Ah Trini Travelogue Trinidad & Tobago's most travelled blogger through 99 countries. Create and Re-Engineer your life for travel.
Today is the start of the new little feature called Monday Morning Consultant. When traveling for work, there are a couple things, that consultants regardless of company, practice, etc go through. The usual script follows something like the following
- Wake up on Monday morning between 3-6am. The world is dead asleep and you’re probably sleepwalking. Of course, the kids/wife/GF/Dog is still fully asleep. No appreciates your noise at this time.
- Shit, Shower, Shave – Not in that order
- Call cab (on schedule) or drive to airport – assuming that your 3 day carry on bag is prepacked from the night before or better yet … untouched from when you came home, the previous Thursday night
- Get in the cab, try to sleep but Blackberry red light /iPhone email icon – flashing like DEFCON 1
- Arrive at airport – walk into Super Elite, President’s Club, MM Mile line to be treated like the traveling VIP that you are … laugh at other other people and occasional tourists, who have to line up like cattle in a slaughterhouse.
- Go through security (laptop out, shoes off, liquids in plastic bag…), get felt up by some weird dude
- Quickly go to the executive lounge to get a coffee and newspaper
- Get in the plane (economy for flights less than 3 hours) at 7-9am…
Now as a traveling consultant, you also become an amateur Air Traffic Controller and Meteorologist. You learn the glossary of terms from the Airtraffic Controllers … terms which you never want to see
- LO CIGS – Low Ceiling, Low Clouds … means #!$!$! delays!
- CLSD – closed … no explanation required
- GDP – Ground Delay Program … in simple terms … too many planes trying to land, you start circling your airport, more time on the plane doing nothing
- GS – Ground Stop … means cancellations, missed connections and overall bad for you
You also learn to read weather at the airport by looking for weather vanes, checking your iPad flight tracker apps like Flight Tracker (smart name huh!), and learning how to decode satellite photos with storm fronts.
If this wasn’t enough useless knowledge to have, you also become a part time airline concierge, since you know all the airports, which have the best food, duty-free booze, and which airline lounges start serving single malt scotch at 11am in the morning.
For some more interesting reading … the following links could prove to be even more hilarious
