Business travel tips

Print your travel itinerary the night before you leave. Look at it long enough to give yourself a general idea of when your flight is and what airline you’re on. Leave it at work.

Discover when you get home that you can’t remember exactly when or how you're flying and you can't log onto your business email account or your account with the airline you’re pretty sure you’re on. Go to bed wondering if you’ll lose your job if you miss your flight the next morning.

Breathe a sigh of relief when you learn at the airport the next morning that you guessed the correct airline and flight.

Eat McDonald’s for breakfast at the airport. Feel fat and gassy the rest of the day.

Plop down in your seat on the plane and discover you're sitting next to someone you used to work with. For the second time in a year. Shiver over the cosmic coincidence.

Don’t pee before you give your client presentation. And wear underwear that climbs so far up your ass you can taste it. Discomfort breeds confidence. Clients pay a lot for that.

Arrive at the airport in plenty of time to discover that your return flight is delayed three hours.

Sit for an irritating half hour next to a lound cell-phone talker who actually yells says, "they'll probe you for whatever probative information they can probe out of you."

Travel with a colleague who has one of those fancy VIP-lounge memberships—and enough pull to get your entire party in the lounge with her.

Pee before you find out you can join her in the VIP lounge, so you have no excuse to check out the undoubtedly cool VIP bathrooms.

Wear a dress shirt you got at Filene’s Basement when you’re in the VIP lounge to reinforce your paranoid fantasies that all the VIP members can tell you’re an interloper just by looking at you.

As you’re finally boarding your return flight, get in line right in front of a belligerent crazy lady who will yell Fuck you! at the gate agent who’s double-checking that her carry-on is an acceptable size. Enjoy your front-row access to the gate agent telling her on no uncertain terms how she’s just fucked herself off a very delayed, very overbooked flight. Continue to stand there, now in awkward silence, as the belligerent crazy lady cries and apologizes to the other gate agent and pleads for her very life because she’s apparently missing her grandfather’s funeral as we speak.

Discover on the plane—using only a very innocent (innocent!) scratch of your upper-lip area—that you are way overdue for a nose-hair trimming. Worry that you've had bats in the cave all day. Be thankful the guy sitting next to you is so asleep he's drooling.

Get home feeling fat and lethargic and plagued with dragon breath. And nose hairs. Blog readers pay a lot for that.