This is not about Langley Park. Or Memphis. But I needed a soundtrack. Instead it’s about trips to Atyrau, Kazakhstan and Perth, Australia. And an unlikely connection between the two.
In 2006 a customer summoned me to Kazakhstan to discuss a problem that had arisen with a product. It wasn’t easy to get there and took a couple of days as I first had to visit Oslo to get a visa. After half a day in Oslo, I flew to Amsterdam, then to Almaty in Kazakhstan. Not too far from the Chinese border. Then I flew back across the country via a couple of other small towns before landing in Atyrau. An unbelievable 18 hour trip – from Amsterdam.
I was also warned to stay awake at each airport stop, as sleeping increased the risk of stolen baggage. I arrived exhausted in Atyrau. An American, George, who worked for a very large service company, picked me up at the airport. He took me to the first of several meetings that day. They started and ended with Kevin, the scary Scots Quality Control manager. He may have been a great guy in a social context, but earlier George had told me that Kevin scared everybody, so I was wary. George was loosening me up for that first meeting.
The afternoon and evening passed in a blur of meetings. I finally got to bed around midnight after one beer and a few thin strips of pizza in a pub with George. I was starving and I don’t recall getting anything at all to eat during the day. I asked the hotel receptionist to wake me at 5 am and order a taxi to take me to the airport. But instead he woke me at 2 am and I have no clue why he did that. Not enough English to distinguish between 5 and 2? Before I realised what time it was, I had put my head under a cold shower to wake me up. The shock of that, combined with lack of sleep and stress gave me an atrial fibrillation (for about the 20th time). Of course I felt like shit. I managed to get a couple more hours sleep and at 5 am went down to the waiting taxi. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. “Oh, you mean the clinic?” was the driver’s reply. Clinic? I got him to take me to the airport instead.
The Atyrau airport building was an unpainted wooden shack. A few uniformed guards with large-brimmed hats and about 30 other men waited for the plane to Amsterdam. There was nowhere to sit, so I stood and composed a letter of resignation to my boss (which was never delivered). On arrival in Amsterdam, my crawling pace between the terminals felt endless. But I didn’t dare ask for help as I suspected they wouldn’t let me travel if they knew I was unwell. I wanted to get home. A few hours later a taxi picked me up at Arlanda airport in Stockholm and the driver dropped me at the hospital in Gävle. Close enough. I spent a total of 15 mind-boggling hours in Atyrau.
My tour of Australia in 2010 was a little longer: 12 days split between Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. One of the companies I visited in Perth was the same as George’s that I’d visited with in Kazakhstan. Nothing strange about that. They have more than 100 000 employees, spread thinly around the globe. The guy my colleague and I were to see was not keen on seeing us at all as he’d heard about our little problem in Kazakhstan. But what he didn’t know was how we solved it. So I spent an hour dropping names (scary Kevin, his brother Ben, Scott, George and a couple of others). I explained exactly how we turned it around. I had every detail on my laptop and he knew, or had heard of all the people I mentioned. Finally, instead of throwing us out, which was his first thought, he gave us a healthy order for goods he needed. It was quite satisfying, a revenge of sorts and the cherry on top of my one and only Australia visit. And the order paid for both trips.