Me, a travel agent

<Begin frustration> To put it bluntly, I had a rather crappy week of work. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind the 4 days work week (well 3.5 days for me since I went in after Linds left on Tuesday), but what I did just sucked.

As part of a workshop I am planning in  Barcelona at the end on April, I spent the week booking hotels and planning the event. I wouldn’t have minded this if I had started planning from the beginning — I would have been down with it 5 weeks ago. Rather a colleague of mine had been in charge of booking everything and we can just say that he never finished it, so it fell onto my plate.

It is so inefficient for me to have to spend a week of my time planning hotels and conference space, when it literally could have been done 5 weeks ago and in much less time. I also found out that on the European teams, not only do I have to plan the bookings, I have to essentially “hand-hold” everyone to make sure they book their flights, hotels rooms, the proper number of nights, how they are getting from the airport to the hotel, etc. No one likes to travel without the proper information, but it seems ridiculous, this level of guidance. </End Frustration>

It all comes down to the learning experience, being part of the global team, located in Europe. There is a very different style of working. Sometimes better than in the US, sometimes worse, and sometimes it is just different. While I can be frustrated and disagree with how they work, I’ll take it as a learning experience for me, as I move forward in my career and manage other people.