I'm sitting in a bar in Munich, in my best suit, drenched in white wine. You're probably thinking this had something to do with a girl, and you'd only be very slightly right. I'm going to dry off, then blog what happened.
The day started out so nicely. I awoke this morning at the Bear Hotel in Hungerford, west of London. They have a great restaurant, so treated myself to a full english breakfast, the sticks-to-your-arteries kind. I really like this place and wish I could have stayed longer. I had all day meetings with a customer. A pretty high pressure situation, but today was not so bad. We got most of the hard stuff done yesterday. We had time for a long lunch at a local pub.
Fashion is weird - well it is for guys in the technology field. If you show up to a technical meeting in San Jose wearing a tie, you instantly lose about 10 credibility points. You gain points for anything denim, and get bonus points for anything with from MIT or Stanford - even more if there are holes in it. However, in London, even in the technology field, you cannot be the alpha male in the room if you are not in a coat and tie. So today I was in a tailored designer suit.
After the meetings I made a mad panicked rush for the airport. One of my travel rules is never to take the last flight of the day to my destination, but in this case it was unavoidable. If I missed my flight, I missed an important meeting tomorrow morning in Munich. That fact made me a bit more anxious than usual as I made my way through London traffic and Heathrow's lines (queues, as they call them here). I just made my flight - but missed dinner. Ah, nothing like pretzels for dinner on the flight over.
I arrived in Munich at about 11:00 p.m. and caught a taxi to my hotel. Very fortunately, the kitchen was still open when I arrived (close to midnight) and I was able to get dinner - shrimp and linguine, mmm. (Actually, the menu was only in German, and that was the only thing I could make out. It was very good) Unfortunately, my waitress didn't have the steadiest hand in the bar. I ordered a nice german dry reisling, and she brought it with some drinks for the next table. After putting it down she proceeded to spill two glasses of wine on me - not just a minor splash, she got me good. And I swear, I didn't do anything to deserve it. Really. She was very apologetic and she has offered to pay for my dinner and the dry cleaning.
My German customer is pretty casual - so I won't need the suit for the rest of the trip.
4 comments:
u sure u didn't deserve it?
Oh, lordy how I miss when men actually DRESSED for work instead of what was left over from their college days. :)
PS: Pretzels for dinner, ftl!
Anon, perhaps it's karma - can't think of anything I've done to deserve it. And I've never been splashed in a bar - never even seen it in real life (only on TV)
Decker, Fashion *is* a business tool - use it or not - it's ones choice.
Did you look like Don Draper?
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