Business Trip

I’ve just returned from a business trip. It seems like I’ve been traveling a lot for work lately. Four flights in the past five weeks. It’s getting a bit old.

When I travel for business I always pack a pair of jeans. I don’t get to wear them during the trip, as the meetings I attend always call for business attire. But when I get to the airport for the flight home, I duck into the men’s room and change from my dress slacks into my jeans. It makes the flight home more comfortable, signals to me that that business is over, and I can finally relax.

But this little routine of mine took an unexpected twist this time.

I walked into the men’s room at the Minneapolis airport to change my pants. I went into one of the stalls, shut the door and set my bag down. As I turned, the toilet flushed. I turned and noticed this stall had one of those motion-detected flushing systems. Those are nice – you don’t have to touch a handle and you don’t have to worry that the guy who used the stall before you left you a nasty surprise.

The stall was rather narrow. I slipped out of my dress pants and hung them on the hook on the inside of the door. That movement caused the toilet to flush again. I reached down and pulled my jeans out of my carry-on bag – and the toilet flushed again. I stepped into my jeans, began to pull them up – and the toilet flushed again.

I’m not really paying attention to this, just trying to change my pants and catch my flight. As I button my jeans, the toilet flushed again. And then I hear a man’s voice outside the stall say, “Man, that guy must be having a real problem.”

It takes me a second before I realize he’s talking about me. All of the flushing – the guy must think I’m sick, have diarrhea, or having a particularly bad time on the john. As I reach down to put my dress slacks into my carry-on, the toilet flushed again.

“Jeez,” says another voice. There must be two guys out there.

So I turn back to the toilet and wave my hand in front of the sensor. Flush.

“This must be a bad one,” I hear the first guy say.

I wave my hand again. Flush.

I moan a little bit. Wave my hand again. Flush.

“Hey, buddy, are you okay?” the first guy says.

“I’m…” wave the hand again. Flush “…uh, uh okay…”

“Let’s go,” says the second guy. “I don’t need to hear this before getting on a plane.”

I hear them leave.

When I got home I told the story to MBW. We both had a chuckle over it.

I wonder what stories the other guys told?

It’s Great to be The Family Man.

If you enjoyed this post, visit The Camping Machine)to read more like it.

I've got a ways to go

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend updating and tweaking The Camping Machine website. It is not where I want it to be in terms of look and content, but it is slowly getting there. I would love to be able to link this blog directly into the blog page of that site, but so far no luck. Right now it is impossible for people to comment on the blog posts - I've asked people to use the guestbook to comment, but that is not as easy as clicking the comment button on a Blogger blog. I'd love to rebuild the site in Dreamweaver and repost it, but that will take me years. If you haven't taken a look, please visit www.thecampingmachine.com and let me know what you think.

As I mentioned before, I'm trying to expand this blog a bit. I want to incorporate more material and expand the editorial options. The focus will always be what it has been here - stories about our family. But in the summertime, especially in between the spring and fall youth soccer season, we focus our summer around the camping trips we're planning to take. As we enter our third year as enthusiastic and proud members of the RV Nation, I'm thinking that when it is all said and done, and I'm on my deathbed, one of the things my kids will say is, "Dad, we sure had fun going on all those camping trips, didn't we? It was great to get out and see all the different parts of the country. Those were some great times." At least that's what I hope they'll say - about 50 years from now!

Speaking of deathbeds, I had a very interesting dream the other night, which I will detail here in a week or so. Also we had an interesting incident on our last camping trip that is an entertaining story, which I'll have to tell soon, while it is still fresh. For those of you who have read this blog for awhile, you're guessing that it involves Tommy - and you'd be right.

On The Camping Machine (www.thecampingmachine.com) website I am re-running some of my favorite posts from this blog. I am finding there are different readers going to The Camping Machine site, readers who have never been here. The Camping Machine website has been linked to from a couple of RV links pages and some traffic has come from there. Those readers don't know The Family Man, so I'm sharing some posts so they will see that the site is more than just camping.

If you are kind enough to link to this blog, I would ask you to change your link to The Camping Machine (www.tehcampingmachine.com) , as at some point I will cease posting here and put all of my writing on that site. If you know of anyone who'd be willing to link to The Camping Machine (www.thecampingmachine.com) please send them there. I will return the favor as I have a pretty robust links page, which seems to get a fair amount of hits.

Thank you again for reading this blog.

It's Great to be the Family man