When The Cat's Away...
or
What I Learned on my Business Trip

Why do I do this? Three reasons: the pay is good,
the scenery changes, and they let me use explosives.

Now for those of you who don't know, a few weeks ago, my company sent me on a business trip to New York City. Actually, it went down like this:

Phil, would you like to go on a business trip, thus spend an entire day out of the office where we can't keep an eye on you and still get paid?

Um... where is it?

New York.

Sure!

The way I see it, my company made four mistakes in sending me to New York on a buisness trip:

1. Sending me by myself
2. Sending me to a city I've been to before and wasn't afraid to navigate
3. Sending me to a city where I know people relatively close by
4. Letting me set my own agenda for the trip

Needless to say, I wasn't purely focused on the conference I was sent there for. Now, I won't bore you with the details of my trip... But I will bore you with a few lessons I learned during my trip, in no particular order:

1. Software people love to use the word "robust" when talking about their product
2. You can get up as late as you want when you don't have to catch a train
3. $5.00 will get you exactly one 10 oz. bag of potato chips and one 12 oz. can of soda at any convention center
4. When you're really bored, you can walk really far without getting tired
5. No force on this earth can make me watch Driven
6. Nobody except me wants to watch Josie and the Pussycats
7. Drinking Mountain Dew late at night is a bad idea when you have to go to sleep in an hour
8. At every convention there are "booth babes" used to entice the lonely conventioneer into sitting through a product demo
9. The quality of the "booth babes" is directly proportional to how bad they want you to sit through the product demo
And finally...
10. "Summer Vacation" doesn't mean the same thing to a working stiff as it does to a college student

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to fill out this form for a corporate credit card...