Sky Warriors

The pilot informs me I am cruising at 31,000 feet, but it’s far from exhilarating. I’m tired for one thing. I began the week leading my negotiation workshop for public health professionals at Harvard, then swooped past the Smoky Mountains onto a chemical plant in Knoxville to help unveil a competency model for first-line leaders. I haven’t communicated with anyone who speaks American in a week!

I left a place where cars are cahs and bars are bahs only to land in a humid clime where pies are pahs and ties are tahs.

And the odd thing is, every one of them thinks I have a funny accent. Look, we’re all from somewhere else. The guy I worked with in Boston had just flown in from Utah, while my Southern colleague, who resides a few miles from my Bucks County home, had recently taken flight from France, and his cohort was a Brit from London.

We’re the sky warriors, the denizens of the jet stream who make our living in the global workplace by behaving as if the globe is our workplace. Which it is.

If you’ve flown for whatever reason, you’ve seen us. We’re men and women from our 20s to our 60s. We often get on the plane first because we’ve earned that coveted pre-Zone One status by flying more than the flight attendants. We slow up your security line because we always have a laptop and iPad to disgorge from our briefcases and place on the screening belt along with our rolling suitcases which we always carry on, checked luggage being a major sin. We’re dressed in what may have at one time been a suit, but it’s probably lost its jacket and tie or scarf along the way.

If it’s Friday night, we’ve earned those circles under our bloodshot eyes, and that tablet book we’re reading is a welcome respite from the unremitting week of work. We can’t wait to see our spouse, our kids, our bed, anything familiar.

In an era obsessed with balancing work and life, we consider ourselves lucky if we keep our balance on the mad dash down the moving walkway to our connection at Gate F-72. “Stand right, walk left,” the sign insists. Guess who’s in the passing lane?

Ironically, a lot of us make good money but live like street people. At 2 a.m. we hang out in empty, uncleaned airports or make our way lugubriously to a quiet Marriott, dragging our belongings behind us as we check in, glancing at the hotel receipt to see what city we’re in, perhaps scooting out to an all-night Wendy’s for an insomniac-compatible snack.

If you ask us what we care about most, we’ll tell you its that family we don’t see enough of. If you ask why we do what we do, we’ll probably shrug: We do what we do because it’s what we do.

We don’t complain, though we might crack a wry smile at friends who say they envy our glamorous lifestyle. What’s to complain about? We sky warriors have chosen this life; no one’s making us do it. Our finances are more secure than most, and we’re part of a really cool planetary coalition of globe-trotting laborers who (mostly) know the two great social virtues of the frequently flying: waiting our turn, and giving each other as much space as we can muster.

What’s more, much more, our jobs tend to be very interesting. Companies don’t fund trips halfway around the world so we can accomplish something utterly mundane. We’re situated excitingly in the vanguard of the 21st century, at the precise juncture where today’s challenges meet tomorrow’s solutions. It’s the best view in the house.

And sometimes the trip moves beyond exciting all the way to sublime. Like the day a client, the Head of Global Pharmico-something-or-other sat in his company’s New Jersey cafeteria and gave me a scoop on the new drug I’d soon be reading about. “It actually reverses the course of certain forms of leukemia” he said. Then, to his great surprise, tears welled in his eyes. He managed to add: “I’ve seen kids get well after just a few treatments.”

That night he was off to Switzerland, one more sky warrior cruising above 30,000 feet, crisscrossing the skies over Paris, Singapore, Dehli, and Doylestown, to the next stop on an eventful career. We make a contribution, each of us, to a sometimes shaky, always unpredictable, invariably fascinating worldwide economic force. No, we won’t save the world or cure a dread disease. OK, maybe once in a very great while.