the students' accomplishment, expecting that she'll
be pleased. Instead Miss Hale delivers a blistering tongue-lashing,
scolding them for taking their horses out without permission,
and then only giving the animals water and a quick rubdown after a hard
ride. She asks rhetorically if the horses have ever once let the
students down, and points out that the horses are totally dependent
upon them for care, and so should be their first responsibility.
She closes her diatribe with a punishment of 16 black marks (in a
highly competitive contest with the another school group) and assigning
them extra stable-cleaning chores during their "free" time.
Well, this made quite an impression on me.
To this day I use the expression "brush your horse" to refer to taking
care of your equipment after a trip. If you are to become a "techmaster,"
oh grasshopper, you must learn to attend to the needs of your gizmos, on
which you depend.
Unpack everything. Test everything. Clean anything dirty.
What about that video connector that had trouble staying on,
or that screw on the monitor stand that was stripped,
or that crate hinge that was coming loose? It may take
you several trips to the hardware store to find what you need, so start
soon, while you're not in a hurry. Anything getting flaky?
Order a replacement. Trade show and demo equipment has to be the
best stuff you can get (your competition's probably is), or people
will think your company is about to go under, and won't want to risk buying
from you.
{1.11.2} Follow Up
You should have come away from your trip with a list of tasks.
Transfer them to your time management tool (whatever you use)
and get started on them.
In addition, be sure to attend to the following:
Sometime it's worth coming in for a few hours on Sunday (or working
on it at home), just to get this stuff done so you can start Monday
morning on all the new urgent tasks.
{1.11.3} Learn from Failures
If something went wrong and it was your fault, set your ego
aside and soul-search. What could you have done better? Maybe it's
time for a new Road Rule.
If several people helped cause something to go wrong, maybe it's
time for a meeting. Don't try to affix blame (that's management's
job come review time), just concentrate on fixing the system.
What procedures and/or protocols could help you
avoid similar problems in the future?
If you sincerely believe problems were caused by management misjudgment,
communicate that as well, privately, not in an email or voicemail but on the
phone or in person (preferred). Make sure they know you are only trying to
help with constructive criticism. Go lightly — chances are they already
know they made a mistake. Allow them to save face. If you aren't
willing to do this, your company isn't getting its money's worth from you,
because you aren't sharing your good judgment, which they are renting from
you. If managers in your company consistently reject such feedback or treat
you with hostility when you offer it, this is a sign that they are doomed,
and you need to move on.
But once you have shared your concerns, let it go. If they ignore your
advice, that's okay. They got your feedback, and they may know of other
factors you don't. Keep doing a good job in your sphere of responsibility,
and trust them to do theirs. (If you find that you sincerely don't trust
them, this is another warning sign that you are in the wrong job.)
{1.11.4} Savor the Victories
Learn to enjoy winning. It's better than losing. (Who said that?
Probably some coach.) Part of the payoff of winning is getting to tell
stories about it. (I don't recommend you tell stories about losing, as
a rule. If you must, have it be a temporary setback on the way to a bigger
win.) And here's a few stories about winning now.
#1 — six weeks of "ball-busting" and for what?
Right at the start of my first full-time pre-sales job
(job H),
helping to sell mini-supercomputers, we got a FORTRAN benchmark program
from a guy at a small aerospace research company up the coast from LA.
I won't tell you his name, but years later I found out from a competing company's
sales rep that they had made a play on words and given him the similar-sounding
nickname "John Ballbuster," because his benchmark was so hard to port
and optimize. I ended up having to spend over a month at our headquarters
working closely with the compiler-writing group before I was able to get it
to work. (This started right on the tail end of a two-week training class
at headquarters, so it added up to six weeks on the road all told.) After
I got it all done, and timed (the idea was to be the fastest computer running
this program), we found out they had lost their money, and wouldn't be buying
anything.
Welcome to high-tech sales.
Nine months later, on the last business day of the year (1988, which
had so far been a dismal year in sales for us), we got a
call from a secretary at this company who wanted our FAX number.
A few minutes later the FAX machine gave a "beep" and spit out a
purchase order for two fully loaded systems totaling over a million dollars.
That's how the salesman and I ended up two months later taking
our wives on a corporate junket to Ixtapa, Mexico, where the Sierra Madre
mountains reach the Pacific. From our terraced, cliff-dwelling-like rooms
we all had breathtaking views of the blue-green tropical ocean spread out
before us. Each room had a private patio with a hammock. This
was, of course, a "sales club" event, rewarding the high-producers in
the company. By day we attended motivational seminars, so that
the company could tax-deduct the trip cost. By night we were entertained
by Mariachi bands under the stars while we ate barbecue food and drank tequila;
that was my first chance to meet and schmooze with the Chairman of the
Board and his wife.
Welcome to the flip side of high-tech sales.
#2 — the uncanny glitch-free setup
Our first year selling those mini-supercomputers had many frustrations.
We had exactly one demo system which was too big to ship by UPS so we had to
use air freight, who frequently lost or mis-shipped our crate. Then
we had to hire truckers, or rent trucks ourselves and haul it around.
Vibration
would cause boards, and even chips, to unseat and we'd have to press
everything back together carefully. The only source for spare parts was
Boston, so almost all breakdowns were at least a one-day delay. More
than once leaving the computer out in the truck overnight when the
temperature dropped below zero caused it to fail to boot the next morning,
but we'd just power it on and wait for the power supply's warmth to unfreeze
everything, and it was eventually OK. But we learned to come set up a day
early whenever possible.
Then one trip the salesman I usually worked with and I flew in to Albuquerque,
went straight to the convention
center, and the equipment had gotten there before us. Everything
had arrived. I set it up and booted up, and everything worked perfectly.
It had been a year we'd been doing this we'd never had such luck before.
"Maybe something's just about to fail," the salesman
suggested. We went across the street for lunch and left everything on.
When we came back, it was all still working fine. "This is spooky,"
he said. We weren't sure what to do.
The convention center was walking distance from Old Town, which we'd never
seen before even though we'd been to the city a bunch of times.
Leaving the computer still on, and walked over there and saw the sights.
I remember buying a ristra, which is a lacquered string of chili peppers,
to hang in our new house's
kitchen, which we were decorating in "New Mexico ranch house" style.
(It was quite a trick getting it home uncrushed on the plane.)
We went back and the computer was still fine. We shut everything
down and went on to check into our hotel. This was before the era of laptops,
so we kept busy in our rooms with whatever phone calls and paperwork we'd
brought, until dinner time.
The show went very well for us, and we ended up selling of bunch of the
mini-supercomputers to Sandia National Labs, who became some of our strongest
supporters. This meant many return trips to New Mexico, and ample
opportunities to enjoy its charms. But that was the trip when our luck
changed in the "Land of Enchantment."
#3 — a million dollar story is better than a fish head
I'll never forget the 1994 SIGGRAPH conference in Orlando. It's the world's
biggest computer graphics conference, usually tens of thousands of people,
and I always find it a fun show and hate to miss it. (These days I'm
on the executive committee of the San Diego Professional Chapter of ACM
SIGGRAPH
[LINK_1-133]
so I'm able to attend more
consistently.) That year I was planning a tandem business/vacation trip as
well, to go to Orlando theme parks. To ensure my place I'd gotten a paper
accepted that I'd co-authored about the company's new flagship product,
and sure enough less than a month before the show all field personnel had
their SIGGRAPH attendance canceled due to "budget constraints" except for
me, because I had a paper to present.
But I still almost didn't get to go because I had a hot prospect who was
evaluating our new flagship product and needed a lot of close support.
I assured everyone that I could provide the support from Orlando.
It was a fabulous conference; I'd organized a panel in addition to my paper,
and participated in some cutting edge Virtual Reality demos with some
friends, and worked a heavy schedule of booth demo duty, and paid
a visit to some cousins of mine and other friends on the east coast of
Florida, and went to some theme parks, in addition to
providing all the support my prospect needed entirely using pay phones
(I didn't yet have a cell phone),
sometimes relaying questions to headquarters in Boston
and answers back to the prospect. I was the only technical contact
they had during the whole process.
As is often the case with these things, the saleswoman I was working
with and I were on another trip far removed from the prospect when we got
word that they'd finally signed the contract. It was for the
biggest Purchase Order (PO) our company
(job J),
had
ever gotten, $1.8 million, and all for software! (In my hardware days I was
involved with a lot of million-dollar plus purchases, but this was new
experience
for me in software.) We decided to go out to a well-recommended restaurant
in the city we were in, to celebrate, and I ended up ordering an exotic fish
dish that came with the head still on. This was a new one on me.
I bravely tried to forge ahead, but I had a hard time eating that fish's
flesh while it stared at me.
A few weeks later we were back at HQ, and our boss had been nice enough to
wait until the whole sales team was assembled to make the announcement about
our sale. Everyone's eyes widened upon hearing the size of the deal.
The VP of engineering came in and sang my praises, emphasizing that I
alone had sold the prospect on the technical merits of our product.
I realized then that this would be the real celebration, not that
overpriced expense account dinner. That night over beers I was able to
regale them with this tale, just as I am telling it to you now,
and for a shining moment savor the victory.
The Sysadmin
The Systems Administrator glowers, submerging slowly in a dark bog of unfinished
projects and stale trouble tickets. A throng of needy, dysfunctional systems looms
in the background. The sysadmin will never leave work before 6pm in this lifetime.
Unexpected trouble, conflict against the odds, uphill struggle. Reversed: Obscurity,
unappreciated labor, stress.
Silicon Valley Tarot
The only baggage you can bring
Is all that you can't leave behind
Road Rule:
Staying mostly packed
all of the time
makes packing easier.
As an experiment, we abandoned our collapsed old bureau toolbox and bought
a ... Sears (the best for the money) rolling mechanical tool chest like you
see in big auto shops. We segregated the tools by function and labeled
the drawers. The result is that tools are easily looked over and selected
and just as easily put to bed. To our great surprise, we found that this
chest caused a dramatic increase in the number of tools being
used and a similar increase in action. We even found that we were
using our own tools more!
— J. Baldwin, One Highly-Evolved Toolbox
in Soft Tech (1978, book) by J. Baldwin and Stewart Brand [ISBN/ASIN: 0140048065]
Road Rule:
Bring some extra
pieces of luggage
in your luggage.
Holds your laptop for easy removal at airport security, also
holds a bunch of other stuff: portfolio, CDs, small manuals, cell phone,
etc. Customers will see this so it should look sharp and new.
Example:
laptop bag [LINK_1-27]
from Kensington
[LINK_1-28]
.
A garment bag should keep your clothes fairly unwrinkled, have room
for your shoes and grooming kit, fit in an overhead bin when folded,
and not have unstowed protruding hooks that can get jammed in airport
baggage handling machinery. Choose functionality and strength over
looks.
This should be huge, light, strong and not too expensive.
Make sure it has sturdy wheels.
Expect it to get beat up from use, since it will always be checked
baggage. I like to buy mine on sale or used.
When you have a lot of manuals and/or sales literature to carry, you
need something that will keep pages flat — a suitcase just won't do.
For nostalgic reasons (my dad worked as a commercial airline pilot) I
like the traditional pilot's "flight bag."
Its main drawback is the lack of a shoulder strap, though you can
have that retrofit at any luggage repair. Whatever you choose
should be neat and new looking,
because customers will see it. Example:
leather flight case [LINK_1-29]
from AvShop (Pilotportal)
[LINK_1-30]
. (I should point out that many folks prefer a small rolling
suitcase instead.)
When you take notes in a meeting, you need to be using a professional
looking leather portfolio to hold your pad of paper. It can be quadrille
graph paper if you are a techie (or a yellow legal pad if you are in
sales or management), but the "frame" needs to be classy and
businesslike. This needs to fit in your laptop bag. Example:
portfolio [LINK_1-31]
from
eBags
[LINK_1-32]
. While you're thinking about it, you need to pick a leather
color and be consistent in your accessories, like pens. Typically you
either go with black leather and silver accessories, or brown leather
(often in red undertones, sometimes known by "burgundy," "tobacco"
and "chestnut") with gold accessories.
Get a long wallet with room for lots of cards and put all of your frequent
flier club cards and hotel rewards club cards into it. (You should also
have them in electronic form that can be easily emailed.) Of course if you
book your flights on the web or through a travel agent (almost extinct
in the 21st century!) either way your frequent flier
number should be associated with
your itinerary, but whenever you rent a car or check into a hotel, pull
it out and see what points or miles you can get. Most employers
have an explicit policy that you can keep the miles as compensation
for you and your family for the trials and tribulations of business
travel, as long as you don't let the rewards programs influence your
choice of travel services. Example:
Travel Wallet [LINK_1-33]
from eBags
[LINK_1-32]
.
I wholly recommend this particular brand and product.
The LL Bean Personal Organizer allows you to keep all of your
grooming needs within reach without unpacking them and without using
up space on the counter, by the sink or on top of the toilet tank.
Just hang it on the towel rack and you're set! The mesh compartment
is great for things that have to dry, like razor and toothbrush. The
whole thing zips shut to pack.
Personal Organizer [LINK_1-34]
from LL Bean
[LINK_1-35]
.
Get a mesh laundry bag so that any damp laundry can dry easily.
As your garment bag gets lighter this will get heavier. Example:
Mesh Laundry Bag [LINK_1-36]
from Bed, Bath and Beyond
[LINK_1-37]
Get a collapsible or foldable backpack to bring along empty.
Make sure the shoulder straps are wide enough to be comfortable.
Get a huge, light but strong duffel to bring along empty.
Make sure your document bag, your mostly-empty garment bag
(except for shoes) and your mesh bag full of dirty laundry will fit
in it without destroying it. Example:
extra large cargo duffel [LINK_1-38]
.
from
eBags
[LINK_1-32]
.
If there is a possibility of rain, and I'm escorting other people
someplace, I bring a waterproof, 4-foot-wide doorman's umbrella. (If
I'm going alone, I get by with a ball cap and overcoat, and comb my hair
when I get there.)
"Get completely dressed, then remove one piece of jewelry."
— Coco Chanel
Road Rule:
Gather everything
before you pack anything.
Road Rule:
If you decide
what to wear
in advance
it frees up your brain
for other things later.
Road Rule:
Never carry fluids while traveling
(except for clear water)
unless they are factory-sealed.
Road Rule:
Don't bother thinking of
too many ways
in advance to use up your
excess slack on a trip.
Road Rule:
Know where you blades are,
and don't try to take them
through security.
"The more you know, the less you need."
— Coco Chanel
Road Rule:
Bring a coat on the plane
if you will fly over a cold place.
while items needed only for car trips have the highway sign:
plane tickets (or printed itinerary if using an e-ticket)
bring a coat on the plane (with windproof gloves and hat in the pockets)
if you are driving, you
should always be carrying a disaster preparedness kit for
the region you are in, whether it be blizzard, tornado,
hurricane, flood, or for us in California,
earthquake and/or wildfire preparedness.
Here is what I keep in my kit,
always in my trunk, based on accounts I have read from folks who
were in earthquakes and what they needed:
Salmon Jerky [ LINK_1-40]
from
SendSalmon.com [ LINK_1-41]
or from
AlienFreshJerky.com [ LINK_1-42].
Example:
12 VDC Beverage Heater [ LINK_1-43]
from
B & A Products [LINK_1-44]
(See section 3.3.3 "Your Clothes and Accessories," for
more detail on what to wear.)
e. what you need to stay sane
(Be sure to put the toolkit in your blades bag before you fly.)
if you are driving, also bring:
audio
books on CD or a music player, or podcasts,
if you are making a long drive.
"I like where Bukowski says - I'm not quoting exactly - 'It's not the big
things that drive men mad. It's the little things. The
shoelace that breaks when there's no time left.'"
— Tom Waitts
"A country road. A tree.
1
4
9
16
25
36
It is possible to accurately estimate how long this program will take to run.
However long it takes to compute and print one result, multiply that times
six. There will probably be a little overhead, but the estimate will be
close, and it will clearly have an upper bound that is never exceeded.
0
0
and it stops, because the zero repeats.
However, if you start with N = 1, the output is:
1
3
11
37
83
21
62
72
53
82
24
67
64
69
60
75
45
86
11
at which point the eleven repeats so it stops.
Other values can produce output that rises or falls
linearly for dozens of steps, and then finally repeats.
Road Rule:
Always know
how long
you will stay
on hold.
"You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world."
Road Rule:
When packing in a hotel
keep making the
emptiness bigger.
Road Rule:
Watch the clock
or listen to the TV
and shed minor goals
as necessary
to finish packing on time.
"There are two towns called A and B joined by a road. A businesswoman must drive from A to B, conduct some business and return to A. She wants her total round trip speed to average 60 miles per hour, but she encountered heavy traffic going to B and averaged only 30 miles per hour on the first half of the trip. What should her average speed be on the return trip to meet her goal?"
— traditional algebra word problem
Road Rule:
Don't count on
fast driving
to make up for
lost time.
Road Rule:
To move quickly,
avoid delays.
Road Rule:
When driving,
be predictable.
Store Number: _____________
Location: _________________________________
Time
Service Point
________
Arrived in Restaurant
________
Seated
________
Ordered
________
Food Arrived
________
Requested Check
________
Check Presented
________
Payment Taken
________
Change or Credit Slip Presented
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
"Nobody told me there'd be days like these."
— John Lennon, Nobody Told Me, from
Yoko Ono and John Lennon's Double Fantasy (1980, music album) [ASIN: B00004WGEK]
MRS WILSON: What gift do you think a good servant has
that separates them from the others? It's the gift
of anticipation. And I'm a good servant. I'm better
than good. I'm the best. I'm the perfect servant. I
know when they'll be hungry and the food is ready.
I know when they'll be tired and the bed is turned
down. I know it before they know it themselves.
Road Rule:
Slow down for
known hazards.
Road Rule:
Don't move
your bags
into the room
until you've
approved the room.
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
We may distinguish six kinds of terrain,
to wit: (1) Accessible ground; (2) entangling ground;
(3) temporizing ground; (4) narrow passes; (5) precipitous
heights; (6) positions at a great distance from the enemy.
— Sun Tzu, approx. 500 B.C.
The Art of War [ISBN/ASIN: 0486425576]
Rutters that revealed the seaways to the New World or unraveled
the mysteries of the Pass of Magellan or the Cape of Good Hope —
both Portuguese discoveries — and thence the seaways to Asia were guarded
as national treasures by the Portuguese and Spanish, and sought after with
equal ferocity by the English and Dutch.
A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has
a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
schematic map of Boylston/Shrewsbury region (details not precise)
California Water Map [LINK_1-62]
(copyright 2001 Water Education Foundation)
available from
The Water Education Foundation [LINK_1-63]
Road Rule:
Get oriented
and stay oriented.
"When everything else has gone from my brain — the President's name,
the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own
name and what is was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of
my friends, and finally the faces of my family — when all of this
is gone, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory
of land as it lays this way and that."
Road Rule:
Learn the
lay of the land.
"Lost? I ain't never been lost. I was a might bewildered for about three
days once, but I ain't never been lost."
— Daniel Boone
Road Rule:
Always use maps
and other navigation aids,
but don't always believe them.
"HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior."
— traditional mnemonic for remembering the
Great Lakes in North America
Los Angeles downtown street names
Main
Spring
Broadway
Hill
Olive
Grand
Hope
Flower
Figueroa
Go up the
hill to
Olive.
Isn't it
grand to
hope to find a
flower on
Figueroa?
changing street names along the Los Angeles and Orange County line
Del Amo / La Palma
Carson / Lincoln
Wardlow / Ball
Spring / Cerritos
Willow / Katella
San Francisco downtown street names
Davis
Front
Battery
Sansome
Montgomery
Kearny
Grant
Stockton
Powell
Mason
Taylor
Jones
Leavenworth
Hyde
Larkin
Polk
Van Ness
Franklin
Gough
Octavia
Laguna
I know it's
corny, but Cary
Grant put some
socks 'n
towels in a
Mason jar for Liz
Taylor, while Quincy
Jones went to
Leavenworth to
hide a
lark in a
poke.
Was that
Vanessa Williams wrestling with Ben
Franklin in that Van
Gough, or just an
octopus on
Laguna Beach?
But the rutter was only as good as the pilot who wrote it, the scribe who hand-copied it, the very rare printer who printed it, or the scholar who translated it. A rutter could therefore contain errors. Even deliberate ones. A pilot never knew for certain until he had been there himself. At least once.
— James Clavell,
Shogun (1975, book) [ISBN/ASIN: 0440178002]
Road Rule:
If you can help it,
never go someplace
for the first time
in a hurry.
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
"When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
— Korean war slogan
Road Rule:
No lunch until
everything is up.
Road Rule:
Stay until
the very end.
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
I like my job and I don't mind the work
But eleven out of twelve is bound to hurt
The pay's pretty good and the benefits are fine
But I got a little girl and I wanna make her mine
Don't mind telling you I get a little mad
To get a bit ahead takes all the time I have
Don't misunderstand me
I'm not getting soft
All I want is a couple days off
— Huey Lewis and the News, Couple Days Off, from
Hard At Play (1991, music album) [ASIN: B00000DRAO]
Road Rule:
Keeping your sanity
is your job;
nobody can
do it for you.
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
"Touring can make you crazy, ladies and gentlemen.
That's what 200 Motels is all about."
1st: If I'm not for me, who am I? Nobody! 2nd: Yet, if I'm only for
me, what am I? Nothing!
— Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus Soap label, 1947
Dr. Bronner's Soaps [LINK_1-91]
I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one cannot
see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting. First,
there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next,
there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from
the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily;
the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of
the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives
off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath
of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquility is profound and infinitely
satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings
develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds; you
simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself.
When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest
and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed
and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of
you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has
lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one
has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon,
sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky
above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you
have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and
the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft
and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes
a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where
it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something
that is worth remembering.
"Laboris Gloria Ludi"
["Work Hard, Play Hard"]
— motto of the Camborne School of Mines
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and
measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
'Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
— Walt Whitman
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, from
Selected Poems 1855-1892 [ISBN/ASIN: 0312267908]
It's a foolish cook who starves.
— anon.
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes :
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
I watched their rich attire :
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam ; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
Their beauty might declare :
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware :
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1796
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner [ISBN/ASIN: 0486223051]
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
"Kindly come to terms with your ass, for it bears you."
Road Rule:
The job isn't over
until the paperwork is done.
"You're either on the winning team or the learning team."
— Marshall Thurber
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
but that's the way to bet."
— Damon Runyon
Road Rule:
Make sure winning
is a reward.
© 1998, Thomas Scoville.
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