Wednesday was the last night in Silicon Valley on the last-minute business trip. Nick and I had to go see San Francisco.
Being a boss has weird moments … like that whole “mentoring” thing. So I’ve been unintentionally mentoring Nick, one of our newer employees, on the ways of travel. While I have been on dozens of trips (both business & vacation), Nick had never been on a plane until Monday afternoon.
Part of Nick’s learning experience is handling customers on-site. Nick is the stereotypical brilliant programmer in a Hawaiian shirt, coding away at obscure things. He’s picked up a lot in a short time at the company, and is perfect for the engineering task ahead.
Thinking back this is a lot like my first time on a customer assignment ten years ago … except I got stuck in the suburbs of Boston for two weeks, I’m not as good of a programmer and I had advance notice of the trip. Aside from that, exactly the same.
So the post-work-pre-departure finale to the trip was a quick jaunt into San Francisco. The short walk through Chinatown turned in to a longer walk with some shopping, then a slightly longer walk due to a wrong turn … then we somehow ended up in Little Italy, but that turned out okay, and we wandered back towards the car … then we discovered the San Francsco Brewing Company is between Little Italy and our parking space, so we had to support the local economy.
Long story short (too late) we ambled through town till after 10:00pm … which meant all of the resuatrants had closed and we settled for In & Out Burger on the drive back to Sunnyvale. By “settled for” I mean “ate somewhere Nick always wanted to go because it sounded neat, but hadn’t been to because it was ont he other side of the country”. In & Out Burger isn’t fancy, but it has quite the image due to decades of clever retro-style marketing.
So a good business trip was had by all. Now I just need Nick to buy some slacks for his next business trip. Damn college kids.
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