Waiting for Gouda

One of my many duties here at the front desk is making travel arrangements for some members of the sales team who fly around the country, trying to get people to give us their money. In theory, this is a fairly simple procedure: they tell me where they want to go, I give them a couple options, they pick one.

It never works that way, however. It usually goes something like this:

One of my colleagues… we’ll call him Brad… sends me an e-mail with a request. Usually something along the lines of… I need to get to Miami first thing Thursday morning. I’d like to leave from Backwater, Indiana around 7am and I need to be in Miami around 8:30, and then I’ll need a car at the airport, which I’ll drive to a meeting and then up to Tampa, from which I’d like to fly out around 8pm up to Boston. Try to get me into Boston before 9, where I’ll need another car and a hotel for the night. Then I’ll leave Boston around noon, but I need to be in the Chicago office before 2pm.

The thing is, I know that Brad has traveled before. I’ve set up many a flight for Brad. Brad really ought to know by now how things work in the world of travel. Brad should realize at this stage in his career that you cannot fly directly from Backwater to Miami, and certainly not in 90 minutes. And yet Brad keeps asking. So I send an email back to Brad telling him that he asks the impossible.

Brad is shocked. Nothing? Brad replies. There’s no flights?

No, Brad. There is no magical superplane that can get you from one end of the country to the other and back before lunchtime. I would like to ask Brad to think back to the last time we played this little game, to remember how airplanes and airports and flight schedules actually work, to remember that there are imaginary boundaries called time zones that might just affect all of this, and to try and keep all of this in mind the next time he needs to set up a meeting that takes places anywhere outside of his own office.

But I realize that this is probably far too tall an order. Brad will not change. Brad, perhaps the very next week, will send me a request:

I have set up a meeting on the Moon for the afternoon of Monday the 25th. If I can, I’d like to leave Chicago early on the 26th, travel backward in time to make a little side trip to Paris for about a half-hour Monday morning, and connect back to Cape Canaveral around noon for the launch. And then, if you can check to see if the space shuttle makes any stops in San Francisco on the way back? Also, I’ll need to pick up a space buggy at the Moonport. Do you have my Hertz Gold Club number?