Just putting the final touches on my Rapture-eve trip to NYC. Its a trip that’s been a long-time coming and that’s suffered a few planning bumps along the way. (i.e. United canceling my reservation & not letting me know as the big one.) I’m definitely a planner. As I described here, my family is big on travel planning. Rule of thumb: Plan to lose your plan.
And if you are planning for someone else, plan to have them screw up your plan.
A few years back, I learned this first hand in coordinating a trip for my boss to NYC. My colleague and I were always very tight on the trip details. There were appropriate, fail-proof steps to take for every trip. Even the way travel details were entered into Outlook had a precise formula. Every step, every minute was planned out. If our boss was on East Coast time, so were we. Making for a few early West Coast mornings.
We’d monitor her movements with our telepathy. We’d take bathroom breaks when we knew she’d be sequestered in an airplane or a meeting. We were never far from the phone – knowing that if a call came in, it usually meant all hell had broken loose.
That’s what happened when she lost the car.
The call came in that the car, responsible for getting her to the next location on time, was not in place. With my colleague on the phone to our boss, I was on the phone to the car company who was on the phone to the driver. My colleague, five feet away from me with an octave too high for that distance, was asking me to name the visual cues on the street of New York that the driver was seeing. The driver, giving all the right cues, kept reporting that they were exactly outside and across the street from our boss. Yet, she kept reporting not being able to see him.
With Google maps on the screen and using our visual triggers, we tried as we might to connect the two – from our command-post across the country. It felt like hours, but may have been ten minutes. To have witnessed the event in the office, you’d have thought we were coordinating an air strike. The screaming NYC call lives on in infamy.
The biggest problem with not being in NYC was that we were not in NYC.
In a flash of brilliance, we called the actual on-the-ground trip planner to physically find our boss and connect her with the car. Problem solved. I believe it took all of two minutes, as the car was across the street where he said he’d be. With both of our handsets cradled back in the phone, I looked – stunned – across the cube-yard wall at my colleague. I swore off NYC in that moment. And probably the job as well.
The beauty of traveling and planning for yourself is that it is all up to you. If the car doesn’t show, if I can’t open my eyes wide enough to see it across the street, that’s all my responsibility. Plan to lose your plan.
Undoubtedly, this weekend will present its own fun challenges. Interestingly, the whole Rapture event might just cause us to really lose our plan. Maybe Jesus will be on the line when I phone in that I lost my car.
Screaming NYC
