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.