"Sorry--I'll be in Paris"

I almost sent that message to someone in Eagan in response to a notice I got today for a meeting that will take place during our planned trip to Disneyland in Paris. I stopped myself, though, and settled for "sorry--out of town." As I considered my potential response, it struck me as a bit snooty to casually toss off a line like that, don't you think?

We're still new enough here that we're not really used to the idea of just running off to Germany or France for lunch or taking a train to spend the afternoon in Zurich or Geneva. It's a pretty casual thing to the Swiss, of course, or to the Thomson folks who have been here for a while. Still, I thought an answer like that might come across the wrong way in Minnesota. I know there are lots of people who would give just about anything to have the experience that we're having, and we kind of stumbled into it.

I'm always aware that we're here basically because of a series of unforeseeable events that just happened to result in my being in the right place at the right time. It's not like they scoured Thomson for just the right person to send to Switzerland; it's more like my VP was meeting with his directors one afternoon, he asked if anyone wanted to move to Switzerland, no one else said anything, I tentatively stuck my hand up, and that was that. Boom. I'm in Switzerland. What could be easier? Most people aren't that fortunate.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this post has much of a point other than to say that I try not to lose sight of the fact that we're lucky to have an experience that would be great for everyone to have but that isn't available to most people. So I try not to send snotty messages back to Eagan about being in Paris for a couple of days even though it's really cool that I'm going to be in Paris for a couple of days.