India - Again?

I suppose I had it coming. When I said that for every trip to India, I have to suffer through ten trips to Cinncinnati, what I meant was that for every trip to a place like India, not India itself. So Tuesday I am in New York for a meeting and the upshot is I am going back to India, probably next week. Going to India once - sign me up - very exciting! Going to India twice - well, not so exciting. There is no extra credit for a second trip to the same place in the pompous foreign traveler handbook. It's not like I can come upon a conversation wherein someone who has only been there once is misinforming those he is speaking too, and I can correct him authoritatively, asking haughtily how many times he's been there and then claiming that you really need to go twice to really get the place.

I offered up the Great Wall of China as perhaps a better meeting locale, to no avail. But with the considerable negotiating tactics that I possess, I managed to get their assurance that the meetings will take place in a different interior conference room - they couldn't guarantee me that it would be on a different floor, but they did say they'd see what they could do. The trick is to stay firm in the negotiations.

The one upside - 36 hours of business class travel, interspersed with lounge accomodations on all layovers. If you've never flown business class, let me put it to you this way, if a doctor told me I had only 48 hours to live, I'd jump on the internet and order me up 2 straight days of business class travel to and fro, along with my family of course. Your seat reclines almost to a bed, you have your own little private TV with about five movies to choose from, you get those steaming hot white towels for your face and hands, and it is pretty much all you can eat service. Last trip I took Air France, with provided me the added bonus of asking the French stewardesses if they had any Cheese Wiz and Ritz crackers. The trick is to try to say it really loudly, as if they are deaf, and with a Spanish accent to show that you are trying to bridge the communication gap - "Chessey de Wiz?" They loved me.

I don't have to tell you that the posts have been very sparse these last few weeks. We have our annual evaluations coming up next week at work, so I always try to put in 3 really hard weeks of work to erase the impression of 11 months of slacking. I'll let you know how that goes. I did make it into the Carnival of Comedies again last week for my Full Bodied Charmer post - it was on Imao (link to the left) and was again posted on Thursday. I think I'll try an archived article this week.