Tom does LA
LA: The city
Hello from Evanston. I’m back from Los Angeles—too bad you (the imaginary loyal reader) never knew it, since I never blogged from there. ‘Twas my first-ever business trip, and I liked the comp’ed meals, paid hotels, and paid airfare thing. Good arrangement, that. But Los Angeles… well, for the impatient, here’s the Clif’s Notes version of my impressions:
- LA is enormous.
- LA has big freeways.
- LA has many homeless people.
- LA has a (literally?) shitty downtown.
- LA has nice weather.
- LA has attractive women.
- LA has annoying, superficial people.
To elaborate: The city of Los Angeles is vast. I first gazed upon its mind-boggling expanse in the taxi trip from LAX to the hotel. We entered the freeway and came upon a crest in the road, after which the whole city was laid out before me. It’s huge. Scarily big. To think that mankind built that from nothing: all that concrete, all those cars, all those people huddled together. I don’t like it.
My hotel was downtown, two blocks from the LA Times building. A decent place, but a bad neighborhood. Downtown LA is shit. (In fact, on the way to work on the first day, I literally stepped in a pile of dog shit. I spent a long time trying to get that shit off my shoes.) Homeless people abound. They seemed quieter than Chicago homeless people. Maybe they’re more hopeless—I don’t know. But they were many, many homeless people. I found it appalling.
On Friday night, my friend Ryan and I were eating in a fast food joint in Los Feliz and a homeless woman came in. She dug through the trash for close to 15 minutes, fishing out discarded styrofoam cartons and eating what she could find. That’s appalling. Tell me that’s not appalling.
I was also not particularly enamoured of the people I met in Los Angeles. Granted, it’s unfair to judge a city by the few people with whom you come in contact on a four-day trip, but I’ve learned to go with my gut feeling about places. And here’s a gut feeling: LA people blow. I sum up the situation like this: Everyone in LA is a salesperson. They sell themselves. They sell their bodies, their talents, and their scripts. They have to, because that’s the only way to make it. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to live in a city of salespeople. Might as well camp out on a used car lot.
LA: The job stuff
If my impressions of LA were rather negative, my job experience—you might even call it consulting—at TMS International was great. Dave and I spent tons of time with the VP, and I think I learned more in three days than I did in my entire sophomore year of college. Yeah, no shit. Business stuff, and I think a lot of it is un-teachable. You just have to experience it, and I’d never experienced it. It’s good, though. It’s interesting. I have to think hard, be quick, find solutions, consider all angles, pick the best strategy. It’s an involved game.
I’m learning more and more about business—things I never thought I’d be exposed to when the Trib hired me for a little small-change usability gig back in March. This is bigger, deeper, and more interesting. It’s political, historical, and psychological. I feel that so much of a business is the people who run it. It’s not the numbers, or the product, or the balance sheet—it’s the people. A company is nothing without good people. Relationships are everything in business; synergy is success, and friction is failure.
Well, it’s not appropriate for me to get into any gory details of my job in this space. Suffice it to say that’s it’s been exciting, and I may have great opportunities ahead of me. If you want to know more, talk to me personally.