business traveler

I spent hours this evening in the darkness of interchangeable spaces: A taxi that could have gone anywhere, a train station whose name doesn't matter, a train shooting through the night though its direction of travel was of no immediate concern to me, a station forecourt that couldn't have been drabber and which I couldn't identify, another taxi, and finally an identikit motel.

Another day at the synchrotron is coming up. On three previous occasions, I enjoyed the pleasure of collecting data remotely. A mosaic of large screens, a fast internet connection and a robot eager to please helped me carry out experiments matter-of-factly, without inconveniencing my daily routine. But tonight certain finesses in my experimental setup require my presence in the wilderness of Oxfordshire where the facility is located.

If there were compensation, the waste of time would be bearable, but there's nothing. Outside the eight-hour shift tomorrow, every minute passes in utter futility. Throughout the bouncy ride to Paddington I worried about the crystals I was carrying on my knees, the trays they had grown in stashed in a Styrofoam box inside a Marks & Spencer bag. The train journey was too short to be relaxing.

The motel could have been in the middle of a landfill, by the seaside or next to an open-pit copper mine. I had no stake in the journey; only the driver knew where he was going. There were no lights around and no life. It was clearly not in a city, but then the countryside around Oxford isn't exactly known for its abundance of cities.

The motel was fantastic and an abomination in one, an explosion of contradictions impossible to square. It's part of a large chain and has not even a trace of soul. The color and the furniture and the carpets and the employees are identical in every location. From a distance, everything looks assembled from standardized prefabricated pieces. It's dreadful, the place where no one stays voluntarily, filled with solitary business travelers, sales representatives between appointments with reluctant customers, and vacationers stranded on their way home by some unexpected mishap.

Look closer and things are nice: The room is big and spotless. The TV is the size of a desk, the bathroom fittings are superior, and the shower is a veritable Niagara Falls of hot comfort. The tiles are ceramic, but when you take a step back, the entire bathroom still manages to produce a one-piece-molded-from-plastic feeling. The hotel could probably be completely folded up in a few hours, ready to be reassembled in a more promising location.

There was a restaurant on the premises. I was delighted because I was hungry. The menu was printed on a fold-out of plasticized paper, to be changed yearly at best. It's got the usual suspects: a dozen variations of fish & chips and burgers. The Puddings & Sundaes section is nearly as big as the Main Dishes. I took a seat and almost instantly regretted it.

The waiter was robotic, rattling off the specials and apologizing that there was no beef lasagna tonight. I didn't inquire whether they had run out or whether the discovery of certain contaminants had compelled them to pull it off the menu a while back already and declined the beef burger, another signature dish of the ongoing horsemeat scandal, preferring fish cakes instead. There was no telling whether they were haddock as the menu asserted.

This was the place where even the head of the kitchen – I hesitate calling him chef – doesn't know what's on a plate. In all likelihood, the food was prepared remotely in an industrial setting, possibly off-shore in a low-wage country, from ingredients that unskilled workers mix in repetitive motions. Frozen and dispensed across the country, it is then heated up as needed. There's no waste and no personal touch.

For all these efficiencies, the dishes were madly expensive, the effect of a captive customer base, hungry after a day on the road or in meetings, with no alternative. I spent exactly 17 minutes in the restaurant, wolfing down dinner and guzzling an ale. The waiter returned a handful of change from a twenty ("Sorry, it's all in shrapnel.") and I was off, catching some sleep before tomorrow's intense eight hours.