Travel Disruptions Have Taught Me What I Value.

A few months into my first consulting job, I had landed for my layover only to discover that my next flight was cancelled. There were not a lot of options for flying into Mobile, Alabama, and so a small group of us headed over to the customer service desk to figure out what was next.

I ended up 4^th in line and listened as the folks ahead of me changed their travel plans. The first woman in the line asked what her options were. The customer service rep offered two possibilities: Fly into New Orleans tonight and drive the two hours yourself or wait until the next flight to Mobile tomorrow afternoon.

10 minutes of arguing later, and she still had the same two options in front of her, refusing to pick one. She didn’t want to drive, and she didn’t want to reschedule. Finally, the customer service rep had enough and asked her to step aside so they could help the rest of the people in line.

The next couple of folks quickly made their choice. One choosing to wait a day, the other flying to New Orleans. I picked flying into New Orleans too, though I was kind of nervous about the drive. Still, it was clear that unless I wanted to spend the rest of the evening arguing with customer service or miss a day of my two-day workshop, that was my only option.

After making the change, I called my boss who was also traveling to the client. In fact, he had flown to New Orleans by choice (the tickets were cheaper) and rented a car to get the rest of the way. He had landed much before me and had already done half the drive. Still, he turned around and came to get me so I wouldn’t have to wrestle with renting my own car.

One thing that had come up during our prep for the onsite was the difference between requirements and what I called “desirements” several posts ago.

I shared my travel experience with the client and the takeaway that some things we think are necessary actually need to be treated as optional instead. It’s not always clear which assumptions you need to reevaluate without some sort of push, like that canceled flight or expensive tickets.

Since then, I’ve fundamentally changed how I approach booking travel. A lot of what drives my decisions are personal preferences, many of which I learned from travel mishaps. I sleep worse if I know I might accidentally sleep through a morning flight than if I’m delayed on a late flight. Cost and minimizing time away from my family play a big role too. I still don’t love driving on top of a flight… especially because then I need to leave a lot earlier so I can drive while I’m still alert.

The meta-problem of travel is the choice of what you want to prioritize in your booking or revising decisions. I have many posts on this idea because the outcomes are so clear and the feedback is immediate: getting to the destination (or not), as well as dollars, hours, and your amount of misery / happiness in the process.

The other thing I love about the meta-problem framing is how empowering it is. Travel can often make you feel helpless when things go wrong, which increases how miserable it is. So having this mindset for feeling in control of my destiny is one of those little things I do to make it more pleasant.

This is a rewrite of a blog post from 7 years ago when I hadn’t come up with the term “meta-problem.” https://typethreeerror.blogspot.com/2018/04/soft-vs-hard-constraints.html