Confession: I like to go on business trips
Categories: Balancing Act, Career Talk, Working Women Issues, Your life
I’ll never forget my first business trip. I was right out of college and working for McKinsey, this big consulting company in New York City. Our team’s client was a company with a division in France and there came a point during the project when one of us had to go and interview some of their employees. Since I speak some French (it was much better 10 years ago, unfortunately) our manager chose me to go.
I was in a rush getting to the airport and didn’t read my itinerary careful. So you can imagine my 24-year old surprise when I got on the plane and they ushered me into the business class section. WHOA! My seat was bigger than my apartment at the time. And the flight attendant wanted to know what I wanted to drink and she took my coat to hang it up and offered me a menu to choose from for dinner which looked like a menu from a fancy New York restaurant.
I knew I should get some sleep on the flight but I couldn’t calm my excitement for a second so I just ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine, watched a few movies and just overall felt completely awesome being there. When I got to my ultra-plush hotel in Paris I realized that the luxury was going to continue and I was determined to eat it up. I was in Paris! In a fancy hotel! Flying business class! For free!
Of course, if you’ve traveled for work, you know where this story is headed. My trip was all meetings and meetings and not very much luxury. Sure, I slept in an amazing bed bigger than any I’d seen before, but I was so exhausted every night collapsing into it that I almost didn’t notice. Thankfully I’d been to Paris before because the only Paris I saw then was out of a window of a cab that I took between the hotel and the client’s office.
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