As the traveling salesman says: All hotel ceilings are white

At first it seems interesting and challenging:
To be a international traveling salesman voyaging from customer to customer visiting many cities in a continent or even the world.

It seems the journey opportunity of your life.
The chance of your life-time to see and meet many different people and cultures.
Seems like holiday forever all paid by the company.

However the reality is:
- You leave home in the early morning or even in the weekends
- You spend many hours waiting for the next connecting flight
- You need to commute from the airport to the customer with a taxi driver that you have to trust
- You need to verify every spending to make sure they don’t cheat upon you
- You need to collect and keep all the bills for your expenses report
- You take your lunch alone on the way to the customer
- You have meetings with people that seemingly have no time pressure, unlike yourself
- At the end of the day you have dinner again alone
- You prepare the meetings for the next day or reply your emails alone in your room
- In the hotel room you zap the TV-channels – mainly viewing the news as you can’t follow tv-shows.
- Maybe have brought some movies DVD’s to watch on your portable
- You might read a book, but these consume space and weigh a lot to carry
- When trying to go asleep you stare at the ceiling which is remarkably similar to all other white hotel ceilings
- In the middle of the night you wake up due to the jet-lag and stare at the white ceiling again.
- You have your breakfast again alone
- You pack your luggage, hoping to leave nothing behind (stress)
- You pay the hotel bill – hopefully at the agreed rate – else you need to discuss and argue
- Leave for meeting the next customer
- The stress you get from waiting lines in the airport, queuing in the taxi line, missing or canceled flights
- You go through many climate changes in a short amount of time (one week)
- In the air plane you are with many other people who can have diseases and viruses: more chance to become ill
- You get ill over the weekend at home
- The air miles earned are harder to spend than you ever could imagine. You hardly can use them: mainly for an upgrade to business class.

The life of the traveling salesman becomes boring rather soon as you start missing your family, your social contacts at home, your spare time activities and your free time.

In the end you come to the conclusion that:
- All hotel rooms have white ceilings
- The excitement of travel becomes the stress of travel
- You hardly meet up with local people
- You hardly see any foreign cultures as all major cities have become rather similar
- You may know many people that you don’t know really

You are locked up between travel, waiting in the airport lobby’s, commuting, meetings, lonely meals, your emails and the hotel rooms with the white ceilings.

The apparently challenging and exciting life of the traveling salesman is asocial and becomes boring too soon as all the hotel ceilings are white.

What was your expectation as a traveling salesman ?
How fast did you get cut off from your family, friends and social life – and got bored ?