The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [75]
I should not have worried about my evening, for when I got back to my hotel, I discovered that a closing-night celebration was in progress. Realising that the majority of their guests were connected to the fair, the management had seen an opportunity to raise additional revenue by throwing a pay-as-you-go party at the bar. Here was my chance to meet in the flesh people whom I had over the previous few days been able only to imagine on the bases of the whirring sounds made by their toilet-roll dispensers, and their sides of mobile-phone conversations, as heard through the thin and even bendy walls which separated us. The hotel did not seem to have been housing anyone in a position either to buy or sell a plane: such dignitaries were more likely to have booked into the Crillon in central Paris, and at that moment were perhaps sailing around the Île de la Cité on the Boeing-sponsored dinner cruise, searching for appropriate remarks to make about the illuminated flying buttresses of Notre Dame, first built by stonemasons in the 1240s. By contrast, this place was the preferred lodging for those known within the industry as Tier 3 or 4 suppliers, people involved in the manufacture of smaller and less sophisticated parts of aircraft, or indeed, even further from the end product, in the fabrication of the tools required to form these parts.
Over an Orangina-based cocktail, I made the acquaintance of a salesman from Fort Worth, Texas. His company produced the rubber hoses responsible for circulating oxygen, fuel and oil around commercial jets. With unintended lyricism, he described to me how these prosthetic veins sent their liquids coursing under passengers’ seats as they soared obliviously over cloud-covered seas towards their objectives. Sensing my interest, he bent down and pulled out of his oversized accountant’s briefcase a brochure showing three grey warehouses with red stripes across their rooflines, located on an industrial estate near Dallas–Fort Worth airport. ‘No other company can equal our track record of providing horizontal, integrated fuel solutions’, the document declared – though the sales director’s choice of hotel seemed proof that not every potential client had been prepared to second this buoyant assessment.
Despite the fact that the occasion marked the end of a few days of hard work, many of the partygoers were feeling anxious, whether about orders, stock levels, Civil Aviation Authority regulations or the skittish exchange rate of the dollar. There was particular distress at the news that Northrop Grumman was planning to revamp its procurement process. A man whose business specialised in corrosion checks shared with me his suspicion that he and his wife had chosen the very worst time to renovate their home near Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place name that inanely evoked for me an image of an archetypal log cabin, like the one I had once recently seen in an outsize canvas by the nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole.
Troublingly, there was no substantial food to be had, so that as we talked, my interlocutor and I were forced to rely to an unwise degree on crisps and salted nuts. We also made some inroads on the cocktail menu, being conscious that we were not going to be able to solve all our problems that night and surmising that we might, therefore, be better off attempting to lose track of them for a few hours with chemical assistance.
On my way back to our table from the bar, carrying a third round, I was struck by what seemed like a profound realisation that the air show was only one of hundreds of industry-specific events taking place at that moment around the world, filling airport concourses with delegates, providing custom for the makers of