San Diego Trip or How I told my boss he was hot

Last week we were “invited” to San Diego by our company CEO. The official story was that there was a board meeting and a team building party but we knew that the real reason was to show us “beautiful” San Diego so that we can fall in love with it and decide never to return back to DC ever again. With this in mind, we were put up in the swankiest of hotels, got limousine service to and fro from the hotel and were served banquet dinners. Rumors were that the CEO has actually bribed the weather bureau to make sure that the weather was sunny in San Diego and it snowed in DC.

So there we were, all 17 of us gathered in San Diego from different parts of the USA , happily exchanging hellos and “long time no sees” when we were called for the team building activity. Our happy moods lasted till we were handed the “waiver document” and told that we were being taken rock climbing. As an aside, they even suggested that the waiver was approved by the company lawyer , a 600$ an hour hotshot corporate attorney. I am still not sure that was a joke. So, off we go, rock climbing…it was the indoor type fortunately, a false rock façade with pegs and finger holes and stones. We scrambled up and down the ropes, raced each other, some of us even had three legged rock climbing races. ( I climbed up and down three times, hated the climbing, liked hanging from the rope and loved whizzing down the rock surface!!) We were then taken for an authentic Mexican fiesta. ( San Diego downtown is about 15-20 miles from the Mexican border)

After dinner we went back to the hotel. The hotel is one of those types where the maids hang your clothes up, arrange your toiletries on the table, put out the bathrobe and leave you a little something on the bed. For me, it was something that smelt like granola. Impressed by the hotel’s policy of leaving potpourri that smells like breakfast ( perhaps a new technique in waking me up, I thought!!) I opened it left it on my bedside table. Next morning Rocky asks me how was the granola. I told her it smelt divine. She asked me how it tasted. I looked at her and asked “you ate the potpourri”. Only then I realized that even if the hotel is swanky, granola is NOT used as potpourri. Lesson learnt.

Anyway, the trip was fine. We had breakfast parties, wine and cheese parties, a full fledged banquet dinner with innumerable courses , so much food that I didn’t know whether my hands were paining because of all the eating I had done or the rock climbing the previous night. In case anybody is interested we did manage a number of meetings and some work too.

Oh and about my “hot” boss, the joke is that at a previous dinner party, a married doctor was sitting next to my boss. After a glass of wine she apparently thought he was the hottest guy she ever met. She went and announced that to one of my colleagues and enquired about him. Needless to say we were amused. So after the dinner at the Mexican restaurant and a glass of Margarita, I turned to my CEO and told him “ I had a glass of Margarita and you are the hottest guy I have ever seen”. At first he looked at me open mouthed and then turned red. I have never seen him this embarrassed. The look on his face as he realized the joke was totally worth it.

But I still didn’t get a salary raise…..