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Business Travel = Impending Doom

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Contributed by: Jared Keller on 2/10/2006

It has come to my attention - through independent study, my own personal experience, and the numerous travails of friends and family members - that one can predict with virtual certainty the exact moment when calamity will strike a specific group of people.

Disasters of all kinds - involving really expensive home repairs, trips to the emergency room, and, in some cases, global thermonuclear war - take place as a direct result of business travel.

Let's take a brief glance back into human history, and we'll see no small number of examples:

991 AD - Ethelred the Unready, King of Britain takes a weekend trip to Normandy, to check out potential sites for a summer cottage, and make nice with his future in-laws. BAM! Norway's own Olaf Tyrgyvasson invades, and the whole episode costs good ol' Ethelred a tidy sum in Danegeld, earning him no small amount of mockery from his buddies down at the pub...until he has them beheaded. He was also known as "Ethelred the Clueless", "Ethelred the Big Stupid Head", and "Ethelred the Unnecessarily Sensitive" following this episode.

1637 AD - The Imperial Chinese court, in a misguided and somewhat pointless attempt to create "the world's most annoying creature", travels to Tibet, and returns with small, badger-like rodents that were crossbred with China's native Pekingese to produce what eventually became known as the Shih Tzu. The resultant abomination would later become known as the Asiatic Land Piranha, and become feared for its reputation for traveling in large packs (called di xia feng lo, or "wandering force of the devil's fuzzy, yapping demon horde" in Mandarin), skeletonizing deer in less than 30 seconds, and hated for its incessant, high-pitched yipping, known to drive rural peasants to mass suicide.

1914 AD - Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand thinks it a capital idea to head on over to Sarajevo to direct military maneuvers in the nearby mountains. While on the flight over, he and his wife take the standby seats that Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip had been waiting for since being booted from a previous flight for tampering with a lavatory smoke detector. As a result, Princip violates no small number of firearms safety rules, and guns down both the Archduke and his wife, in what has become known as the first documented instance of "Air Rage". A minor intercontinental dustup occurs, as a result.

More recently, my eldest brother and his family experienced some degree of calamity as he traveled back to Denver to look for work. Apparently, his absence from his current home just north of Chicago led to an outbreak of meteorological horror, temporary insanity on the part of my nieces and nephew, and some sort of incident involving a ShopVac, two cords of firewood, and a South American primate of questionable character. I won't go into detail, as the story is somewhat confusing, but suffice to say, it represents yet another case of travel-related disaster.

My own recent experience - while I was away just last week - involves a wife cooped up in the house with a sweet, but rather garrulous two-year old, a sudden realization that we'd run out of God's nectar of life (Peaberry Breakfast Blend), and a somewhat harried attempt to back out of the garage to go get said coffee. Around 2:00pm Eastern time, I received a somewhat unusual call in my hotel room on Hilton Head, and, after suffering some initial confusion regarding the sobs and general hysteria coming from the receiver, was able to ascertain that my wife was calling to tell me something about backing the truck through the garage door. See, even under the best circumstances, this type of news is never exactly welcomed. When it happens when I'm a couple of thousand miles away, and unable to do anything to help? Well, the aggravation factor grows rather exponentially.

As it turned out, things weren't as bad as they might have been, and all is now well, thanks to my amazingly resilient wife (I got her permission to retell this story, for those of you who fear for my safety...), and to two saints who just happen to look like my brother Todd and Father In-Law Peter.

The moral of the story is this, kids: if, when you're interviewing for a job, the interviewer mentions the "glamour", and "excitement" of business travel, your best course of action is to gather your papers, stand from your chair, and, with the utmost decorum and propriety, punch the moron squarely in the nose.

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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Jared Keller

Littleton

Jared Keller has posted 450 stories and 62 comments since joining on 12/1/2005. Jared Keller 's average story rating is 4.85.

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