Brasklapp

Dallas Trip #4
DAL Airport · Thu 19 Feb 2026. 4pm.

My main purpose in coming out to Dallas for this short business trip has been to support a "Developer Days" trade show one of our major customers is putting on. They bring together representatives from their internal solutions groups as well as key vendors to staffs booths at a private trade show for their developers. Our company has done a few other trade shows like this in the past year.

Today's "Developer Day" was similar to one I supported in June. Same setup, same conversations... same surprising degree to which people who work at a major bank hoovered up our free merch. A wave of attendees came in at 10:30 (we started at 10am), and people were five-deep at our table, snapping up the merch. In 20 minutes we were out of everything but stickers. And we ran out of stickers before quitting time came around at 2pm.

Also like last time I played "booth babe" while my salesguy colleague stepped away for a few 1:1s. But unlike salesguys at trade shows who often step away to do anything but talk to customers, Maya was off having tough conversations with customer VPs. Staffing the booth while he was doing that was the least I could do.

Dallas Trip #3
Irving, TX · Wed 18 Feb 2026. 10:30pm.

Hotels were expensive in Irving when I booked this trip a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what's up, maybe it's people flying in for the mini trade show I'm working with a customer tomorrow, maybe it's another company running a bigger show, maybe it's a concert at the nearby arena. Either way, the hotel I wanted, a Marriott walking distance to the event, was $400/night. That's well above our company travel guidelines.

Being a good corporate citizen I looked for other credible hotels nearby. I booked in at a Hilton Homewood Suites about 1 mile away. It's $200/night. Meanwhile my colleague, Maya, booked the Marriott. Maya scoffed at $400 being "expensive" and said that's just the reality today.

Well, my $200 Homewood Suites is worth maybe half of what I'm paying. It's a suburban hotel, spread out, and I'm in the room pretty much farthest from the front desk. I have to walk through the parking lot to get to a separate building at the far side, then either take the stairs up 2 levels or use the elevator at the far end of the building.

Oh, and the wifi's was busted all day. When I arrived at 1:00 there was a guest in the lobby grousing about it. The staff said a tech was working on it. By 6pm this evening, when I had a customer demo call to support, the wifi was still busted. I tethered from my phone. At least I had a decent 5G signal. But my meeting was still laggy.

This evening after dinner I stopped by the Marriott with Maya. Wow, what a night-and-day difference between the hotels. The Marriott is a high-rise with an upscale lobby. The Homewood Suites looks like a suburban motel built 30 years ago— and the threadbare furniture in my room looks 30 years old, too. The Marriott is definitely worth more than the Homewood, probably even 2x. I just wish it hadn't been $200 vs. $400 when my company's asking me to keep it to $200. Because when local demand is up, $200 often doesn't buy decent basic accommodations anymore.

Update: When I got back to the Homewood after 10pm, wifi was finally working... but barely. Signing on took 5 minutes with multiple retries after failures.

Dallas Trip #2
Irving, TX · Wed 18 Feb 2026. 1:30pm.

Today I'm in Dallas. More specifically, Irving, one of its suburbs. Irving's a nice town, at least the part I'm in, with a mix of office towers, restaurants and hotels, and condos. Ah, but the trip out here took a bit of doing.

My flight today went smoothly. Even getting up at 4:45am went smoothly. I was worried it might be painful getting up that early, or that my scheduled Lyft driver might bail on me, or that I might get to the airport nice and early only to discover my flight was running 2 hours late. None of those bad things happened. And I even had a great seat on my flight when it left, on-time, at 7:05am.



I had an entire exit row to myself. Leg room and shoulder room! And this wasn't some 40%-of-the-seats-are-empty flight. It was mostly full. But thanks to Southwest's new assigned-seats policy, picking exit row seats costs extra money for people without elite status. Of course, if the flight were 100% full they'd put people in these seats for free. But this flight was maybe only 90% full, so I lucked out.

We even landed early at DAL airport. Of course, landing early meant we had to wait on the tarmac for our gate to free up. 🙄 There's no getting ahead in today's commercial aviation system. The only way to win is to fly semi-private. ...Which I'd like to try sometime. I'll see if/when it makes sense.


Taking Lyft from the airport was an odd experience. My driver called me up and yelled at me because I wasn't where he was trying to meet me. I was, I explained patiently, standing at exactly the place where the Lyft app told me to go— which was, not coincidentally, right under a bunch of signs that read "Lyft Ride App here ↴". But my driver was a 60+ male so the fact that somebody had changed the rules on him sometime since, oh, 1983, made it a thing to piss and moan about for a few minutes. 🤣

I could've hung up on him and tried another driver, but I really wanted to get going faster than canceling and starting over would take. And because I was patient with him, he eventually agreed to work with me instead of complaining I was "in the wrong spot"— which apparently was where ride apps used to do pickups, not where all the signs point today. He drove over to my spot and picked me up. I sympathized with him about "Yeah, they always seem to change the rules every few weeks"... and that was enough to put the issue to bed. We had an amiable conversation about the natural beauty of California vs. living in Texas after that.

I reached my hotel just after 1pm. They didn't have any rooms ready. That's really rare, but I accept it because it's within policy that checkin starts at 3. I stowed my bags with the helpful front desk person and walked over to an Italian restaurant a block away for lunch.

This really is a nice little corner of town with things close by & walkable. The DART light rail even has a stop a few blocks up. I'll see about getting my room again in another few minutes here as I head back after finishing lunch.

This evening I had dinner with one of my clients. We got the VP of the organization that owns our software, along with the director and manager underneath him who manage our software on a daily basis, to join us. It was an amiable meeting where we talked about a number of things. One of the topics of conversation was where everyone lives and the degree to which we work from home (WFH) or are mandated to return to office (RTO).

My company is remote-first, I've noted before. We actually gave up our last remaining office lease last year. Execs looked at the cost versus the number of person-days of occupancy we had, and decided the value wasn't worth the cost. Our customer exec quipped that his company looked at the same equation and made the opposite decision. Instead of reasoning, "Too few people come to the office, let's terminate the lease," they chose, "Too few people come to the office, let's force them to come back."

But here's the funny thing about the whole equation. The exec in question doesn't RTO. He lives 500 miles away. He works from home. Every person beneath him in his organization is pressured to spend more days in the office. It's tracked. It's a topic in performance reviews. But the VP works from home.

Oh, he's aware of the hypocrisy. Some employees are bold enough to confront him with it. Others go through anonymous feedback sites, where "You work remotely while forcing us to commute to the office, that's ridiculous" is the #1 most common item of feedback. He recognizes all this... and he treats it with the same detachment as he might note, "Huh, there's rain in the weather forecast today." He's hypocritically enforcing a policy he doesn't abide by himself... and he doesn't care.