"Please change your hotel"

I'm sitting in a hotel in Sticksville. It's late at night. I'll go to bed soon.

I'm here for a week-long management confab for my department, worldwide. We are working four days, but they wrap around a weekend. Strictly speaking it is a "leadership meeting" meaning that the [other] invitees all outrank me. But the Big Boss of this global department said, "You should come too, Hosea, because you are somehow an honorary member of the leadership team in North America." Flattering, I guess.

Anyway, it turns out that everybody else got rooms at the Holiday Inn, four miles out of town. I got a room at the same place I've stayed the last two or three times I've come to town, the hotel I first found because Hil was staying here when we were working on a project together a few years ago. Why not? It seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do.

Only then the Big Boss suggested, "Wouldn't it be better if you changed your hotel so you were in the Holiday Inn with the rest of us?"

Ulp.

I haven't done it yet. I guess if it's really important to him I can do it tomorrow. I can always claim I was too busy to get around to it before I left home.

But I really don't want to.

Why not?

The first reason I think of is that at the end of the work day I want to be done with work. I don't want to bump into my new boss -- or the Big Boss -- while I'm strolling down the hall in my swim suit and towel looking for the pool. I don't want my weekend hijacked by invitations from hearty, cheerful, outgoing colleagues, all of whom outrank me but want to get along as "just friends" for the weekend doing something [God knows what] that I find crashingly dull but that I have to go along with so that I don't offend anyone ... because we all have to work together later and I can't really afford to blow them off. I don't trust that I will find any real common interests with any of these people besides work, and I don't want to have to be on my guard every minute that I'm out of my room. The whole idea of having to change my hotel so I can be in the same building with these guys makes me clench up inside.

But wait a minute. Whenever I go somewhere to work on a project with Hil we share a hotel. (Not a room, to be sure!!) She and I don't have a lot of common interests: she's a big fan of recreational shopping, for example, which I find just painfully dull. We usually don't have a lot to talk about besides work ... occasionally our children, and (maybe once in a blue moon) our divorces. But I don't clench up inside at the prospect. What's the difference?

I see two differences. One difference is that we are clearly peers: what's more, we share a common approach to the work we do, and I am as good at it as she is. So I don't feel insecure on that front. The other difference is that she's a woman, and I always feel more comfortable around women than men when other factors are equal.

Both differences matter. If I were sharing the hotel with male peers I would feel less anxious than I feel at the invitation from the Big Boss; ditto if I were sharing it with female superiors. But in neither case -- I think -- would I clench up as much inside as I did when I read Big Boss's e-mail.

Let's see what he says when we get started tomorrow. I really better go to bed.