Tuesday, June 13, 2006

On the Road

From time to time, I have to travel as part of my job. Tomorrow is one such time - I get to go to Birmingham. I'm not looking forward to it, but when I first accepted the job I really did think that it would be a nice perk to travel about a bit. It never is though as it usually involves cheap hotels, lots of rushing about and rarely seeing mcuh of the place.

In a previous job, I once spent a week doing a series of events around the country and each time we stayed in a Post House hotel, which were pretty much identical. It was awful. By the end of the week, I could hardly remember which town I was in, like some aging rock star on a stadium tour.

The same 'tour' was very high security as we were working for a defence company, who were expected to be a target for protesters. (This never sat easily with my conscience and I always expected to fail the security clearance as I had once been to a Socialist Working Party meeting.) We had to be accompanied by a security expert, who had a suitably mysterious background that invovled work in the military that he couldn't talk about. He was a small man, but made it clear that he would be ready for whatever situation arose. In the end, nothing happened at all and he was visibly crestfallen at the end of the week.

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