Unlike most young professionals, I don't often get the opportunity to travel around. Even when I do, I get to go to places like Reading or Basingstoke.
Today I got an all expenses trip to Milton Keynes with my colleagues.
It didn't start well when my colleague lost one of her pearl earrings on the train to Vauxhall.
Then we got to Euston and found the first train to Milton Keynes. All my other colleagues got onto the platform but I had a different type of ticket which did not allow me onto Virgin Trains so I had to call everyone back to find another train operated by a different company. The glares I got from the Virgin Trains staff and some of the other passengers were pretty impresive!
Eventually we got to Milton Keynes where we due to visit the home of one of the residents and paint their living room. I will call him Mr A for the purposes of this anecdote. When we arrived, Mr A's massive dog emerged to great us. I'm not a big dog person so Mr A spent a lot of time trying to reassure me that the dog wouldn't bite my hand off. He even tried to make me feed it dog biscuits which added to my discomfort. Then he gave us the grand tour, featuring his avery full of budgies.
More challenges came when we found that Mr A had not really prepared for our visit. The room was full of furniture and ornament. In addition the room had very textured wallpaper which immediately posed a problem. Were we going to paint over the wallpaper? Would Mr A want he wallpaper to be stripped? Then when the paint did arrive, it was the wrong colours and the wrong brand. No amount of persuasion could make Mr A change his mind and allow his room to be redecorated. After a few frantic telephone calls to the head office, it was decided that there was no option but to cancel the redecoration of Mr A's room. Having spent a few hours at his house, it was a little embarrassing to leave the living room in exactly the same state it was when we arrived.
Unfortunately the problems did not end there. We then had to find a taxi back to the station and in the process found ourselves between a bleak college campus, a school and the housing estate we had just visited. The taxi coming to collect us got lost trying to find us. Then on the train home we sat with a tattoo artist and started chatting. He told us about all the bizarre tattoos he'd been asked to do and even offered to give my colleague a free Winnie the Pooh tattoo if she was ever in Northampton. It certainly made the journey home more entertaining!
Most work trips I have been on previously have not had any notable moments. In fact, the most exciting thing to happen normally is trying not to fall asleep in a meeting. I think it was one of those days where the sequence of events just got more and more bizarre. I plan to be a lot more cautious when I am asked to attend work trips in future, there are too many opportunities for stange things to happen.
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