I'm one of those people who float through the world inconspicuously. I try to blend in with the crowd go with the flow, so to speak. If I ate in the same restaurant five days in a row, I'm betting the waitress wouldn't recognize me on the sixth. In a world of exotic spice and vibrant color, I'm vanilla in khaki. Despite my anonymity, I seem to be a magnate for misadventure. OK, occasionally I bring it upon myself, but more often than not it's thrust upon me.
For more than 20 years I've been traveling for business and otherwise. While my experiences might not be all that different from the frequent traveler, I have the distinct feeling that somehow I've been eternally cursed by the travel gods. Lost baggage and cancelled flights aside, traveling is a hassle - even more so since the advent of this post-911 bizarro illusion (or should that be delusion) of enhanced security.
The cookie story from a few issues back was 100% true. Over the years, I've managed to accumulate enough of these experiences to easily fill a book.
Where do I start and what do I leave out? Well I guess I can start at the beginning. My first real business trip turned into an unplanned adventure:
Sir, you'll need to come with us.
It was 1986 and I'm working for a Japanese trading company in New Jersey. Three years in the Northeast and the cold weather was gnawing at me. It was time to move south to Florida. My escape was already planned for a month later. I hadn't given notice yet and was asked to take a trip to the Seattle area and visit dairy suppliers together with a visitor from the home office. In those days, we were exporting a lot of powdered milk products whey protein concentrate and other stuff I hadn't a clue about.
My Japanese colleague spoke no English, which made the trip that much more enjoyable. The trip involved a lot of bowing and pointing. We spent a week looking at cows, looking at milk and looking at the inner workings of factories that honestly reeked so horrifically that I still cringe every time I go past the dairy aisle in the supermarket. Believe me I've been in stinky places before. I've been down wind of a fish drying operation and toured a few slaughter houses not to mention changing a few hundred diapers. This was the kind of smell that hung on your clothes even after two washings and a dry cleaning.
My Japanese friend didn't seem to mind the smell. It was a few years later when I finally had a chance to visit Japan and realized that there were actually a few things that could smell worse than the inner workings of a dairy processing plant. No offense intended to our Japanese readers, but honestly you have to admit that stomaching the smell of natto (fermented soybeans) in the morning requires a bit of intestinal fortitude.
As we were traveling the Pacific Northwest, my colleague was happily collecting samples of the products to take back with him to Japan. When we arrived at the airport to finally part ways and each return home, he opened his briefcase and handed me the five plastic bags filled with white powder each containing about half a kilo of the stuff.
Through a combination of hand gestures and pictographs that was part Kabuki and part charades, he managed to convey the message that he wanted me to carry these samples home with me and then ship them to his office by courier. Not a problem, I assured him with a nod, a smile, a bow and a sayonara good-bye.
Once on my own, I had different thoughts. Number one: I was going home to quit this job, number two: this stuff stunk and I wasn't putting it in with my clothes and number three: I wasn't very excited about the prospects of going through security with 2.5 kilos of an unidentified white powder in my luggage. While security was a different animal in those days, you still had to pass your hand luggage through an x-ray.
I thought about tossing the bags into a nearby trash can, but there were too many witnesses around. I ducked into the nearest men's room, but found a crowd there as well. What else to do? I stepped into one of the toilet stalls, thought about it for a second and then tore open the first bag and started dumping it into the toilet. A puff of a dust cloud rose from the toilet, as the water swirled. I had hoped the cloud was contained within the stall and that others would assume the horrible smell was just, well let's just say the after effects of some bad cheese.
I quickly tore into the remaining four bags and dumped the content into the toilet. As the huge clump swirled its way down, it burped up a final puff of dust. I brushed the dust off my pant legs, picked up my bag and opened the stall door. There, to my surprise, where two Sea-Tac police officers standing with hands on their holstered weapons. Sir, you'll need to come with us was the only thing I heard, as I was snatched by the forearm and dragged to the airport's police station.
Since I had flushed the content of the five bags, it took me about four hours and half a dozen phone calls to convince the police that this was not something illegal. I missed my flight and the next available flight was about 24 hours later. My clothing in my checked bag went on to Newark, I was too poor to afford a hotel room and couldn't explain the expense to my bosses, so I spent that night and the next day wandering the Seattle airport in my stinking, powder-stained suit. Sayonara indeed.