I am back in Zurich tonight. However my normal routine is slightly different this week because rather than being at the client site tomorrow I am taking my boss and his boss on a site visit about 2.5 hours away from Zurich. So it will be me who is the chauffeur this week rather than being ferried around by various taxi drivers. As a result I had to hire a car at the airport tonight.
It is a well known phenomenon that as you get older you get less open to change – people get “set in their ways”. I suddenly realised then tonight that I am getting older; it was only after I had hired the car did the rather attractive girl tell me it was an automatic not a manual car. I had never driven an automatic car so I started to get flustered. However she was just too attractive for me to contemplate any form of embarrassing climb down, so I took my life into my hands, calmly said that everything would be fine (trying to turn a worried grin into a smooth nonchalant smile), and then went for the “learn to drive an automatic in 10 minutes” option. Thankfully there was a rather ugly skin head gent in the car park who was more than happy to show me where Mercedes had decided to hide the cigarette lighter (for the GPS) and how to shift out of “park”.
So this old macho dog learnt a new trick tonight although there is clearly room for improvement....the trip that takes the typical taxi driver around 18 minutes took me nearer 35 (and that doesn’t even include the 10 minutes that I sat in the car looking for the cigarette lighter). I obviously blame the GPS that I brought from home which, for the first 8 minutes of the trip, stubbornly refused to recognise the fact that it had left the bosom of the Basque Country and that it was in Switzerland. The upshot was that I had to guess at various German road signs whilst travelling at 120 KPH. I am sure that didn’t help my cause.
Thankfully I had regained my poise by the time I reached the hotel and as I walked into the bar I caught the eye of the Monday night waitress who, with the nod of a head, scuttled off to bring me my Monday night chicken club sandwich and diet coke. The sandwich was excellent – enough to compensate for that fact that my Monday night bedtime will now be 10.15PM rather than the habitual 10PM. Just call me grandpa.
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