I could not help speculating last night in the hotel bar at the Brandenburg airport in Berlin.
There was a guy there who was having a beer and engaging in animated conversation, in English, with what I presume were work colleagues. He was talking about sales and how sales were going so far in June, and other technical details with a lady called Melissa.
He reminded me of the image I had in my mind of the ‘travelling salesman’. The guy who travelled around the country generating sales, staying in hotels for overnight trips, spending his time in the bar talking and thinking about making sales.
I speculated briefly about that life. And about how things might have turned out different for me in my life if I had made different decisions or if things had conspired against me. How I could have been that guy in the bar.
And the guy in the ‘Death of a Salesman’ play and all those salesmen and women who make their living from sales.
It’s a tough life, although many of them, I would imagine, like or love the itinerant life of being on the road.