The Absurdity of Traveling with Elephants
This story was submitted by Andy Sitison to the Stories of Travel collection as part of the May SEEQ sessions.
I stare at the back of the seat, the stained taupe plastic that is my visual. I drop instinctually into my “bored blur”. The numbing that happens when you are just trying to limit the impact of the moment, trying to mentally move on to more valuable things when “WOOSH”…an implosion of your space. His highness in the seat before you, has slammed his throne into full recline. Now that gross plastic is replaced with the blue woven fabric of the seat top and his bald spot, all 10 inches from my face. A granular view that is far from comfortable.
How many times have I stared at that very same seat or one just like it? I dunno maybe 1000 times? Let’s see: 4 flights a week, 45 weeks a year, 15-18 years, more like 2000 times. No wonder I both despise its presence and yet know it so well. For this story let’s conservatively say I have been in this condition 1800 times, and I have made 750 trips around the globe to be in different places. Travel can be glorious; travel can be full of so much bull shit. At some point It is hard to tell if the mechanisms of travel are not actually my job. I spend more time with them. I stress more about them. I labor equally for them and they retain the same level of my focus. I know strangers in airports that I only know because we pass each other on the way to other places. I Have been in an airport at 11p on a Friday asking myself “what is my job anyway”?
There are two components of business travel that take it to the absurd. First are the fractional aggregates. Fractional aggregates are all the little things you do unconsciously on trips that add up to “elephants” over time. There are some possibly good elephants like the “sprint walking with luggage elephant”. Its good exercise, but the stress of it likely fires enough cortisol, triggering fat production, to a point that negates any value. There are likely bad elephants like “back-scatter radiation to the genitals elephant” as we are asked to “raise your arms and don’t move…” Of course, there is the “sodium elephant”, built upon all the processed foods, figuratively and physically weighing upon you, stifling life a micro-gram at a time. “Then there’s the “isolation elephant”. Hotel rooms, rental cars, individual seating in the hotel café, a self-tour of the canals of Amsterdam, to walking back to your car in the remote parking lot, there seems to be infinitely immense segments of alone time spent in a robotic and mindless zombie state of mind. At some point today’s business traveler becomes a park ranger at a sanctuary for sick elephants.
The elephants aren’t only individual manifestations. Human conference for business creates elephant herds. Consider the “food waste elephant”. It was my pleasure to cover Latin America for a portion of my career. In Latin America, business meetings are called “reunions”. I always liked that touch, which was just one of the special touches that places like Mexico and Brazil put towards making the best of business experiences out of the littlest of meetings. The problem is whether in Sao Paul, Singapore, or San Jose, meetings have an exhaust, a byproduct. Like sediment, there is a footprint when humans conference. Nothing highlights this extravagance better than the immortalized waste in leftover box lunches in rows of twenty sitting beside an air-dried stadium-sized bowl of potato salad. “Food for the winners…” Most travelers routinely come to such conference with an overabundance of consumed calories, and a void of stimulation which leads many to an biblical level of internal debate on whether they are going to eat that macadamia nut cookie or not. Elephants are everywhere.
The second absurdity is the unitized value of travel for any given event. For many enterprise corporations, travel becomes a given. Kicked off by corporate processes and beliefs that manifest in methods and traditions predetermining behavior. A successful sales executive deeply believes in “face to face” selling, and becomes in charge of a global partnering organization, and boom you have hundreds if not thousands of employees traveling all over. I one year alone had travel and entertainment expenses that exceeded $80,000. What did I get in return? I missed by kids soccer games, gained weight, and got audited for 18 months for doing my job. Yes, I was one of the highest on the list that year, but I was just one traveler of hundreds who made routine trips like ants on a gingham napkin. So many of those trips are influenced by others that each trip is rarely assessed for value. So many of them are not very valuable in hindsight, and because a travel decision can require 100’s if not 1000’s to jointly make it, often valid alternatives to travel are not considered. More elephants arrive at our door. That “I’m being audited element” meant they paid me slower, so I also got to have “Pay the Amex with my own money and float this Fortune 300 company a person loan every month elephant” that was a special elephant, it had a nickname: “Kiss my Fucking Ass elephant”. Bitter elephant indeed.
We could continue to describe an endless line of big-eared, trunk-wearing mammoth manifestations of travel. Some worthy of note like the “Airplane fuel elephant”, or the “Kamikaze’s at 2:00 am elephant”, but let us consider the metaphor properly satiated. The wisdom from this that can only come from a journeyman. None of these things are obvious until instantiated over time. In assessment it is a good lesson in life. Be who you want to be by doing what you want to do, because it will consume you. And, per the old saying “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”. Travel happens to travelers.
