Back to the Airport Less Than 12 Hours Later

Just over 11 hours after getting home from a week+ long trip last night I've turned around to head back to the airport this morning. This time it's a business trip. I'm headed to Austin for 3 days to staff a trade show and meet f2f with some prospective customers in town.

To maintain sanity and some semblance of work-life balance with this fast turnaround I've booked the later flight this morning. I'm on the 10:45am departure to Austin. It'll get me in about an hour late for the start of the trade show late this afternoon, but that's the tradeoff I'm making. The alternative was to fly on a 6:35am departure, which.... Just no. I'm not getting up at 4am on my first day back from a week of PTO.

In the past I would've felt a bit guilty about arriving an hour late for the show. At this job, though, I've found nobody else, including our event organizers, is diligent about always being there on time— or at all. I'm not going to run myself ragged for a team where nobody else is pulling that hard. I'll keep my sanity and preserve my work-life balance.

Now I'm just hoping airline delays don't turn my one-hour tradeoff into missing more of the event. 😅

Trade Show Day 1

Day 1 of this trade show is over. I've been back in my room with my shoes off since just before 10pm. Not that this Day 1 is any big accomplishment. It's the easiest of the 3 days of this show.

Much of the day I spent flying from San Jose to Austin. The flight was uneventful, though it did fall a bit behind schedule. Then I hit some afternoon traffic getting over to the resort. In all I didn't get to the trade show floor until over an hour after the show started. But at least my room at the hotel is nice.



This is the Omni Resort Barton Creek in Austin. It's not the Omni "in" Austin, it's the one maybe 10 miles away from the city center. Out here they actually put some hills in the Hill Country of Texas.



The company running this conference generally picks nice, resort-y hotels for their events. And for me it's a bonus that it's not Las Vegas. I hate Las Vegas. It's so much more pleasant looking out the window and seeing this than seeing yet-another Strip view... or, more often, a parking garage and a freeway 30 stories below.

After working the booth for an hour in the evening shift I boarded a shuttle to a barbecue restaurant my company was co-sponsoring a dinner at. Lest you think, "Woohoo! Boondoggle!" the fact that my company is co-sponsoring means I attended as a co-host. That meant guiding people to the shuttle vans from the hotel lobby and working the room during cocktail hour to make sure nobody was left alone in a corner. (Because this is a techie conference there were several people being left alone in corners... and generally they wanted to be left alone... and generally it was better for everyone that they were. 😅) In between that and eating and drinking I had several good conversations with customers and prospects.