Travel – we’re getting the hang of it

I’ve chronicled our travel debacles since Nuha’s birth in a couple of places now. Travelling with multiple pieces of luggage, frustrated and harried at airports, struggling to console our daughter on planes. But I have to say, we did real well this time. As we left home for Paris, and eventually Istanbul, we did so with two medium sized suitcases and a small carry-on, all well under the weight limit. Beyond that, I had a small backpack that I planned to use during our treks. We were ready before the shuttle arrived to pick us up, patiently waiting by the door, which in itself represented a marked change from our previous trips, where I’d usually be busy with last minute things, praying for the taxi to be late.

But the hot streak didn’t end there. Security lines, which once used to be child’s play, had become terrifying ordeals that we hated. This time around, however, it was like a finely choreographed dance - eliminate liquid containers before the line, grab multiple bins in one go, deposit jackets/belts/shoes in one, laptop in another, and backpack in the third. Shoes off, ticket in one hand, baby in another, deliver strategic ninja kicks to expertly collapse stroller, and walk through. Done!

Actually, the entire journey was a series of high fives between Saeeda and I. All except for one incident. We had boarded our KLM flight from SFO to Amsterdam, and the flight attendant, sitting in a jumpseat directly in front of us, asked us to buckle Nuha in. Nuha, however, wanted nothing doing . And so began a Class A, Premium Quality Meltdown of the 1st Degree. We’re talking writhing, hollering, hell-raising screaming, with tears and snot streaming out in copious amounts. Our neighboring passengers did their best to ignore the tirade, and we did our best to control Nuha, but to no avail. We were “those” parents with the uncontrollable child, and I could tell everyone was doing mental math to figure out how long they would be stuck beside us. Thankfully, the tantrum stopped the moment we reached cruising altitude and unbuckled Nuha. I think the flight attendant figured out what was in her best interest too, because during landing she turned a blind eye as we waited until the last possible minute to buckle Nuha, and then unbuckled her the first opportunity we got.

Still, all in all this was one of our most successful trips ever, and I’m hoping that it’s something that we can build on.

A volcanic disruption in review

My European travel adventures finally came to came to a successful end on Tuesday. On that day, the authorities in charge finally relented and airspace opened back up, allowing stranded passengers to start making their way to their respective destinations. All in all, this experience was an interesting and not entirely unpleasant one

Traveling in Europe is fun at any time, but doing so by relying completely on your own wits, rather than the boring predictability of planned schedules – there’s something exciting about that. Of course, I was blessed throughout this experience in that I was traveling on business, and hence was the ward of my multinational employer with covered expenses and dedicated travel agents ( albeit ones who refused to pick up the phone). There was also never a pressing emergency that had me desperate to be home, although it has emerged since my return that my wife and I have different definitions of “emergency” - a wailing, inconsolable toddler constitutes an emergency, I now know. Finally, my contact with stranded families aching to be home, or of stranded students running out of money and living off airport cots was sobering, to say the least.

Perhaps most interesting was the dynamic that was in play between the airlines and the governing authorities. At the outset, the public saw the decisive action taken by the EU as reassuring, despite stranded passengers grumbling about the delay - visions of planes with clogged jet engines falling from the sky made sure that few questioned the initial decision. But then something interesting happened. Airlines began to bleed money. As the shutdown stretched from hours to days, it became clear that grounded air traffic was going to lead to a severe financial impact. Airlines began taking “test flights” to check if it was ok to take to the skies, although I found it interesting that none of the test flights took place through the ash clouds themselves, or flew at much lower altitudes than normal. CEOs began exhorting the authorities to open up the skies, that the shutdown was draconian and excessive. There was even talk of bailouts.

And the EU relented. Despite any conclusive evidence that proved it was safe to fly, the Net Present Value swung in favor of letting planes off the ground. Someone will write an interesting analysis on this someday, but you could sense the equation changing on a daily basis.

Day 1: Planes crashing as a result of volcanic ash = no planes allowed to fly.

Day 3: $200 million in daily losses = hmm, is this volcano thing really that bad?

Day 5: Screw the volcano. We need to get s#%* moving again!

Ah economics. What a truly dismal science.

I leave you with a few pictures I was able to snap on my crappy Blackberry camera as I decided to make the most of my stay in Germany and Switzerland:

Chili flavored chocolate? Really, O Swiss people? Have desis so pervaded your society that you feel you need to cater to us?

Entrance to Dachau. "Work will set you free"

Surfing(!) in Munich. This is in the middle of the city.

With Mike's Bike Tours

Marienplatz - the old town center at night. Much prettier in real life.

Me, the Autobahn, and Lady Gaga

The norm for “seeing Europe” is usually after one’s college graduation, and before the start of one’s first job. It is an American rite of passage – a last hurrah before one has to buckle down and begin worrying about things like contributing enough to a 401k to make sure to get an employer match. But given this stupid volcano, I’m now living every fresh college graduate’s dream European vacation.

Today I bid goodbye to Munich, and headed to pick up my rental car for the journey to Zurich, which is where I had managed to find the next available flight out on Swiss Air. Driving in Europe is a ton of fun – you invariably get a German car with a great engine, and you get to speed on autobahns where it’s easy to push 100 mph. Picking up the car was just as much fun for me, though, because the rental car agency I had found was at the main train station in the center of the city, which meant having to use zigzagging alleys and one-way streets to get out of the city and on to the highway.

It’s hard not to feel a little like Jason Bourne during the process. Ok, maybe it’s hard for me not to feel a little like Jason Bourne. But come on! I don’t speak the language, but I’m at ease in my alien environment. I’m at places of mass public transit, wending and weaving my way through strangers who know nothing about my mission. I convince agents to lend me a car, using one of my many credit cards linked to offshore accounts. I locate my vehicle in a non-descript, off-site parking structure, load my minimalist belongings, rev the engine, and zoom my way across narrow roads, knowing where to go only by instinct … and by the aid of my GPS (which I set to speak at me in a haughty British accent).

Driving is indeed a lot of fun in Europe, even putting aside the great highways with no speed limits. The countryside is so ridiculously postcard perfect. In my case, I passed countless small villages clinging to valley riversides, with the Alps soaring in the background. Farms flew by, with cows lazily lounging in the fields. And every now and then I’d pass through small towns where I’d pull up next to an old church, built an impossibly long time ago.

The only blemish on this driving experience was the music. Europop itself is fine – I kinda like the catchy pop-tunes that make up most continental hits. And I really enjoyed listening to German, Italian, and French songs, even though I didn’t understand a word. It was part of the experience of being in a foreign land. But that’s what made the amount of American crud playing on each and every single radio station absolutely infuriating. I don’t claim to have a trained ear, nor do I claim to have any deep knowledge of music, but even I can tell good American music from formulaic, vapid crap. Among the songs that were on infinite replay on all the radio stations was that ludicrous song by that guy who would like to make himself "believe that planet earth turned slowly” and for some reason wants to “get a thousand hugs, from 10,000 bugs” (why is he asking each bug to hug him ten times?) Or something like that. Owl City, is the name of the band, I think. And then there was Lady Gaga. You know that song – the one where the chorus sounds like she’s trying to gargle while singing – “rah-rah-ah-ah-ah, roma roma-ma, ga-ga ooh la la.” WTF?!

Both these vomit inducing songs played with such regularity that I eventually just had to turn the radio off, and resort to my trusty British GPS guide to entertain me the rest of the way. The three and a half hour drive went by a lot quicker than I expected, and I pulled into my Zurich office in the afternoon, surprising my coworkers who thought they had seen the last of “that corporate guy from California.”

Tomorrow promises to be another exciting day – will I get to fly out? Will I be moving to yet another city? Will I have to endure more Lady Gaga? Who knows.

Unpronounceable volcanoes

My ability to withstand infuriatingly unhelpful travel agents continues to amaze me. Yesterday I stopped living in 90 min. increments (average wait time for an operator), and resigned myself to the fact that I will get home when I get home. This means that I'm no longer splitting time between keeping my bags packed in case my flight leaves from Munich, walking around the city entertaining myself, and wasting away on hold on the phone. This is a better approach anyway, since now I can relax and catch up on email, and spend time surfing the web again.

I arrived in Switzerland last week, and eventually moved to Germany for meetings. I was supposed to fly out of Stuttgart on Friday, connect to Munich, and then go straight to San Fran by Friday evening. That's when that silly volcano with that unpronounceable name started to mess with a finely tuned aviation system, and all air travel went haywire. Since then, I've taken a train to Munich, scrambled for a hotel over 1,000s of other people (and with the year's biggest convention starting here this week), sat around for three days while my rescheduled flights were cancelled repeatedly, contemplated taking the 8 hour train to Greece or Turkey (only places functioning close to normal), commandeered a rental car, and will be driving to Zurich tomorrow.

We have an office there where I should be able to camp out - perhaps literally as I have not found a hotel room yet. The second-biggest problem right now is finding lodging. People who were supposed to leave, haven't. And people who were in transit have arrived, which means availability in cities is tight. Still, being productive in an office, surrounded by my coworkers who speak the language and can help with travel arrangements is bound to be better than being useless in Munich.

I was on the phone with our travel agent for the umpteenth time this morning, re-booking yet another flight, when she mentioned that I should look into cruise lines. Apparently some forward-thinking passengers booked themselves on ships last week when the airports started shutting down, and many of them are already arriving in the US. Craziness. And it's not like the airlines know more than the rest of us - yesterday I ran into a pilot from Delta and stewardesses from Continental who had no idea when they would be leaving. When I used my Blackberry to look up the latest info on Lufthansa's website on airport closures, they were grateful because it provided them more of an update than they were getting from their HQ. I learned that flight crew are provided with company-issue laptops or cell phones, and instead just rely on wherever they get internet access.

By the way, I'm looking forward to my 3.5 hr drive tomorrow, since the only car that was available, and which I snagged, was a Mercedez sedan. The problem is that it's a manual transmission, which I last drove when I was in high school in Pakistan. I'm not worried though - I maintain that anyone who learns to drive on the streets of Karachi can out-maneuver James Bond in a car chase. I'll get to put my theory to the test tomorrow as I try to navigate out of Munich's old-town , with its classic windy, narrow, European streets, and onto the autobahn.

Possibly the worst part of all this (other than trying to convince my wife that no, secretly I'm not having the time of my life) is that I can't swear at this f#$%!@* volcano properly. It's not like, "Damn Mt St. Helens!" or "shit Pinatubo, why did you have to screw things up?". No, the ridiculous name of this volcano is impossible to pronounce, which makes venting of anger near impossible.

Maybe I'll dial my travel agent again.

i-Yawn

I wanted to wait a while before posting about the new i-Pad. So much hype preceded the launch of the latest device from Apple, so it wouldn't have been fair to discuss it without some time going by and letting thoughts settle.

But really? An oversize iPhone is all Apple could come up with? Granted the pricing is attractive, but netbooks continue to drop in retail price, and satisfy the needs of the casual websurfer just fine (albeit with some performance issues, but these should diminish with time). So Steve Jobs couldn't have thought this was going to displace the mobile computing marketplace (especially since the iPhone is already leagues ahead of competition in this regards).

No, I think the real value of the iPad is going to be in the eBook space, and the skirmish this has started with Amazon. There are several things going for the iPad in this regards - the iTunes-like store for books, the ePub format, and an interesting revenue-sharing contract with publishers are a few of them. Amazon doesn't need to worry about it's online bookstore engine, but the proprietary Kindle format and its pricing agreements with its publishers is of concern. I own a Kindle, and love it, but already the iPad has forced Amazon to move away from its loss leading $9.99 price for eBooks. I won't be too happy to see prices for books go up, so I'm waiting to see what happens.

Extra competition is good, and eventually you'll see innovation drive advances in the electronic publishing industry. As a consultant, I worked on eBook projects in 1999, but the platforms just weren't there, and projects fizzled. Now, with the iPad and Kindle going at each other, I'm looking forward to some true change (I haven't played around with the Sony Reader or the BN Nook to form much of an opinion on those devices).

But to come back to my original reaction to the iPad. Only the Apple fanboys can truly believe they are getting a successor device to the iPod and iPhone when they buy the iPad. For the rest of us, it's the shot fired across the electronic publishing world that should get us salivating.

What defines career sucess?

In the next six months I’ll be making a transition in my career. I’ll be staying at the same company, but will be moving off from a program that I’ve been part of for the last three years. The opportunity is a rare one – there are only so many times in one’s career where there is the opportunity to choose from multiple positions, knowing that some of these can take one’s career in a completely different direction. However, let me be clear - given the economic environment, there are multiple candidates vying for these same opportunities, so it’s important to network with senior management and get your name out there.

So last week I set up time with a Senior Manager to discuss opportunities on her team, but more importantly to get general career advice regarding the division in which I am interested. This individual has been at Abbott for a few years now, and has several staff reporting to her. Most of the half hour conversation was spent discussing my strengths, and what sort of a fit positions on her team (if they materialize) would be for my goals. Towards the end of our friendly conversation, she asked about my transition to California, and how the experience here differed from other places where I had lived.

When I mentioned that I had started out on the East Coast, her eyes lit up. Probing further it turned out that we were alums of the same institution – the University of Virginia. She mentioned that she obtained her MBA from the Darden business school at UVA in 2002, and I responded that I had attended UVA as an undergraduate.

“So did I,” she said.

“Really?” I asked. “I graduated in 1998 from the Engineering school. You?”

“1998. From the Engineering School.”

Although I should have been excited to find an alum from the same school and program all the way out in Santa Clara, CA, I felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. Here I was, having spent 30 minutes getting career advice from a personable, accomplished Senior Manager who had clearly achieved success. And yet we were the same age, and had started our careers at the same time. And she was my senior (by quite a bit).

I tried to recover a little by expressing surprise at what a small world we lived in, and asking who else I should network with.

“Do you know X?” she asked. Of course, I replied – he was a General Manager in charge of our Asia-Pacific operations, and I had heard his name mentioned often.

“He also graduated from UVA. 1998”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, other than her telling me to stop by if I had any other questions in the future. I was too busy trying to figure out where my career path had slowed down relative to these successful individuals, to do anything other than meekly thank her and leave.

So that remains the question. How does one define career success? A title, a corner office, multiple direct reports? A high salary, great responsibility? Personal fulfillment? And what timelines should be attached to those goals? I understand that I switched careers – from consulting to healthcare – and that I should not measure my path directly to the Senior Manager I met with, since she graduated with an MBA three years before I did. But how should I advise my daughter as she grows up? Should she try to get to b-school as soon as she can? Is working for seven years before grad school (like her dad), going to slow down her career trajectory? Or is the perspective that comes with time in the industry reward in itself?

Whatever the answers, I know I’ll continue networking. After all, I have lost ground to make-up.

H1N1 success ... at last

Burned twice, nothing was going to stop me now. I was a freaked out parent on the prowl, willing to go to any length to get my child that elusive vaccination I had been seeking for weeks now. I'm sure part of it had to do with the paranoia sweeping California regarding the virus, and part of it had to do with me not willing to consider the scenarios where I *could* have done something, but didn't.

So it was off to the Santa Clara fairgrounds again, where yet another free clinic was being held. Except this time I showed up at 6:30am. And this time I was ready. I had my cold weather gear (it was 35 degrees), I had my lawn chair, and I had my New York Times (the Sunday edition takes me hours to read cover to cover). Once the line started to move, I planned to call Saeeda to drive over with Nuha, and then the three of us would hang out until we got the shot.

As it turned out, my showing up that early was a good idea, because there was already a ridiculous line of people waiting before me. And with that line came the associated entrepreneurs, selling everything from churros to eternal salvation (some Church group or other passing out pamphlets). One guy was even dressed up as a Subway sandwich and was handing out coupons.

By 9am, I had called Saeeda, who arrived with an unsuspecting Nuha in tow. It was a good thing they got there when they did, because the line had started to move, and beyond a certain point the police were not letting anyone hold places in line for anyone. There were a lot of distraught parents, one of whom had been holding a spot only to realize that they had gone past the point where they could usher their family in later.

It was around 11am by the time we finally made it INTO the fairground building where the shots were being administered. The scene was surreal, and instantly made me think of a Hollywood disaster flick - queues of confused people in a vast hall being directed by authoritative staff and conflicting signs; nurse stations quickly processing vaccine administrations; doctors and emergency personnel standing by in the wings; relieved patients walking out quickly, just glad that the ordeal was over.

The unsuspecting victim before heading inside:

The line inside:

Uh oh:

All done!: