Wednesday, February 1, 2006
The Wit of Business-Travel Stories and Other Myths
The New York Times Business section runs an occasional feature called "Itineraries"—a catchall vehicle for the dynamic world of business travel. This feature is home to an odd breed of journalism that resembles anecdotes in content but not in form. They succeed at brevity, yet they fail at being nominally interesting.
There are still lessons to be gleaned from this misbegotten format, but the lessons should be provided in bullet-point format—for the business traveler on the go. Entire paragraphs are not only a tease; they are a waste of time.
A tighter rewrite of the most recent "Itineraries" follows below. The original text has been cordoned off in blockquotes.
At a business dinner in Beijing, the guests were expected to sample an assortment of duck parts served on a lazy susan, including livers, gizzards and legs. Unable to force himself to eat the feet, Neil Gussman, a magazine editor in Philadelphia, helped himself instead to seconds of fried scorpions. "I am not prone to nightmares," he said, "but that night I woke up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat after dreaming those scorpions had reassembled themselves to kill me and were walking up my throat.
• Foreign countries have crazy food.
• A biology education is not required to make a career as a magazine editor.
As David Greene, a London lawyer, was riding through a swamp in Uganda, several tsetse flies bit him and his driver. They closed the windows and Mr. Greene seized a newspaper to kill the insects that remained. One had landed on the driver, and he smacked it with such force that the car went into a spin and landed in a bog. As Mr. Greene pushed the vehicle out, he was bitten several more times. He had learned, he said, a hard lesson: When in tropical Africa, "keep windows shut, however hot."
• A London lawyer may feel out of sorts in a Ugandan swamp.
Then there was the time a rhinoceros charged the taxi in which Mr. Greene was riding through a game park in Kenya. "It became a race between us and the rhino," he said. Finally, the car pulled ahead, and Mr. Greene treated the driver to a meal at a local restaurant, the Carnivore.
• A car is faster than a rhinoceros.
• Some restaurants have interesting names.
Mr. Laermer had fallen violently ill on a flight from New York to Miami, and his seatmate had moved so he could lie down on three seats across. On one of his runs to the restroom, two women appropriated two of the seats, dumping his belongings onto the floor. He told a flight attendant that if they didn't move, the plane would have to make an emergency landing. "It was a hero's moment," he said, "but worth it." The bluff worked.
• The threat of hijacking is a reasonable conflict-resolution strategy (in a pinch).
Mr. Gussman, the magazine editor, likes to bike on his frequent trips abroad and always wears stars-and-stripes spandex jerseys. On one excursion in Hong Kong, he elicited sneers from the driver of an overcrowded bus….
"He didn't like getting beaten by a bicyclist," Mr. Gussman said. "Each time at the light, he was glaring. By the third light, he was screaming up very close behind me." Fearing for his life, Mr. Gussman turned aside and let the bus pass, on the assumption, he said, "that an overloaded bus wouldn't stop any better than it would start."
• When overseas, avoid becoming a metaphor for geopolitical tensions.
• Foreign countries have crazy bus drivers.
