Survivor: Wild Bill

Posted by John

Sometimes surviving isn’t about making it through some cataclysmic event alive. Sometimes it’s just about getting from day to day, and sometimes that’s really hard to do, especially if the day involves business travel.

I’ve recently had to take a few business trips and they’ve reminded me of a few very important concepts to keep in mind when it comes to such things:

-Remember where you park your car. More specifically, remember which parking lot you put your car in. After a long business trip the last thing you want to do is ride the wrong shuttle entirely through the wrong parking lot then all they way back to the terminal in order to get on the right shuttle.

-Never travel with a smoker. If you think about the amount of time between getting to the airport, checking in, going through security, boarding, flying, landing, deplaning, and exiting the airport, it’s generally about 10 times longer than the average smoker goes between smokes, which for a smoker might as well be a lifetime. Then your entire day of travel with a smoker becomes a plan to get from one smoke to the next. Plus, it’s horrible watching someone suck down 8 consecutive cigarettes on the way back to the airport to load up on their fix before they get back onto the plane.

-Never travel with a camel, which is to say, never travel with someone that doesn’t stop to eat, drink or piss. Always bring rations just in case. Yeah, I’ve been carrying this granola bar around in my pocket all day but it’s better than eating my thumb off right now.

-Never eat “local”. Some people love going to a new city and trying all the new local restaurants. Admittedly I do too when I’m traveling for personal reasons. But when it’s business you can’t risk it. As much as I hate Applebee’s and Chili’s and whatnot, at least you know what you’re getting. Unlike at Debbie’s Diner where the meatloaf comes with a side of mashed taters and some salmonella. The only thing worse than a middle seat on the flight home is a seat in the airplane’s lav.

While I don’t travel much now, I used to travel all the time, and that’s where I learned all of my business travel survival lessons; usually the hard way.

One of the worst business trips I ever went on was several years ago to Birmingham, AL with a guy I will call Wild Bill. Wild Bill was a ginormous, 50-something-year-old Texan of Scottish descent, which basically means he was a loud, sweaty boozehound who wasn’t afraid to wear a kilt from time to time. Fortunately the kilt didn’t make an appearance on this particular trip; unfortunately his alcoholism did.

Let me digress for a moment to give you an idea of what it’s truly like to spend time with this man. I once had the pleasure of attending a happy hour with Wild Bill where I witnessed him drink 18 12-ouce Budweiser bottles. 18! The waitress would drop one off then make a round through the bar, pick another one up and drop it off as he was drinking the last gulp of the previous one. 18 times!  When we were all set to leave (probably when the bar ran out of Bud), Wild Bill tried to drive home. It took three of us to restrain him until he finally acquiesced but not before he declared he had to piss, which he did right on the front of his truck. Not wanting to be any part of that we all walked a few paces away and turned our backs to let him finish, which gave him plenty of time to get in the truck and drive off, probably before he was even done with his pissing. He was a drunk bastard, but he was a wily drunk bastard.

At any rate, on this one particular business trip Wild Bill and I flew into Birmingham and drove to the job site about an hour away. Normally it would take a full day to complete all of our business on site so we scheduled the last return flight out of Birmingham. For some reason on this particular trip though, Wild Bill wasn’t interested in completing all of our business, nor was he interested in waiting until the last flight out. So instead we did everything in about half the time, which as you can imagine was pretty much half-assed, then raced back to the airport to catch the early flight. We didn’t make it. So there we were in the Birmingham airport with nothing but time to kill until our originally scheduled later flight. So what do you do with Wild Bill when you have time to kill? That’s right, you drink. Now, the thing is, when you’re drinking with Wild Bill he’s paying. There’s no sense questioning it or protesting it. Wild Bill is paying. The other thing about drinking with Wild Bill is, if he’s paying, you’re drinking at his pace. So you can imagine where this is going. I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say at one point I was finishing the last sip of a 22-ounce beer and had two full ones sitting in front of me.

To say I was wasted by the time our originally scheduled flight boarded is like saying conservatives are a little peeved with Health Care Reform. I stumbled onto the plane, fell into my seat in a heap, and passed the fuck out before it even pulled away from the gate.

I woke up several hours later when the captain announced we were making our final descent into the airport and we’d be on the ground in 20 minutes or so. At first I didn’t know where I was, feeling like Rip van Winkle - I could have slept for 15 minutes or 45 years; I had no idea. I was completely parched like I’d been snoring my ass off with my mouth open for the past 2 hours and I was still pretty inebriated. As I was trying to gather my thoughts from my sleep there was really only one thought that mattered, “Jesus, I’ve never had to piss this bad in my life.” It wasn’t like waking up and thinking, “Oh boy, I sure have to pee,” it was like waking up and thinking, “Dear God, I had to pee 6 hours ago; how did I not piss myself while I was asleep?”

I pulled myself together and tried to get up from my seat but I was sitting next to the window. The guy next to me gave me a look as if to say, “What are you doing, buddy? We’re about to land here.” So I gave him a look back as if to say, “If you impede my progress in any way, I will end you.” Actually, in my stupor I may have said those words out loud; I can’t be certain. But just as I was trying to get out to the aisle the stewardess came by and said, “I’m sorry sir, we’re in our final descent. You’ll need to take your seat and buckle up until we land.” I gave her a look as if to say, “If you impede my progress in any way, I will end you,” at which point she gave me a look as if to say, “If you make one more move I’ll have you arrested as an enemy combatant and shipped to secrete CIA black site where you will be waterboarded no less than 7 times a day for the rest of your life.” I decided to let her thought trump my thought and my need to piss so I sat back down.

That last 20 minutes couldn’t have been any longer and it was made worse by the fact that I knew as soon as that plane landed it still had to taxi and we still had to get off the plane one at a time. My eyes were watering, my brow was sweating, and my toes were curled up so tight I would have needed the jaws of life to get my shoes off. I felt like my bladder was losing a 12-round boxing match to Ivan Drago.

When the plane finally did land and the seatbelt sign went off, I did the one thing everyone hates on an airplane - I grabbed my bag and started to push my way to the front of the line like a salmon swimming upstream. The only feeling in my entire body was pain and I knew for a fact that there was no way I could wait in line to get off the plane. Every person I pushed past gave me this awful look as if to say, “Come on, buddy, who do you think you are?” Each one of them got a look from me as if to say, “I will end you.” Actually, I know I said that out loud several times.

Once off the plane I ran up the jet bridge, through the terminal, and burst into that bathroom, just barely making it in time before I started stripping the enamel off the back of the urinal while tears poured down my face. If you want to see a grown man cry, put him through the exact scenario I just described.

So, the moral of this story is, if you want to survive day to day life, and specifically a day that involves a business trip, heed this advice, which is listed in ascending order of importance: Never drink with Wild Bill; Never travel on business with Wild Bill; Never drink with Wild Bill while traveling on business with Wild Bill; Never get on an airplane after drinking with Wild Bill while traveling on business with Wild Bill; Never take a window seat on an airplane after drinking with Wild Bill while traveling on business with Wild Bill; Never pass out on a plane in the window seat only to wake up after the plane has entered its final descent after drinking with Wild Bill on a business trip with Wild Bill; and most important of all – never, ever turn your back on Wild Bill while he’s pissing on the front of his truck.