Work Daze

You will find this hard to believe, but I was once turned down for a job. The reason? After sailing through all the preliminaries, and getting thumbs up from staffers up and down the org. chart, I faced but one final hurdle—a “courtesy, rubber-stamp, no-pressure” lunch with the company’s CEO.

“We’re not hiring him,” I later learned the boss declared after what I considered to be a pleasant-enough repast at a local bistro. “I only hire people that I’d want sitting next to me on a cross-country flight.”

To this day, I don’t know what I did wrong at that lunch. It certainly couldn’t have been my spellbinding stories about teaching archery at boy scout camp, or the photos of my pet parakeet, Mr. Feathers, that I had thoughtfully brought along to display on my lap top computer. And as for my ordering an extra four surf ‘n turfs to take home for my family’s dinner—well, it’s not like the boss had to pay for it out of his own pocket. We were on expense account.

The point of this sad story is that if going to lunch with the boss is this dangerous, imagine the risks of actually taking that cross-country flight with El Queso Grande. It could be a complete, career-ending disaster, or as a recent column by Sara J. Welch in The New York Times recently suggested, “ A Tandem Business Trip Can Be an Opportunity to Stand Out.”

As an example of an employee who turned a trip with the boss into a springboard for promotion, Ms. Welch tells the story of a large-size female employee who, after her airline delivered her to petit-only Manila without her suitcase, “went a whole week dressed in men’s clothes and didn’t bat an eye.”

“The fact that this woman was able to adapt and roll with the punches,” made her boss realize that she could be a “star performer.” That she could also be a cross-dresser apparently did not cross the boss’s petit-size brain, but I still wouldn’t recommend the technique if you happen to be an employee of the male persuasion.

The fact that you could spend a week in female clothing may not be immediately recognized as a knack for “rolling for the punches.” In fact, you may find yourself on the receiving end of a few rather painful verbal punches (and pinches) when you return to HQ.

The Times column does provide a few semi-helpful tips for traveling with the boss. Terry Riley, a corporate psychologist from Santa Cruz, California, suggests that employees should “research the destination and the wants and needs of their traveling companion.”

“Ask the person’s assistant if they have any food allergies, say, or if there’s anything she especially likes to do.”

You certainly can spend time doing this kind of research, and if you learn that your boss is deathly allergic to, say, fish, a lot of potential problems could be avoided simply by showing up at the airport wearing a cologne made up of equal parts ground tuna and raw sardine. There’s no telling how impressive you can be with the boss in intensive care.

As for investigating what the boss “especially likes to do,” that certainly won’t be necessary. Who knows better than you that the boss really enjoys abusing innocent underlings for trivial mistakes that are not their fault. On a business trip of even moderate length, you should be able to find plenty of opportunities to take the blame for events that disappoint your manager, like the absence of Absinthe in the hotel mini-bar, or the excess pulp in the boss’s fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Ms. Welch’s column also cautions low-echelon traveling companions from being too friendly with their betters. Before you change your regular greeting from “Hello, Mr. Important, Sir. And may I say I feel honored to be in your exalted presence” to “Hey, Dude, wazzup?” consider the opinion of Chicago-based, industrial psychologist, Michael Barr, that traveling with a superior is like a job interview—“Remember, you’re being evaluated every minute.”

This is not to say that you can’t ever relax when on the road. After you’ve tucked your boss into bed, you are certainly free to take off and visit that leather and latex biker bar.
And if you see the boss there, remember to take pictures. They’ll be a nice memento for the two of you as you start what I suspect could be a rapid rise up the corporate ladder.