Three Hundred Thirty-Six Hours

One trip, two weeks, fourteen days, three hundred and thirty-six hours. It was all one particular event but as you break it down it seems even more intimidating. When you talk about two weeks, it doesn’t seem that long. Then you start thinking about packing for 14 days of travel, and after you are done packing you actually have to spend the next 336 hours away from home and working 12+ hour days. Checking a bag is a necessity and factoring a day/night to do laundry accompanies that necessity. A two-week vacation sounds like a dream come true, a two-week business trip sounds like the exact opposite. It is not, however, as bad as it sounds.

Taking on a business trip that is this long takes some research to prepare for, especially if it is your first time travelling for more than a long weekend. The first place I found to be helpful was this article. The author does a great job of highlighting a lot of small tricks that can really prove useful. One that I took advantage of was contacting your hotel about laundering services. I was going to be staying in two different hotels, moving about halfway through the trip. I was able to have the second hotel launder some of my more important items for less than the first hotel wanted. I also found great help in packing multipurpose shirts that can be worn alone in a casual setting but also look nice and formal when you put a blazer on top of it.

A trip of this length takes a lot of flexibility and the expectation that things are not all going to go according to plan. We left a lot of times as flexible within a 15-minute period so that we had some leeway once we were on site. Communicating properly with suppliers (especially restaurants) was key so that they knew if our group was running late or if our attendance number changed. On this particular trip we had 4 planned dinners that were plated and served 25+ guests. The rest of the dinners we spent on our own as workers but offered options and reservations at local establishments to our guests. This trip was a little bit of a booze and schmooze event as we were hosting guests that could greatly influence the ROI of new products based on resale predictions and pricing. This meant that you were always walking a fine line when you were with them because you were expected to converse and mingle but making sure not to offend or give the wrong impression to the guests was imperative.

When it is all said and done I was able to get paid for spending two weeks in California. No matter how many hours I worked, it is hard to complain about that. I checked my timesheet and I showed a total of just less than 120 hours, which is an average of 8.5 hours a day and that includes the weekends.

Preparing for Take-Off

Four seconds is all it takes to travel a quarter of a mile at approximately 300 miles per hour. No this is not in an airplane, this is in a Nitro Funny car driven by a professional NHRA driver. For work I attended my first ever professional drag race. This was the NHRA event in Charlotte, North Carolina. Our work involved student recruiting for Ford Motor Company, in the pursuit to bring back the popularity of vocational schools and fill the empty field of service technicians. We spent the weekend communicating with high school aged students regarding career paths in the automotive technician field. This is a program we have spent the whole year working on, but only activated twice so far. This was my first time being at an activation, which includes plenty of logistical hurdles including contacting and meeting with dealerships local to the race track to obtain employees who want to positively impact our youth. Below is a photo I took of our professional driver Bob Tasca III addressing a group of students in his pit area. He spent a lot of time talking about the opportunities that exist within the industry beyond working at a Belle Tire or other shop. Motorsports is where the fun is at, that is for sure.

There is a lot of on the job learning that occurs on a trip like this. Sitting in an office in meetings can’t ever teach you how to interact with student’s or how they may interact with you. It also could never prepare you for what could or does go wrong that requires an immediate judgement call to be made. On site at an event like this we do not have an hour to email with a supervisor regarding how to solve an issue, we all have an understanding of what the overarching goal is and on site you do whatever it takes to achieve that.

When you are learning on the job and working events it seems like the days last forever. Time just crawls as you try to process everything that is happening and it feels like the weekend will never end. Going forward it always feels like the next event approaches so slowly. There was a study done regarding our perception of time. Burkhard Bilger found that the more familiar our world becomes, the less information our brains hold on to. When your brain is not writing down as much information, time seems to pass by faster.

Once you make it back to the office, you get to apply all of what you have learned on site to the programs you work on for the rest of the year. I have to mention again that you will never be fully prepared to host an event in another state, because of all the logistics behind making it all possible, but in time you learn how to adjust on the fly.