​​​​​​Because humor is funnier when you know it's true.

Biz trip: Peru (continued)

After much more testing, we confirmed that our packaging indeed had an altitude problem.  And our next destination would make that more painfully obvious:  Cuzco, altitude: 11,000 feet.

After flying over beautiful Peruvian mountains, we landed in Cuzco.  My breath was literally taken away.  No, not from the beautiful scenery.  This time it was from a nearly complete lack of oxygen.  Though I was in my 40’s at the time, I felt instantly elderly, as I crept along the path from plane to airport so as not to overexert myself into a coronary or stroke.  Fortunately, my younger coworkers were struggling too.  My frail male ego was somewhat assuaged.

We were driven to our accommodations, which were in a monastery that had been converted to a hotel.  Very cool.  Interestingly, I noticed that on each floor of the hotel, there was an oxygen tank with attached breathing mask.  Not as cool.

After the first day of testing, we found even more disastrous packaging results than in Arequipa, as feared.  After overdosing on mucho bad data, it was time to wrap it up for the day.  The “older crowd” decided to hang out in the hotel’s restaurant to eat, drink and be merry, while the younger folks decided to go out clubbing.

When everyone met for breakfast the next morning, I recognized the signs of severe sickness amongst our young clubbers.  Though they may have been affected by the local water (ice) in their drinks, or by altitude sickness, my guess was that the main culprit was alcohol, or an axis of evil of all three.  Whatever the cause, the younger workers were out of commission for the rest of our trip, which put pressure on we older folks to get the work done.  By the next day, we had lost an additional guy to illness, and at least two guys were hitting the hotel’s oxygen tanks pretty hard.  We were dropping like flies.

Of course the hardiest of our team were a man and a woman who not only survived the week, but who also happened to be chain smokers.  I guess limited oxygen was no problem for them since they had been training their lungs with limited oxygen every day of their lives.