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You are 100% correct about the age:

http://www.businessballs.com/treeswing.htm

Have yourself a cookie!

The first "this" in the prior post is supposed to be this link:
http://www.businessballs.com/airtrafficcontrollersfunnyquotes.htm

Next time, I shall use the 'preview' button to actually preview.

This comes to mind. http://www.businessballs.com/images/treeswing/tree_swing_70s.jpeg

i suppose the graphologists willsoon bee reporting their findings on how the choice of font type,font size,use of bold and italics,the use of i instead of I and dozens of other typing choice we make tells us all sorts thing about a person's personality which we could use for counseling,crime investigationand recruitment purposes...

I see a whole new field of pseudoscience just waiting to be brought to the forefront of public imagination by a CSI episode.

Typology and typography are already taken, what shall we call this new science?

Why? Because the US and England had the first major commercial air industries.

or, alternatively (quoting from: http://www.businessballs.com/airtrafficcontrollersfunnyquotes.htm)

Allegedly, a Pan Am 727 flight waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war."

[1] I'm sorry, but if long experience developing has taught me anything, it's this: If you don't know how to code, and have no experience of coding, you have no idea what you want.

Maybe they should. But they won't. As far as most management are concerned, their job is to pay you as little as they can get away with.

But if you are going to ask for a raise, make a good case. This website has some good advice.

People in general want the same basic things because the list of basic needs is the same for everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of _needs

http://www.businessballs.com/maslowhierarchyofneed s5.pdf

The idea of the "better world" in many religions is belief that their world will and must come about and will exclude all persons of any other belief system. And the problem is with those that believe they must take a hand in making that world come about through force of law or violence.

You're assuming that the opportunity to work on the plane hasn't been factored into the plan. In general, it has.

So it's planned to have someone doing important work in a crummy environment right up to the wire? That seems to violate what an ex-Navy friend called the 7P Principle ("Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance"). Seriously, fly over a day or two early and work from your hotel room. Or better yet... (see next block).

An example of last-minute figures might be a company's quarterly statement filed with the SEC. The client needs the analysis as quickly as possible in order to make a decision. Or maybe the figures are delayed until the last possible moment so they can be error checked more thoroughly. Maybe a competitor has just made an announcement and you need to arrive at head office the next day with a response. These are all very common scenarios.

What matters in business is not just accuracy, but speed. The best analysis in the world is useless if events overtake it.

I'm well aware of that fact, which is one of the reasons why I think air travel for business purpases in an age of a globe spanning, nearly zero-lag telecommunications network is singularly paleolitihic thought. Last time I checked, electrons traveled faster than planes.

So you haven't, then. [business traveled]

It's not the same thing at all.

It was an allegorical statement. I see that you disagree with my premise, that's ok. You people also eat things called "spotted dick", so obviously we're going to diverge in spots... ;-) [sidenote for those unaware of it, spotted dick is a kind of pudding with raisins in it. pretty good actually, if you can ignore the name...]

The material you work on onboard a plane often doesn't exist in a usable form beforehand.

Where you see efficient working, I see incredibly poor planning. Again, I maintain that if you're patching things together on the way to a deliverable, odds are the final result is going to be crap, steaming and cubed on a silver platter.

Really, let's get to the heart of the matter, the core of my objection to "business travel." I see it as inefficient expenditure of resources. The central thought behind it seems to be that the person traveling is so important that only they can do something, and only in person. It seems to be a very "Theory X" management theory sort of conjecture, that if some random C-level employee isn't personally there to get his/her hands on something, it won't turn out right. More corporate warriorism, rather pointless self-importance displayed in the war-paint of "The company must spend Lots of Money to get me to the action, becuase only I can Save The Day!!! Bow before m3, for I am B1FF, the Super-CEO!!1!" More, to be blunt, bullshit the corporate suits and shiny shoes set thinks smells like roses.

At this point in time, I see no real technical barriers to telecommuting for white-collar jobs. It's all social. And I don't think that telecommuting will be common until today's teenagers and Gen-X-ers are grey haired executives becuase nobody older than them has grown up with near-infinite permiability of the infosphere they (we) have. They see loss of self, loss of importance, with the lack of need for any one person to be in a particular geophysical place at a particular time. I'll draw an analogy back to the world of physical travel: CEO A takes a private jet and a helicopter to arrive at an event. CEO B flies coach and takes a cab or rents a car. If they both arrive on time, who is the better CEO? I'd argue that CEO B is a better CEO becuase they have been better stewards of their stockholder's money by planning better to acheive the same result at lower cost. But people, sadly, rely on symbols for too much of their self-worth. This is why, I feel, most of the orignial responses to my post were very emotions-based (one fool going so far as to label it the stupidest thing they'd read on slashdot, an allegation with the punch of a feather coming from an Anonymous Coward).

But hey, if you're convinced business travel as you define it is a good thing, have at it and good luck. Maybe I'll feel the same way when I've established my globe-spanning liberal army of darkness (oops, did I say that out loud? lies, all of it, i'm as meek as a church mouse! 0:-]).