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An Avis Rental Bus Episode


Lately I have been having episodes where I wonder why I even bother going to the airport. Today, Delta was kind enough to turn a maintentance service that should have taken 5 minutes into 1 hour and 1/2. The flight left when my flight was supposed to land in the destination city. I made it to the hotel just in time to catch the last 49 seconds of the NCAA basketball championship. Good thing it was an extremely close and exciting game. Ironically, I saw a former BA who used to work with me in the crowd in Duke blue. He was live and in HD. That was actually kind of exciting.
For those of you that travel a lot and rent cars, some airports have rental car facilities between 8-13 minutes away, while some have them on site. In most of the cities I travel to, I usually have to catch a rental car shuttle bus to the central rental car facility.
Tonight was actually interesting because I was on the Avis rental bus today and heard two business travelers talking. One was a systems engineer. The other was a management consultant. The systems engineer proceeded to go deep into an explanation about the industry he worked in, who he worked for, and the type of work he did. The management consultant just talked about his kids' education in private colleges and how one was a doctor and decided he didn't like that, so he decided to become a lawyer that sued doctors. It never occurred to me until writing this that the management consultant was about as deep as a sheet of wax paper.
Then it occurred to me that I am probably the same way. The main reason is that as I'm talking to someone, I go through every type of experience that I have in order to articulate what I exactly do. Because that usually takes longer than most - part of that may be I'm slow - I'll just go to talking about what's easier. This could be Tennessee football, ACC basketball, or even the latest theories around quantum physics (kidding).
That said, I encourage anyone who reads this to have a canned elevator speech and try to go beyond a phrase or label that is open to interpretation like, "management consultant." Be a management consultant that specializes in [something]. Indirectly the management consultant on the bus just sounded like someone bragging about their kids and how much money he made because of where his kids were going to school. Maybe at the end of the days that is all he had to talk about. That's unfortunate.

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