Hi Ho, Hi Ho, it’s Off To Work We Go
I recently attended my high school reunion. It was interesting that the people I once shared unlimited topics of immediate and free flowing conversation, were at a loss of what to say. Snide critiques of classmate attire or lunch room offerings were no longer relevant. So, interactions turned to a predictable sequence of questions:
“How are you?” immediately followed by, “What do you do?”
There are limitless answers to this, but it usually refers to what one does for a living, what one’s job is. It is unreasonable, really, to be “defined” by how we spend our work day, what tasks we tackle during most of our waking hours in a week, but it does give others a glimpse into a portion of what our life is like. Some jobs are easy to envision – fire fighter, teacher, nurse. Some are a complete mystery, such as “systems analyst” or “network engineer”. Out of embarrassing ignorance, I simply had to walk away from those classmates. For me, the reactions were varied.
Classmate 1: “How are you?”
Me: “Fine, you?”
Classmate 1: “What are you doing these days?”
Me: “I’m a tour operator.”
Classmate 1: “A door operator? What kind of doors do you operate?”
Me: “Um, no. TOUR operator.”
Classmate 2: “What are you doing these days?”
Me: “I’m a tour operator.”
Classmate 2: “Oh, so you go on great trips for free and meet new and exciting people.”
Me: “Well, sometimes I do.”
The experience made me realize how difficult it is for anyone to relay to another what their job is really like. Even though the next reunion is way in the future, I have been working on my response. It seemed that here on the blog would be a good place to try it out.
What do I do? I write books. “Story books?”, you might ask. They are sort of story books. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. They have scenes and characters and a time line. Oh yes, that timeline… that is the most important part. What I do is PLAN the tours that hundreds of middle and high school students take. And absolutely everything needed to move through that trip is in a book. I write that book.
Climb into my world here for a minute. Picture 150 students on three buses going to … let’s say Washington, DC. They arrive at dinner time, hungry. The tour director approaches the host at Joe Theismann’s restaurant.
“Good evening,” the host greets. “How many for dinner?”
“One hundred and fifty,” the director replies. “And we will need a place to park three buses.” From dinner they walk down the street into Old Town Alexandria. They check in at the Ghost Tour kiosk. They ask to take a ghost tour… for 150. Next, they are tired. They need a place to sleep. They show up on the doorstep of a local hotel needing rooms for 150. How do you think this would work? You are right. It would not work. Not any of those three stops would have been able to accommodate them with no notice. And that is why I write the books.
Of course, the contents of this book vary greatly depending on destination city, number of travelers and their particular itinerary requests. I’ll give an example. One hundred band and orchestra students from Texas are going to New York for four days.
First, make the itinerary: departure/arrival, hotel check in, Radio City Music Hall, Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Broadway Show, band/orchestra clinic, Times Square, Shopping in Chinatown, Central Park, and of course all of their meals. Second, make it work: book airline tickets, book buses to transport while in the city, book hotel and select room placement, acquire entry tickets to sights, purchase tickets to Wicked and mark seats on the seating plan, get ferry schedule to Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and reserve, reserve clinic time, rent any needed instruments, purchase food vouchers for some meals, make reservations at restaurants for others, providing business with pre-orders for all guests, plot all travel routes with estimated times, directions and bus parking. Once the pieces of the puzzle are defined, they are put in order on the time line, creating the final “big picture”. All instructions, maps, schedules, tickets, vouchers, contact information and confirmation numbers go into the book. The book then takes on a life of its own. Name badges are made for each traveler with the itinerary printed on the back, cut and stuffed into plastic covers and attached to lanyards. As all the details take time to finalize, the book is not a finished product until very close to the trip date. It is then FedExed out to the Tour Director, that person that “takes all those trips for free”, to lead the happy travelers through the pages of the book in real time.
How do I feel when the book leaves my office? I feel proud, excited for the students, accomplished, and relieved. It may be a little like a mother feels when she watches her child getting on the kindergarten bus for the first time. I know I worked to give it all it needs to survive out there and I look forward to hearing how it went. But I cannot dwell on these thoughts. Why? I have 31 more books to write…. each with a planned happy ending.