I have only recently realised the difficulty that non-international business travellers have with sudden contrasts. To my UK-based colleagues, the contrast between their old company car list, made up of German sports saloons, and the new one, made up of über-efficient French diesel hatchbacks and Japanese battery boxes, has caused much moaning. Imagine your typical sales account manager: fortysomething, hugely self-confident, massively vain, adorned with expensive wraparound sunglasses and a flashy watch so heavy that checking the time becomes a minor workout. Now remove the gunmetal grey BMW 330i coupé three inches from your rear bumper and replace it with a white Toyota Prius cruising along in the slow lane. It has had a catastrophic impact on confidence levels and sales.
Even ignoring the materialistic world and its effect upon the existential persona of sales managers, contrast can still be very disturbing. The kids struggle between boarding school life and home life, where the rules and regulations of the latter flummox them into Kevin and Perry-style foot-stamping. Recently, I accidentally on purpose deleted X Factor from the Sky Plus to make space for Newsnight, which resulted in the second foot-stamping episode of the holidays from Miss Business Lifer. This was followed by a marital row over the matriarchal declaration that we should become a vegan family because some organic, free-range hippy magazine said it would save the penguins.
To escape my cabbage-munching spouse and our offspring I decided to spend a weekend with my colleague. To my surprise, he went from a witty, sharp and liberal marketing director to a rustic mystic. I suppose my suspicions should have been aroused when I noticed incense sticks burning in his study, and more so when he revealed several guns and camouflage smocks, but the biggest clue was a pre-OS-X Apple Mac computer. "Squirrels," he snarled, before leading me on a weird creeping trip around his cobnut grove, in compulsory silence and equipped like Rambo.
Despite working longer hours for just as many years, and in a far more stressful role than 'chief of colouring-in', I'm pretty sure the dramatic contrasts that I experience between midwinter nights lost in Moscow and dangerous weekends at home (where even beef-flavoured crisps currently provoke histrionics) have had very little impact on my overall sanity. More recently there was a breach of the peace after I used chicken stock for the family dinner, which resulted in my imposing another 'Take your boss home' weekend on a co-worker. This time it was a Euro salesman who appeared really quite normal during office hours. Strangely enough, he was completely normal at home too. It seems international business travellers are equipped with an innate ability to hack contrast without suffering personality changes, tantrums or squirrel infatuations.
Our entrepreneurial correspondent travels the world in search of business, soft beds and good breakfasts
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