Road Trip II

Movies always make the prospect of a road trip sound romantic. Sure, there’s excitement of traveling new places, hours of uninterrupted good tunes, and the prospect of too much food that’s too bad for you to consider while you’re on the road. But when you get down to it, road trips are about one thing: driving. A lot of it. And I hate driving.

Our move to California was no different – fourteen hours of driving over two days. My ass still hurts, which is saying something given that I’m back-filling my blog from a month in the future (cue Futurama reference: “Welcome…to the future! WoOoOooo!”). That’s not to say there weren’t a few poetic moments, beyond the occasional image of me massaging my ass at an interstate rest stop. But enough about my ass.

How’s this for a poetic moment? Somewhere in Oregon, speeding away as fast as possible from my MBA, we were overtaken by a car with a vanity license plate reading “SYNRGY”.

Synergy?

Yes, synergy.

Synergy is an inside joke among graduates of my MBA program. When we’re asked informally about what we learned in our MBA, our answer is simple: synergy. Not as a business concept. Not as a desirable outcome of a acquisition or merger. Just the word. “Synergy” is a part of any answer to any question a professor poses. “Synergy” is the equivalent of “uhm”, a placeholder for your mouth while your mental tape recorder pauses to auto-reverse.

It’s somehow appropriate that the one-word summary of my MBA would choose to pull up stakes, don an Oregon license plate, and make for Silicon Valley. Just like me.