On the Road Again

At work, I tell people that "All things Ethernet go through me." That is to say that I oversee all of our products designed for the turn-up and troubleshooting of Ethernet services up to 10GE. I have so subordinates and my boss does the best he can to back me up (when not working on his products (mostly SAN testing)), but at the end of the day, I'm the only product marketing manager -slash- applications engineer -slash- applications development engineer -slash- point toward which all escalated customer support issues get directed -slash- guy at whom the buck stops.

Most of the time, it's not too bad since all 5(!) of my products have a shared pedigree and related feature set. It also means that when the field needs someone from the factory to go out and visit customers, it's me. If not for my boss, I'd probably be traveling twice as much I am now. I've never as productive on the road as I can be when I'm in the office. I always dread reading email and finding out what blew up when I wasn't there to put out the fuse. I appreciate the importance of face-to-face meetings and building customer relationships, but there comes a point when its counter-productive to the sustained health of my products to not be nurturing them at home, as it were.

All this is a long winded way of saying I'm sick of airports, of lugging around a 50-pound carrying case along with my luggage and PC, of not sleeping in my own bed next to my wife (and up to 3 cats), of being up past midnight because my body thinks its not even ten o'clock yet, of flying out on Sundays despite what my personal plans might be, and of being home only 1 full week in the entire month of June.