Management consulting = travel
No way around it. If you don’t like business travel, you will hate consulting. Here are some things I have experienced.
- Know your airline frequent flyer number, but not your mom’s phone number
- Take too much pride in the type of roller bag you have
- Drive 30 miles out of your way to stay within your hotel loyalty program
- Find it odd to pay for restaurant meals on the weekend
- Recognize new hotel staff, and welcome them “aboard” the Marriott family
- Stop taking left-over miniature toiletries home (because you have enough)
- Call the hotel “home” by accident, a lot
- Do your dry-cleaning in your travel city, not hometown
- No longer make fun of TSA (nothing more to say after 8 years of mocking them)
- Buy the monthly parking pass at your client site
- Buy a set of clothes at Macy’s when your flight home gets cancelled
- Wake up in the middle of the night, don’t know which city you are in
- Change into jeans before your flight home in the airport bathroom
- Have a ziplock back of rechargers and electronics (phone, iPad, bluetooth)
- Get amazing work done on the plane – especially with aisle seats
- Compliment the pilot when it is a particularly “good landing”
- Like your rental car because its nicer than your own car
- You know where the outlets are in the hotel lobby
- Leave gym shoes, tennis racquet and extra clothes with the bell hop
- Eat the same restaurant 3 times in one week
- Receive a Christmas present from the hotel
- Eat Five Guys breakfast sandwich at 6am
Some things I can relate to, but have never done. . .
- Place your hands under the faucet at home, expecting the water to come on
- Take a flight just to make the next level of airline rewards
- Sort expenses into 2 reports: #1 expenses that might be challenged (and delay payment),#2 all the other ones that will go right through
- Keep 2-3 suitcases packed at a time to minimize laundry and re-packing time
- Interview / get interviewed for a job at an airport lounge