Day Tripper

5:00 AM. I haven't seen this time in a long time. Wow, it's still dark. Shower and shave, straighten my tie, pick up all my stuff for the trip (resume copies, boarding pass, book, iPod) and I'm off to the airport.

Traffic is light so LaGuardia is only a 10 minute trip at this hour. The 7:25 flight is booked solid. I'm a little surprised but then again I'm not an experienced business traveler. I'm wedged into the middle seat in row 15 between a very attractive young lady (alas, she's wearing rings) and a young man who eats part of his bagel, opens his computer, closes his computer, flips through some papers from his bag for 10 seconds, puts on his iPod, turns off his iPod, eats part of his bagel, repeat full sequence for the whole 2+ hour flight. A little less caffiene in the morning bud, especially before flying. I get a good 2 hours of reading my book (Twinkie, Deconstructed), time I never seem to get when sitting at home.

The pilot makes good time and we arrive in Chicago about 20 minutes early. Of course the gate isn't ready for us so we spend that extra 20 minutes sitting out on the tarmac waiting. We finally taxi to the gate and I can get a little more space. This is the second time I've been in Chicago and both time I've never left the airports. I've heard it's a pretty nice city, and if their airports are any indication of the city I would believe so. O'Hare is very nice (compared to the airports in NY) but a maze of gates and terminals. I was walking around for about 15 minutes before I found the American Airlines Admirals Club, where the meeting will take place.

The Admirals Club is a fancy little meeting place set up in the airport. It seems to be pretty active, looks like a lot of people flying in for interviews (I don't know if anyone else is flying in for this job). Our meeting starts a little after 9. I meet the three people who I more or less I would be working for. It appears I'll have a few different bosses coming at me from different angles. It's a situation that I'm used to as the last place had the same structure. In fact the business models of the two are so similar that I think the transition to this job would be a very quick one. I have no doubt that I could be successful in this position, both for myself and the company. My hope is that I have convinced these people in that in the short time I had (well, it was about 2 hours).

But I still have to wait a little bit. The manager of the NY office is on vacation this week and he'll be a part of the decision to hire me. So they promised me an answer next week. Hopefully this will be the last week of poor sleep.

I had about 2 hours to kill before the return flight so I wandered the airport. It's almost like a mall that airplanes come to. Do people really buy suits, dresses, humidifiers during waiting time in the airport? Seems very odd to me.

The trip back was uneventful and luckily I had an aisle seat this time. I needed to decompress a little so I just leaned back, put the iPod on shuffle and listened to music for the next 2 hours, trying not to think. I was back in the house by 5:30 and that was really the first time I relaxed the whole day. It's always great to get back home.