Rebooking My Trip at 41,000 Feet
Nov. 11th, 2025 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerTexas Trip log #2
41,000' over Nevada · Tue, 11 Nov 2025. 7pm.
I'm not even halfway to Texas yet and already my plans for the rest of the week have changed. The customer I intended to visit in San Antonio on Friday couldn't get all of their people together on the same day. Instead we'll meet with them virtually, and probably next week. That means I should go home Thursday instead of Friday, and I don't need a rental car to drive to San Antonio.
Unfortunately this is the way enterprise selling is in 2025. Face-to-face meetings are rare anymore. Scheduling them with customers and prospects is like pulling teeth, and even once they agree to a meeting date they often renege on it. It's like nobody can commit anymore.
Fortunately I know it's 2025, not 1995 unlike a certain senior politician who seems to think "Bring back Johnny Carson [to host the Tonight Show]" is a reasonable demand. (Johnny Carson stepped down from hosting that show in 1992 and retired to private life. He died in 2005.) I anticipated that the customer in San Antonio had at least a 50/50 chance of flaking on us, so I held onto two homeward flight reservations: one on Thursday and one on Friday. I simply canceled the one on Friday. And, as I got the news of them flaking out just before boarding the flight, I was able to do that from my phone while sitting in my seat while the aircraft was still parked at the gate.
Cancelling my rental car reservation took a bit longer. I waited until I could take out my laptop computer for that. Though by the time we were 41,000' feet above Nevada I couldn't get my computer to connect to Southwest's flaky wifi. So I went through "Sorry, that username or password couldn't be found" purgatory on my mobile phone trying to pull up the booking site to cancel the car.
41,000' over Nevada · Tue, 11 Nov 2025. 7pm.
I'm not even halfway to Texas yet and already my plans for the rest of the week have changed. The customer I intended to visit in San Antonio on Friday couldn't get all of their people together on the same day. Instead we'll meet with them virtually, and probably next week. That means I should go home Thursday instead of Friday, and I don't need a rental car to drive to San Antonio.
Unfortunately this is the way enterprise selling is in 2025. Face-to-face meetings are rare anymore. Scheduling them with customers and prospects is like pulling teeth, and even once they agree to a meeting date they often renege on it. It's like nobody can commit anymore.
Fortunately I know it's 2025, not 1995 unlike a certain senior politician who seems to think "Bring back Johnny Carson [to host the Tonight Show]" is a reasonable demand. (Johnny Carson stepped down from hosting that show in 1992 and retired to private life. He died in 2005.) I anticipated that the customer in San Antonio had at least a 50/50 chance of flaking on us, so I held onto two homeward flight reservations: one on Thursday and one on Friday. I simply canceled the one on Friday. And, as I got the news of them flaking out just before boarding the flight, I was able to do that from my phone while sitting in my seat while the aircraft was still parked at the gate.
Cancelling my rental car reservation took a bit longer. I waited until I could take out my laptop computer for that. Though by the time we were 41,000' feet above Nevada I couldn't get my computer to connect to Southwest's flaky wifi. So I went through "Sorry, that username or password couldn't be found" purgatory on my mobile phone trying to pull up the booking site to cancel the car.
