When Finding Joy in the Journey Costs Too Much

Be careful when you do find joy — she may just kick your butt.

American Germaphobe India Saga (part 2)

For those just joining us, this is an ongoing true story of a work trip to India by a spoiled, frightened, American germaphobe, who to maintain some semblance of sanity must find humor in the fear.

Previously I had chronicled the perilous mission to acquire a taxi, said mission having succeeded only in that I am now in a car departing the airport, unsure of (a) is this really a taxi? and (b) is the driver really going to take me to my hotel?

CONSPIRACY THEORY #12

Once we’re out of the airport proper, the taxi driver — who never, ever speaks — takes us onto a highway and begins to prove to me that Indian drivers are indeed the most skilled drivers in the universe. For those who don’t know, India is one of those insane countries where you drive on the left side of the road and the driver sits on the right side of the car. For us normal folk who drive on the correct sides, it is inherently stressful to participate even passively in this kind of activity. Now take that warm soup of pants-moisturizing terror and add some Indian spices: (a) those lane indicators which you might expect to keep you safely isolated from the other cars are in India decorative at best and (b) like bats from Superman’s Bizarro universe, the best drivers always have at least one hand on the horn and the other on the high beams so that they can advertise their presence to other drivers using an ingenious form of reverse echolocation. This allows everyone and everything on the road to “flow” hither and thither at highway-unsafe speeds without anyone getting hurt. Oh, and can I also point out that in India when traveling at highway speeds you aren’t truly considered to be tailgating until you’re exchanging electrons with the bumper of the car in front of you? Since this is difficult to tell for sure if one is that close, the modus operandi seems to be to ignore scientific evidence and just get as close as the laws of physics would permit.

This equation lets you know if you are indeed SAFELY tailgating in India, but since math is hard, no one uses it in practice. (source: youtube.com)

Incidentally, that taxi guy’s car now has a hole in the floor of the back seat where I kept trying to apply my virtual brakes.

So, about 15 minutes into this ride I realize two things:

• First, I had thought from my diligent pre-trip map checking a week ago that the ride from the airport to the hotel was a short one. After all, the distance between the two points on the screen was like less than a couple of centimeters. And to reinforce this “fact,” the hotel is located on “old airport avenue” which clearly implies that it should be pretty close to the airport. But after 15 minutes of extremely-variable-speed weaving and dodging through the cacophony of trucks, cars, tuk-tuks, motorcycles, bicycles, people on animals, animals sans people, people sans animals and other indescribable bits of “traffic,” I sense that we’re getting farther and farther from the airport and no closer to anything that looks remotely like an area that would suggest “a good hotel can be found here.” I begin to think that perhaps I’m being kidnapped (old-man-napped?), perhaps taken back to the old shack with the slimy bolt that I encountered back in 2006.
• Second… actually I can’t remember what the second thing I realized was, so pretend it was something interesting.

I am therefore developing a growing sense of concern. It is still on the sane side of paranoia, so I try to relax and take stock of my assets. I realize that I have a little device which could tell me whether I am indeed heading for trouble of the kidnapped sort or just the more obvious “well, you’re in India now — deal with it” sort of trouble, and so I wisely turn my phone on. Why, if I am so wise, was it off? I had turned it off in Frankfurt because the battery was really low and the charger stations and outlets near my gate were blockaded by suspicious-looking airport-energy-stealing youths with no respect for their American elders. I had hoped to charge it on the plane but the plane seat’s outlet turned out to be non-functional. This evidence clearly proves a deep and well-planned conspiracy designed to manipulate me into just this circumstance.

Incidentally, I submitted this evidence for inclusion in The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. Unfortunately, my conspiracy didn’t make the cut, ranking #12, just after another conspiracy theory explaining the mysterious disappearance of anyone else who could have corroborated my evidence. (source: workman.com)

IGNORANCE WAS BLISS

So with my phone turned on, I figure I can fire up google maps and see how it would navigate me to the hotel and compare it to our present route. This would at least let me know if I was being taken “for a ride.”

Quick rabbit trail: since my employer made my phone “secure,” it is slow. So slow that it takes about 5 minutes to boot up and do anything useful. 10 minutes if I have a desperate need to use the phone such as in a life-or-death emergency where a call might save someone’s life or to satisfy a hankering for some Angry Birds action. I really miss my insecure phone, since now while my secured phone consumes its precious remaining few percentage points of battery power to boot up and do its various security-related checks, I am not feeling secure at all. I am in fact feeling more and more insecure with each 3rd-world country landmark that whizzes by my window, obscured though they are what with the suspicious grime on the taxi windows and the threatening outer darkness of the Indian night.

In the distance, a dog barked. I did not hear it, though, as the incessant noise of the taxi’s laboring engine overrode all but the beeping, honking and tootling of the 1.2 billion other cars flowing with us down the wrong side of the highway.

After uncountable minutes of stressful waiting, including some bonus additional minutes of waiting for my phone to find a telecom carrier that it likes enough to establish a reasonable data connection, I am finally informed of two things. (Yes, really two this time. Trust me.) First, we ARE on the way to the hotel. That is good (or so I naively think). Second, I have several voice and text messages from my wife Megan that sound rather urgent telling me I would do well to call her NOW. One of those messages is a text with a picture of firemen standing in my basement. This is highly unsettling on its own, but this picture shows them standing there in my basement in their fireproof hats, coats and pants, oxygen tanks on their backs, wielding tools that seem specifically designed to damage doors, windows and walls in the event that the fire they might otherwise extinguish will require their help to reach a level of severity worthy of an insurance claim, all looking with great concern at something outside of the picture’s field of view. I might mention that we don’t have that many firemen friends, and when they do visit they don’t typically bring extra oxygen, so I take this as a bad sign.

And who put all that junk on my ping pong table?!?! What, are we living in a barn, people?!?!

And, as if to dispel any doubt I might have had about the true urgency of these messages and texts, I also have emails from our home security system alerting me about a fire in my home. That can’t be good. Probably not good at all.

COMMUNICATION: CORNERSTONE OF A GOOD MARRIAGE

All of these clues imply — some might argue that “demand” is a more appropriate word — that I might be wise to invest my remaining 3% battery power and call home immediately.

But, let’s take a step back here from the emotionality of the moment. Doesn’t wisdom demand that I pause and think this through rationally? Weigh the pros and cons? Play out the what-if scenarios? Collapse the quantum probability wave thingies to maximize the odds of my optimal outcomes? (Translation: how can I best rationalize my next actions?)

The taxi ride is pretty noisy and bumpy and Google Maps is telling me that I’m sooooooo close now to the hotel that I should almost be able to detect the sewage smell that some of the reviews warned me about. So I text back to Megan that I’ll call her in a few minutes and hope (relying on Husband Logic to convince me of my righteousness) that this response does not severely undermine our marriage.

With the text sent, I can’t stop being mentally preoccupied by the situation at home, but I am now at least strangely calmed that I am not about to lose my wallet or my innocence in some remote field in India. Duly calmed, I attempt to distract myself and turn my attention to Bangalore that is whizzing by. Granted, this is Bangalore at 3:30am in the morning, and as I mentioned, the windows were somewhat less than transparent, but now that we are in moderately-more-well-lit areas I can see there is quite a bit going on at this hour in the morning. There are dogs in the streets — big ones that I think are gang members. There are boys in the streets — little ones that I think are gang members. I wonder if the boys and the dogs have occasional turf wars. I also think to myself that with so many dogs on the street, and since the plan is that I’ll be walking between the hotel and the office, that I am going to need to watch where I step as I trek through this jungle of feral and fecal dangers. Still, I think it will be wise to search Google for the dogs’ gang colors since they looked scarier than the little boys’ gangs, even though the boys were smoking and trying to look tougher than the dogs.

Don’t let the lack of cigarettes fool you. And in actual fact, these dogs (well, perhaps not these specific dogs) really are killers. (source: thesun.ie)

REASONS + REALITY = RATIONALE

The route to the hotel takes us through some areas of town that seemed rather dubious to my America-trained sensibilities. It is not unlike some of the rundown drug-infested areas of Baltimore city, only less well-to-do. As if to drive home the point, when we finally get to the official hotel property, there is a gate with a guard who stops us. He demands the driver turn off the car, and he uses one of those mirrors-on-a-stick (like the ones dentists shove into your mouth in search of proof that your claim to floss regularly is in fact a bald-faced lie, only this one was much larger) to check the underside of the car. Is he looking for bombs? Stowaways? Gum disease caused by gingivitis?

Having satisfied four out of five dentists as well as the guard that the car is devoid of any suspicious cavities, we finally arrive at the entrance of the hotel. I proceed to drag my weary soul and scuffed luggage through the entrance, but alas, this is not permitted. My luggage must go through a luggage scanning device, and I must walk through a metal detector. But once through these barriers, I am finally able to enter into the glory of the Royal Orchid.

The Royal Orchid: you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. I will soon be calling this by other names, such as the Musty Orchid, which should indicate to you that this will not be the 5-star experience I’ve been led to expect, but we’ll get back to that later. First, we need to have a few words about the hotel reviews on TripAdvisor and why I chose this particular hotel:

• TripAdvisor and a few other sites I researched had generally positive reviews of this hotel.
• It is the hotel recommended to me by many of my colleagues who had travelled to this particular office location before.
• It was also recommended to me by several of my colleagues who work at this particular office.
• The hotel is close to the office and I should theoretically be able to walk there from the hotel without having to cross busy roads — something I’m told inexperienced American visitors should not try to do. (I’ll explain why this is indeed true in a future episode.)
• My employer’s travel expense policy is principled upon fiscal responsibility, with strongly worded encouragement to business travelers such as myself to opt for the cheapest mid-range hotels. Although this hotel claims to be a 5-star hotel (i.e. higher than mid-range), the rates work out to a little less than USD $100/night which puts it nicely into a mid-range price point.

So, given the recommendations, proximity to the office, the fact that my employer will ultimately be paying for it, and that the internet ratings were generally positive, I wanted to err on the side of not making too much trouble when filing my expense report.

But when I say “generally positive” the keyword there is “generally.” In the reviews, more than one mentioned (a) that there may be some kind of a sewage treatment plant nearby that is “occasionally” detectable by those with a more sensitive nostril, (b) that the rooms are musty smelling with aging furniture and décor, and © the hotel staff isn’t very friendly when you bring these points up in a misguided demand for justice. But since most of the other comments — the majority actually — were positive, this is the hotel I chose to facilitate my safety and comfort while in India.

Righteously errant and proud of it. (source: imgflip.com)

PRIORITIES

Having proven to the scanning devices that I am a secure and trustworthy hotel patron, I enter into the hotel lobby. As hotel lobbies go, this one actually looks fairly nice, at least to a weary traveler at 4am local time after said weary traveler has been through what I’ve been through, really needs to pee, and has that nagging Spidey Sense that if he doesn’t call his wife soon, a permanent residence in Bangalore may be warranted. The staff is friendly. Check-in is quick. And once the clerk has confirmed my ID, he surprises me with something I never expected to hear upon checking into a hotel: “Oh, sir, a madam called for you earlier.” A “madam” huh? I’m not the kinda guy who has “madams” in my life, so I figured this madam was either Megan or someone from publisher’s clearinghouse tracking me down to award me a large sum of money. (It was Megan. Had it been the latter, this story would have evolved in a wholly different direction.) The desperation required to get her to call India looking for me further inflates my anxiety.

Finally checked in, I am escorted up to my room by the bellman, who makes a point to show me all the wonderful and unique things about the room like how to use the light switch and something he gratuitously refers to as an “air conditioner” but which will later disappoint by not providing anything remotely resembling conditioned air. He didn’t comment on the smell though, but given the circumstance, neither did I. His tour of my room complete, I tipped him another 200 rupees (why try and do math again at this point?), plugged in my phone charger, peed as fast as my aging plumbing would allow, and finally called home. (Ok, let’s get real here. I called while I was peeing.)

Those who know me well might say that I can be a bit — just a bit — pessimistic. No one has said (to my face) that I am negative or a whining complainer, but most would agree that I am in fact gifted with the ability to take the smallest clue of misfortune and extrapolate from that all manner of evils and tribulations. Usually, I use this gift to generously give others options to think about as they receive bad news, but now I was forced to selfishly use this super-power on myself. So, clearly my house had burned to the ground. Almost certainly my wife and daughters had been irreparably scarred by the heat and flames, destined to live out the rest of their lives covered by hoods and gloves and 1980s-era leg warmers. Almost surely my reserve of toilet paper in the basement was now gone forever. With these apocalyptic visions flashing through my travel-weary brain, when my wife answered my call, with a Herculean effort I restrained my urge to inquire about the toilet paper and immediately asked, “Are you and the kids ok? What happened?” and steeled myself for a report the likes of which not even Job from the Bible could have survived.

(For the readers who are unfamiliar with the Book of Job, suffice it to say that God taught Job some important truths in the midst of terrible suffering and tragedy. What most people overlook in this story, however, is that God did not allow Job’s toilet paper reserves to be taken from him. I confess this is somewhat of an interpretive liberty, but I challenge the reader to prove this inaccurate.)

AngelSoft Mega Rolls — for when the #$% gets spiritual.

The truth was, as it so often is, stranger than but not quite as bad as I imagined. Our hot water heater blew up. Ruptured like a bomb. And with it being next to the security system panel, it “confused” the alarm system as the watery explosion fried its electronics. And here I am nearly all the way around on the other side of the world while my wife has to deal with that. I’m not happy about that. (Neither was she, truth be told.)

At least no one was hurt. And there was no fire. And the toilet paper was indeed safe. But what no one could foresee, not even me with my advanced degrees in pessimistic prestidigitation, is that this would be the first of many such incidents where every time I travelled, something at the house would break or fail. While we would ultimately come to refer to this as “The Hamilton Curse,” I think it is more likely a fundamental law of the universe, possibly a higher-order truth than even Murphy’s Law.

India’s way of saying “Welcome back, Scott” certainly packed a punch. After all of that I was really looking forward to a good morning’s sleep. Everything looks brighter in the morning, they say. “They” again. I can confidently say these pontificators never stayed at the Royal Orchid.

Don’t worry — I won’t leave you hanging on that note. There’s a lot more to the story, continuing in part 3.