Business Travel 101

So I'm now away on my first business trip with this company (who I've worked for just about a year). I used to travel all the time and frankly, I actually really like business travel. The main reason I disliked it at the last job where I traveled all the time was...it was ALL the time. When they start talking corporate apartment, you've crossed the line from business travel into professional traveler. So, while I will stand by liking business travel, I will categorically deny anyone who says I want to be a professional traveler.

Anyway. If you could pick two people from my company for me to travel with that would be the worst possible combination of people, you would come up with my current traveling companions.

First we have "HeebieDeebie Guy" (HDG for short). Did you ever watch Fat Albert? You know the guy with the football shaped head that you couldn't understand? This is how HDG talks. My conversations with him run as follows:

HDG: Heebiedeebiedoobieheebie.
Me: Huh?
HDG: Heebiedeebiedoobieheebie.
Me: Sorry?
HDG: Heebiedeebiedoobieheebie.
Me (still with no clue): Ah. (nodding) Umhm.

For all I know, I have agreed that the world is flat and that he and I should get together and have hundreds of little monkey children who we will raise to eat only lawn clippings from sewage treatment plants. (On an aside, do they still have sheep that graze on sewage treatment plant grass? I vaguely recall when I was little driving by and seeing the sheep out on the sewage treatment lawns and thinking that was kind of cool.)

Then we have Non-Technical-Management-Guy-Who-Thinks-He-Is-Technical (NTMG from here on out.) Now, NTMG is also the one who rented the car. Partly because he's "in charge" of this little expedition, partly because he's oldest, and I'm sure there are many other partlys that factored in. NTMG is not a good driver. We have an ENORMOUS grandma car. (Seriously, it says MCRY GRMA on the rental car key - that's got to mean, "Mercy, It's a Grandma car!" right?) The trunk on this car could comfortably house 100 hurricane Katrina refugees and any of their personal effects that they managed to rescue. I'm not sure what kind of car NTMG normally drives, but it's clearly not built like this one. He just toodles down the middle of the lanes. Not in the middle of any particular lane, but straddling at least two lanes - sometimes three if you count the bicycle lane. His response when queried about taking his half out of the middle: "I'm just gonna head in a straight line, the lanes can curve if they want to." Makes me glad to have a seatbelt, paid up insurance, and a HUGE tank of a car around me.

So anyway, we're in training classes here. HDG is pseudo-technial. NTMG as his moniker suggests, not technical in the slightest. Most of the training is technical training. Not sure what either of those two are doing here, honestly. Anyway, they went over mostly the business end of stuff today (day 1 of training) and talked about some of the new innovations in their current product. Sort of technically groundbreaking innovations. (And by innovation, I mean things no one has done before.) On the way back from lunch, the conversation was something like this:

Me: That innovation XX was really cool. I can see how we could use it for Y purpose.
NTMG: Oh, we already do that.
Me: Really? Where?
NTMG: We've done that for years. Annoying-Thinks-He's-Superior-To-Everyone-Including-God programmer guy did that two years ago.
Me: Really? For who? I'd love to play around with it.
NTMG: We already do that.

At that point, I just go back to Mmm and UmHm type comments.

Should be a really interesting trip. Maybe the people we're visiting are hiring. They look like a really cool company to work for.