Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

When I got home from a quickie trip to New York City earlier this week I remarked that I was too tired to unpack. Well, now I've unpacked. ...Haha, no, it didn't take 3 days to unpack my suitcase. I did that Wednesday morning (after arriving home, exhausted, Tuesday night). But it's taken me until now to mentally unpack from the trip. As part of that I've pushed a few photos from NYC through my pipeline to share.



The hotel my colleagues I stayed in was reasonable for NYC. My room at the 70 Park Ave (photo above) was reasonably sized and comfortably furnished. Oh, and the view out the window was actually a view— across Park Avenue instead of the prison yard-like view out my window last time I stayed in Midtown (at a different hotel). And the 70 Park hotel had a very affordable rate.



At 70 Park we're just a few short blocks south of Grand Central Terminal. My company's virtual office— which is actually its law firm's real office 😅— is just two blocks away, closer to Grand Central. The weather Monday morning as I walked to work was gray and drizzly. It was also cold, though thankfully not as cold as Sunday night.



Up on the 45th floor there are great views from the office. The niceness is blunted by the crummy weather. It's interesting, though, to see Midtown's skyscrapers disappear into the clouds. It's like, when you scrape the sky, sometimes the sky scrapes back.



Our Monday evening piss-up was at the Monarch rooftop bar in Midtown. With the cool and rainy weather there was a pavilion tent covering most of the roof area so it was hard to appreciate the views. Plus, some of my colleagues spent far more time looking through their cocktail glasses than anything else. 😂 "You know we're right next to the Empire State Building?" I asked them as I showed this selfie I took. Then they all ran outside for selfies, too. 🤣

BTW, what's that drink in my hand? It's a Manhattan, of course!



Tuesday's weather in NYC was sunny. Here's a photo from the 45th floor looking south across Midtown. You can see the Empire State Building in the middle.

NYC Quickie Travelog #5
Midtown Manhattan - Tue, 25 Mar 2025, 7:30am

It's been two nights of being up late and two mornings of being up early. Ugh.

The first was because of timezone changes. I flew to New York on Sunday. Going east, the 3 hour time change makes it hard to get to bed at night. I stayed up until 12:30am on my computer before turning out the lights but then tossed and turned in bed until almost 2. I even took a light sleeping pill that didn't seem to help.

The start of the workweek (not counting spending most of my day Sunday traveling for work) came early. My alarm rang at 6:30am. I snoozed it once and, thankfully, it turned out I didn't need to rush. My working spot for the day was just a short walk away, closer than I had estimated last week. I had time to check things on my personal computer in the morning, stop at a bagel shop on the way to work, and still get to the office before most others arrived for the workshop.

Monday was another night of being up late, though I can't blame timezone change for it. I was out with colleagues too late. The company had a reception at a rooftop bar after Monday's training/feedback. It was scheduled for just 30 minutes— the reception, that is— but lasted much longer. A few people peeled off after 30 minutes to get a proper dinner somewhere else; something about them needing "a porterhouse steak and a $200 bottle of wine". Or maybe that was how those of us left slumming it on the rooftop bar saw it. 🤣

I was with a small group that stayed until the bar closed down sometime after 11, then stumbled into another bar on the walk back to the hotel. The group stumbled into the bar. Actually, two stragglers in the group stumbled into the bar. I was already half a block ahead waiting for them to catch up when I noticed them stepping into an Irish pub. I seriously considered leaving their drunk asses there but decided instead to stick with the group... and for the same reasons I'd stuck with they already to that point. They're my team. 🙄

I finally got back to my room— no additional stumbling into bars on the rest of the walk home— a bit after midnight. I undressed and went straight to bed.

My 6:45am alarm today came early, though not quite as early as yesterday. I had spare time then so I relaxed it by 15 minutes today.

I'm feeling only slightly off from last night. Mostly that's because I did not go overboard with drinking last night. I hit the proverbial bottle hard at first, then slowed my pace of drinking— deliberately— after that. Some of my colleagues pounded down 3-4 more drinks while I nursed one. And they don't have the body mass I do. I bet they're going to be hurting when I see them at work in another hour.

NYC Quickie Travelog #1
OAK airport - Sun, 23 Mar 2025, 8:30am

This morning I'm off to New York City. For work. Yes, on a Sunday morning. And not even comfortably late morning. To catch my 9:20am departure out of Oakland Airport— not the closest to home— I set my alarm for 6:30am.

Why NYC? And why sacrifice half of my weekend for work— especially when I haven't yet caught up on taking comp time for when I sacrificed my weekend two weeks ago? Would you believe I volunteered for it. In fact I didn't just volunteer, I basically demanded it. 😣

My company's doing a sales training program Monday and Tuesday in NYC. It's not for everyone; it's for a small, hand-picked tiger team. I heard about it last Monday from a colleague, Mike, who was chosen for the team and asked if I'd be there. "I haven't heard anything about it,' I answered, "Holy shit, you're not on the list," Mike said, checking the calendar. "I can't believe they didn't invite you."

Mike and I discussed it a bit and decided it would really make sense for me to go. I ran by him a 3- or 4 sentence request I'd send to my department head. He agreed with my wording and added he'd tell his sales VP that not including me was "nuts". The VP would be sure to add... persuasion. I sent the message off to my department head right away, while Mike delayed in pinging his VP to give my director time to do the right thing.

Long story short, an invite came through to me by the end of the day. My director was kind of a dick about it, though. 🙄 Maybe the sales VP was too... persuasive... with him. 😅

Once I was invited to the meeting, though, I started to have second thoughts about it. I made my case for going because I hate being left out. This training is for our new product, and people who participate in it this week will be the tip of the spear. We'll be the first to scale up selling it— and in the process we'll learn what works and what doesn't work, and communicate that back to improve the training, and possibly even the product, before they scale out to the rest of the sales organization. Blazing the trail and then paving a path for others to follow in sales is what I do.

But once I got the invite I felt a bit like the dog who always chases cars and finally catches one. Did I really want this? Did I really want to burn half my weekend just to be first? I could lay back like the other 80% of the team and take things as they come— and enjoy my damn weekend. The weather's going to be beautiful back home today, 72° and sunny. I would've gone hiking. Instead I got up early, trudged to the airport, and will spend most of the day playing Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to get to New York where the high temp is in the low 50s and it's supposed to rain tomorrow.

An exchange in the comments on a recent post mentioning weather got me thinking more about how long periods of cold, gloomy weather weigh on a person's spirits. That in turn got me thinking about when such gloom has influenced a major decision. In effect, When has the weather changed your mind about something? ...And I don't mean just, "Gosh, I'm going to stop being in this bad weather." I'm talking about a decision that's a lot larger than the weather itself, but where weather played an informative role or perhaps was a tipping point.

One example that comes to mind for me is when I changed my mind about work-life balance.

Set your wayback machine for this one to 2007, Feb/March-ish. I had been working in sales, enterprise software sales, for a few years at that point. I was helping my company grow and I was traveling all over the US to do it. I was helping develop new territories in the Midwest and Northeast. So lots of trips to Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston— places where winter is long and crummy.

Work travel was still somewhat new to me. I mean, it was and it wasn't. I'd been doing it for almost 3 years so I'd gotten really good at it. But I was new enough at it that I was still figuring out where to set limits. In those 3 years my travel had gone from 20% to 50% to north of 70%.

At the 50% level travel was already cutting into my weeknights activities such as socializing with friends. At 70% it was killing my weekends. Even if I wasn't traveling on the weekend— and I tried to avoid Saturday/Sunday travel for work, though it wasn't always possible— traveling that much had me so tired that a lot of the time I just wanted to stay home and relax on the weekend. That hurt my biggest leisure activity, the one I share with my spouse: hiking. She was already registering her concern about it. I was concerned about it myself, too. But I hadn't yet acted to change anything.

Then a moment of epiphany arrived.

I remember I was on a train platform in New York City. I'd come in on a subway train from JFK Airport to NY Penn Station. I then walked two long blocks from the 32nd & 8th side of Penn Station to the PATH train station at 33rd & 6th, where I'd take the PATH train to New Jersey and walk one block to a hotel. Flying to JFK and transiting through NYC made more sense than flying to EWR on that trip because of price and availability for a non-stop flight. Anyway, I was on the PATH train station. It was nighttime, maybe 10pm, and it was cold. Cold and windy. The cold wind swept right along the platforms.

"Why am I doing this?" I asked myself reflexively. It's my job, of course, was the answer. I amended the question. "Why am I here, working late nights in the cold, to pay a mortgage on a house where it was pleasant and 70° today?"

Understand this was not merely, "Wah! I don't like cold weather!" I get that we all make sacrifices for work. That's the reason it's called work. The epiphany here was not simply that the conditions were tough but that they were tougher than I was getting credit for. They were tough— on me— and nobody else at my company cared. I resolved two things that night. 1) I would speak more forcefully for myself, pushing back against overly tough travel demands. 2) I would seek to find ways to have my business travel not only not wreck my life but actually help it.

Today New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced his resignation. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, will serve the rest of his term when the resignation becomes effective in 14 days. Example news coverage: NBC News article 10 Aug 2021.

Hoisted By His Own Petard

Cuomo has been under fire for months with allegations of improper touching and sexual language against female staffers and others in state government, and retaliation against one woman who filed a complaint. For months he vigorously denied the allegations and resisted calls to step down. He even authorized NY Attorney General Letitia James to conduct an investigation of the matters, boldly predicting that the probe would exonerate him.

James's report proved to be his undoing. The findings released one week ago (link to actual government document[1]; 860KB) were damning. Elected leaders in Cuomo's own party, an increasing number of whom had already joined opposition politicos in calling for his resignation, turned against him en masse. Faced with the real prospect of being impeached and removed by force by the New York State Assembly, Cuomo resigned today.

Guilty or Not Guilty?

A big question on many people's minds is, "Did he do it?" As in, Is he guilty? Some assume Cuomo's resignation is an admission of guilt, but it is not— legally, or otherwise. Cuomo continued to dispute the allegations in his press conference today, characterizing them variously as politically motivated, opportunistic, misleading, and patently false. In fact, after he began his press conference with several minutes of proclaiming his innocence, reporters audibly gasped in surprise when Cuomo uttered the words, "And therefore [I resign]."

It's possible we'll never know the truth of Cuomo's guilt or innocence in many of the charges. The NYAG's report was not a criminal investigation. It does not make a conclusion about whether criminal charges are warranted, nor would the office of the NYAG be the body that directly files any such charges. Criminal charges would have to be investigated and prosecuted at the city or county level. To date one of the allegations is being investigated by a county sheriff's office. More cases may be opened in the future... or not. High-profile resignations such as Cuomo's have a way of blunting calls for prosecution. Right or wrong there's a sense of "We got him!" combined with "He's been punished already" that makes many feel criminal prosecution is unnecessary. Though that's unsatisfying to those of us who want to know the truth of these serious allegations and want that truth to help drive critical changes in clean government.

[1] Yes, I cite primary source documents in my blog. This isn't the first time.

White Plains, NY - Saturday, 12 Jun 2021, 2am.

Wow, it's been a clown show for most of the past 12 hours. Oh, our seats on the flight to New York were nice. Very nice. But that was, like, the one thing that hasn't been screwed up today.

The clown show started with even trying to get to SFO airport. We were hiring a ride for the 2.5 mile trek from Hawk's office, where we'd parked our car. The Lyft app was running painfully slow. Uber wasn't much better. We finally got one of them to recognize what "SFO" is (it took them literally 30 seconds to respond) and requested a ride. The driver was apparently asleep, because he didn't move from the intersection his car was shown at for several minutes. I started calling a different ride with Uber while Hawk called the first driver to ask if he was actually coming for us. He insisted he was. But he didn't move for another 2 minutes, then he started driving the wrong direction. What should have been a 2 minute pickup time turned into 10+.

Meanwhile, on Uber, the advertised 3 minute pickup turned into 10, then back to 3, then actually took 6. As I waited I tried to update my credit card (it's been over a year since I've used either of these services!) but the app kept failing. I gave up after 5 attempts. Hours later Uber emailed me saying "Your credit card didn't work...." Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. I tried to tell you 5 time!

At SFO airport, American Airlines has relocated to the newly rebuilt terminal 1B. It's spacious, modern, and attractive compared to, well, anything, let alone the comparative shit-hole that old terminal 1B had deteriorated to. Buuuut there's a catch. The gates are basically all at the end of a ridiculously long concourse. You have to go almost 1/2 mile past food and shopping to get to where they keep the aircraft. "Great," I thought, "It's becoming like London Heathrow." (LHR is designed to extract maximum money from you while you await your flight.) And half the food and shopping isn't even open yet.

Once we landed in New York I opened my Avis app to check on our rental car. "No cars available for selection," the app alerted me. Uh-oh, would we even have a rental car? Car rentals have turned into a shit-show recently with all the agencies having reduced their fleets over the past year (due to Coronavirus cratering travel) and suddenly everyone wanting to travel again. Last-minute rates for our three day rental were $800 to $1,000+. Fortunately we booked at "only" $200 months ago. But maybe Avis gave our $200 car to someone willing to pay four times as much?

As I arrived on the tram at the rental depot I found a problem of a different color. There were plenty of cars in the lot.... Just the computer system was partially broken. Desk agents were having to call out on two-way radios to fleet attendants for every. Single. Rental. to figure out what car could be assigned. I waited about 10 minutes, making jokes with a fellow customer about "Wouldn't it be great if there were machines that could handle these numbers? And maybe send data over wires?" until I was given my assignment, a nice Ford Escape with heated seats.

Once in the car we had a drive of about 32 miles up to White Plains, NY, where we're staying for the next 3 days. There was traffic even after 11pm because of a combination of stupid people, construction, stupid people afraid to drive near construction work, slow trucks, stupid people afraid to pass slow trucks in the neighboring lane, a bit of drizzle, and stupid people terrified to drive faster than 40mph in a bit of drizzle.

We checked into our hotel at 11:30. Nothing bad happened there. Yay? At the rate things were going it seemed like they should have lost our reservation.

Next I wanted a bit of dinner. Yeah, at nearly midnight it's awfully late for dinner, but I hadn't eaten in over 6 hours. Fortunately there was a pizza delivery restaurant open until 4am. Supposedly. I called them... their phone rang and rang before rolling over to voicemail that was broken. I tried again; same thing. "Maybe order online," our friend, Peter suggested. We did. It worked perfectly. ...Ordering, that is. There was still nobody answering the phone. And no pizza ever arrived. I seriously wonder if they're going to bring me a pizza in the morning, 30 minutes after they open for the day!

Well, now it's 2am. On Pacific time that's only 11pm, so it's not as crazy-late as it seems, but still it's time to get to bed.

UPDATE: As of 10:30am Saturday no misplaced pizza has arrived!