Weekends Exist To Keep The Homicide Rate Down

My bosses are all traveling this week, which is nice in one way, due to the wealth of downtime and alien things like “lunch hours”, yet they are hell in another, because the second they are all incommunicado, that is when disasters happen and when disasters happen in corporations, there is not enough caffeine on the planet that will make you wired enough to solve the situation without weeping, losing three quarters of your hair and threatening people with a letter opener. Luckily, so far, all is quiet.

Too quiet…

One boss, who has been an enormous pain in the rear lately, is in Florida. She has changed her travel plans so many times that even the airlines are confused as to her intent. I envision her name soon being scrawled on a “no fly” list alongside “Osama Hussein-Mohammad” and that dickwad from Oasis. She now wants to come back today one hour earlier than planned (waiting in the airport bar for an hour, chatting up the bartender while sucking down Manhattans wasn’t an option apparently). She’s flying from Miami to New York but I’m seriously considering routing her through Salt Lake City. And Chicago. Where she will be delayed until Tuesday by tornados and by which time her head will have exploded and my life will be 50% more bearable.

Still on the subject of travel, we have our own travel department here and someday soon I will come to work with an axe and murder one of our reps. This particular lady is a very nice person, friendly, jovial and totally, inconceivably incompetent. Not much frightens the Guv’ner, but she frightens me to my core.

Take, for example, the time I booked boss number one on some flights that would take him to a four day conference in Las Vegas. I call the travel department and get crazy travel rep. to make sure that the hotel we discussed for this conference is confirmed and she assures me that yes, he is all set. He is good to go. Commence launch sequence. Then the automated itinerary arrived via email and I quickly glanced at it to make sure nothing was amiss and, yes, she was absolutely correct, the hotel is booked and confirmed, just like she told me.

It’s also in Houston, Texas.

Much swearing and scurrying and threatening and changing of things ensued, while I contemplated how hard I’d have to connect with the plate glass partition in my office to actually put my head through it.

She will routinely give me flight options that don’t exist or omit ones that do.

She will swear blind we didn’t discuss something when I have notes proving we did.

She will tell me there is no way to do something in a certain time frame that another rep will not bat an eyelid at.

She will give me options for all three NY airports when I ask for flights “only to and from La Guardia” and end up booking irate boss on some flight back to Newark, despite telling me it was to La Guardia and when his car is waiting for him, peacefully, at La Guardia. I will naturally only find this out at the last minute and be scurrying around like a gerbil in Richard Gere’s back yard, trying to rectify this monumental cock-up.

It’s exhausting. And rage inducing.

But it’s Friday.