A Day in the Life of a Traveling Salesman

Two Nights in San Diego #6
Back home(-ish) - Thu, 27 Jun 2024, 6pm

Here's a "Day in the Life" diary of what it's like being a literal traveling salesman.

The Morning Roll

6:32am: Awoke without my alarm clock... which is good because I'd forgotten to set an alarm for 6:30am (a bit earlier than my normal wakeup).

6:35am: Decided that lazing in bed for 3 minutes was enough. There's lots of stuff to do this morning so I'm glad I'm getting up early.

6:40am: Basic bio stuff is taken care of. Now I'm nibbling on a protein bar and sipping a Coke Zero as my pre-breakfast while dual-screening it with my work laptop and personal laptop open simultaneously.

7:00am: Join morning meeting for demo (to me & my team) of new product features. I could catch this on the recording later but I'm happier watching it live now. Part of my thinking is, "If I don't have time for the meeting, I won't have time for the recording, either." Though I might have to drop off before it finishes to shower, pack, and leave.

7:40am: Meeting wraps early, as I expected it might, which is awesome because it gives me time to shower, dress, and pack before breakfast without having to miss part of the meeting and try to catch up on its recording later.

8:02am: Walking out the door of my room to the elevator to get breakfast downstairs

8:20am: Colleagues join me for breakfast. I'm almost done eating. But I don't mind. I picked a table next to the floor-to-ceiling windows so I've enjoyed plenty of natural light along with 15 minutes of peace and quiet.

8:35am: Breakfast conversation. A combination of personal catching-up, debriefing on yesterday's meeting, and planning for today's meeting.

Meeting & Lunch with Customer

9:05am: We hop in a car to drive out to the customer's office.

9:40am: We arrive early in the area and look for a coffee shop. (Colleague May is a coffee fiend.)

9:43am: First strip mall we enter looking for a coffee shop has none. How can a strip mall next to multiple office parks not have a coffee shop? We find one marked on our maps a mile away and head there.

9:48am: Oops, this coffee shop marked on the map is inside an office building. Not worth the bother. May says he really just needs a bio break, not a coffee break. The customer's office is 3 blocks away, so I propose we just go there a few minutes early.

9:55am: We're all badged in at the office and waiting for our hosts to arrive.

9:58am: Hosts arrive to escort us to the meeting room.

10:00am: Meeting begins promptly.

11:20am: The nominal end of the meeting is approaching, but the customers are really into the information & conversation we're sharing with them. These customers are sharp people, so we're seeing great value in it, too. We all agree to keep going.

12:15pm: Meeting wraps almost 45 minutes late. Everyone's happy, though, because it was a mutually positive meeting.

12:30pm: We reconvene at a lunch spot less than a mile away.

12:45pm: Service at the restaurant has been slow, and I'm worried about leaving in time to get to the airport— I have a 3:30pm departure, and the airport is 25 miles away— so I order light.

12:54pm: Suprisingly the food arrives really fast. Maybe I should have ordered more. But it's also okay that I ordered light since I'm going to need to scoot pretty soon.

1:20pm: I call a car via Lyft and start saying my goodbyes to the customer. Colleague West says he'll join in in leaving even though his flight isn't until a few hours later.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Home

1:28pm: West and I are in the car rolling toward the airport.

2:05pm: At the curb at SAN airport. Traffic getting here was a bit worse than forecast at the start of the trip but thankfully not too bad.

2:06pm: Walked around clots of slow-moving people headed to the wrong line to get into the TSA Pre-Check line ahead of them.

2:10pm: Through TSA screening, checked my phone to see home much time I had. Realized I'd been miscalculating— instead of 20 minutes left 'til boarding I have 50 minutes. I could have not rushed so much at lunch. 😅

2:15pm: Catching up on work emails and Slack while charging my computer and phone at one of SAN's many charging kiosks. This old concourse for Southwest is lovingly called "The Circle of Death" by frequent flyers, but this newly refubished charging area is, like, the one plus it's got going for it.

2:48pm: Our aircraft has arrived at the gate. Passengers are disembarking. This is both a good sign as we're less likely to be badly delayed now (because the aircraft is here) but also a bad sign because we're likely to be at least ~10 minutes late.

3:05pm: Boarding call. Time to line up. I'm A19.

3:12pm: Boarding as A19 I can usually get an exit row aisle seat, but today a cluster of guys just ahead of me in line grab all the exit row aisles. They're all 5'11".

3:13pm: I pick an aisle in row 3 as my second choice. Soon enough the row is packed in all the way across. And my knees are touching the back of the seat in front of me.

3:28pm: Boarding seems complete, maybe we'll leave on time?

3:33pm. Nope, a few more stragglers boarded.

3:38pm: And a few more stragglers. This group are a family of 4, with 2 small kids. And the only seats left are 4 scattered middles. The flight attendants are begging people to switch seats for them.

3:49pm: Wheels up. We're about 15 minutes behind.

4:29pm: Hawk and I start our "What do you want for dinner?" negotiation via text while I'm at 38,000'. Yay, in-flight wifi! Yay, it being free because of my elite status!

4:55pm: We're on final approach. Hawk has offered to pick me up so I don't have to take Uber/Lyft home. Instead of Lyft I use Byrd!

5:05pm: Standing on the curb at SJC. Disembarking was fast (I was in row 3) as was exiting the airport. Too bad Hawk is stuck in traffic coming to meet me.

5:30pm: Picked up by Hawk at SJC; we ride off to dinner in downtown San Jose.

Friday Night Halfway in... Chowchilla?

Tonight we're at a hotel in Chowchilla, California. No, not chinchilla. That's a species of rodent native to the Andes Mountains of Chile. Chowchilla. It's a town of approximately 19,000 people in California's Central Valley. By California standards that's basically a highway rest stop, though by New Zealand standards... it's twice the size of the towns of Clinton and Gore, combined.

Chinchillas
(image from Wikipedia article)

Why Chowchilla? It's Friday Night Halfway. We're headed to a couple of hikes in the Sierra National Forest tomorrow. Today's drive of 128 miles knocks out a few hours of travel, leaving us a drive of just 56 miles, about 1 hour 15 minutes, to our first hiking trail tomorrow.

We got stuck in some traffic driving to Chowchilla this evening. Normally it'd be a drive of just over 2 hours. Leaving at 4:45pm— which, yes, was less than 24 hours after I got home from a business trip 🥵— we caught a bit of early rush hour traffic driving south to Gilroy on US-101. We stopped for dinner in Gilroy wondering if maybe the traffic east through the Pacheco Pass might clear a bit but, alas, it didn't. We were stuck in the usual Friday Night Escape misery on CA-152. We'd lost almost an hour to traffic delays by the time we got to Los Banos. We stopped there for a bathroom break, leg stretch, and ice cream cones. Oof, I really needed the leg stretch. And the ice cream was good, too. 😂

Continuing east from Los Banos it was smooth sailing the last leg of the trip to Chowchilla. We arrived at our hotel at 8:45pm, for a trip of 4 hours including traffic and food stops.

What's in Chowchilla, other than approximately 19,000 people? Well, first of all, that 19,000 figure apparently includes the inmates in two area prisons. How many are free to leave their rooms in the morning like we will, I don't know. 😂

Chowchilla really is a highway rest-stop type of town. I mean, people do live here. We passed by many houses and a few apartment buildings on the drive in. It's an agricultural town. People who live here presumably work the farms in this area and the businesses that support them. And staff the two prisons. 😂 But the businesses in town are mostly gas stations and a few fast food restaurants clustered near highway 99.

Update: You know what happens after Friday Night Halfway, right? It's Saturday Morning the Rest of the Way!