Last week Wednesday (the 10th), my boss told me he wanted to send me off to Shenzhen, China for the next 2 weeks to press check our fall packages. I've been once before, to meet our vendors here, but never by myself. And I've never travelled internationally without a friend or family member accompanying me or meeting me at the airport, so this was a bit of an adventure.
First thing I did was book my flight. Non-stop, Economy Plus, window seat. Some like aisle because they don't like to crawl over people to get to the toilets or want to get off the plane faster. What they don't realize is that if you're on an aisle seat you have people constantly crawling over you, back and forth. The decision becomes: to crawl or to be crawled upon. I prefer to have the command decision in this situation, probably because I'm a control freak.
As far as getting off the plane faster, the aisle saves you maybe, maybe about 30 seconds. That's just not enough to make a difference in my book.
What the window seat really offers (other than a false sense of control and a nice view when landing) is a corner where you can wedge yourself in and sleep for most of the flight. And on a 14-hour non-stop flight from SFO to Hong Kong, it is essential to sleep as much as possible on the flight. Not just to make the flight seem shorter, although this is a nice perk. Sleeping the flight away (at least when headed West) allows you the opportunity to reset your internal sleep clock, which means less jet lag issues. You sleep about 5-6 hours on the plane, arrive around 6pm the next day, get to your hotel, and go back to sleep. When you wake the following morning at 8am you feel great, refreshed and sans jet lag.
I chose a different hotel then the last time I was here, primarily because we received a corporate memo that said the original hotel was not to be used anymore by our company. Apparently they couldn't work out a cheap executive discount rate or something, and so they switched us over to this new one, the Marco Polo hotel. It's cheaper, and for some reason the hotel has decided that I'm actually entitled to the Executive Privileges (though I did not book an executive room): free breakfast in the morning and cocktails in the evening. It's a nice perk, but doesn't quiet make up for the lack of perks from the former hotel: an iron and ironing board in the room, a huge claw-foot tub with bath salts provided every day, and wine delivery to my room each night. First world problems, I suppose. At least this hotel has a huge pool for me to swim in (open at 6am), yoga classes and a day spa. Things could be worse.
Like not being able to check your work email while on a work trip. Or your work not paying for an international phone (or international calls).
The company I work for is very tight on security, so we have to enter a code from an RSA key (which changes every minute or so). Unfortunately my RSA key seems to have given up the ghost; instead of 6 clearly lit digits I see 3 or 4 garbled ones. Which meant when I went to check my work email last night, my attempts were futile.
As one might surmise from earlier sentences, my work does not think it's necessary to provide us with an international phone when travelling internationally for work. They also don't think it's necessary to provide us with compensation for international calls if we already have an international phone. So I'm essentially phone-less when I come to China.
This is particularly a problem when you've been put under the assumption that your very important press check, for which you traveled over 6,000 miles, is the next morning, possibly at 8:30am, and your ride to the printer has not been scheduled. And, you're in mainland China where almost no cab drivers speak English and all you can say in Mandarin is "Nee huay shwa yigwen mah?" which translates to "Do you speak English?".
So I tried to email my boss from my personal email account to alert him of the issue (and get it resolved), but then realized that my laptop wasn't plugged in. So I plugged the power supply into my China adapter outlet and nothing happened. I tried again and again, to no avail.
Finally, I gave up, put my lap top to sleep and took a hot bath. And ate some food. And came back to my laptop and thought...hmm. I don't recall actually plugging the power supply into the computer itself. Perhaps I might try that. And of course it worked perfectly, proving that one shouldn't make complicated decisions like plugging in a laptop without proper relaxation and sustenance.
I went to bed and woke up to an email from my boss saying he had contacted our IT guy here and that he would be providing me with a new RSA tag today. Which he just did. And another email from our printer that said the press check today doesn't start until 4:30pm, which means I have most of the day to relax, get my things together, and enjoy.
Then I checked my work email and found the usual flurry of 69 panic-stricken email threads, each ending in the usual "ok, glad this was resolved" email. So, there it is.
Did I mention today is my birthday? Happy birthday to me.
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