Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Oh, the Places We’ll Go!

After eight weeks of lockdown and the world being scary, challenging, and unpredictable, it’s time for a break. I have spent the past two months and counting working with companies, reps, and salespeople to help them try to conduct business as usual. I have given numerous presentations on how to sell when you can’t visit customers, work from home, and keep in touch with your customers using sales flashes and tools like LinkedIn and Constant Contact.

Now, I hope you will humor me if I take a break from all that and dream about the places I’ll go and things I’ll do when this pandemic is finally over. I’m sure you all have some things that you have been surprised to miss. Here are some of the things I miss and can’t wait to get back to.

I miss taking plane rides. I would not even care if I had a middle seat in the back row. It has been nine weeks since I was on an airplane. For the first time in 27 years, I do not have any tickets booked. Heck, I even miss airports. I cannot wait to fly again.

I miss visiting Tucson. Since 1999 I have spent at least 50 nights a year working with Prototron Circuits in Tucson, and I have spent 1,000 nights in the same hotel practically on the same floor and in the same room. That’s a total of three years of my life in that town. I even miss going to Denny’s a couple of times during that trip. I cannot wait to go to Tucson again.

I miss my beloved bookstores. The last eight weeks are the longest time that I have not been in a bookstore. Now, all I have is Amazon. I miss Barnes and Noble and the privately owned stores as well. I can’t wait to visit Brick & Mortar Books in Redmond again.

I miss my customers, including the people I work with in Aurora, West Chicago, and Bloomington, Illinois; San Jose and Sunnyvale, California; Redmond, Washington; Ayer, Massachusetts; and even 20 miles away in Winthrop, Maine. I talk to all of these friends/customers all the time, but I miss seeing them and having the luxury to hang out with them. I can’t wait to see my customers again.

I miss my walks in all of those areas, such as the walking path in St. Charles, the walk up the Broadway Hill in Tucson, and the beautiful park in Redmond. Not that I don’t have a beautiful walk in my own neighborhood in Waterville, Maine, but I’ve grown accustomed to walks in every town I visit, and I miss them. I can’t wait to take a walk in St. Charles again.

I miss restaurants—even the mediocre ones like Wienerschnitzel, A&W, LongHorn Steakhouse, Chili’s, the aforementioned Denny’s, and all the rest that I’ve grown used to. Yes, I can’t wait to get to Denny’s again.

I miss going to church, whether it’s the Presbyterian Church in Sammamish, the one in Tucson, or my own Methodist Church in Waterville (there are no Presbyterian Churches in Waterville). Oh, I go to service every Sunday by watching YouTube, but somehow, it’s not the same.

Having said that, I have to say that I have gotten used to working from home for these past eight weeks. It has been fun getting to know my wife Debbie again. Sadly, this is the longest time we have sent together in decades, and we are doing much better at it than we both thought we would. I will be happy to spend some more time at home. The other things can wait a little bit longer.

And I do like starting home projects like painting the front porch and not being rushed because I’m home for only five days and have to get it done before I leave. And yes, I do like the way I can work all day long on a work project and not have to worry about having to be anywhere—because there is no place to go.

But we can all see signs of activity and things opening back up again, although we are still not sure if this will be a good thing; it might be dangerously too soon. It’s disturbing to me that whether or not a U.S. state opens has become a political “red or blue state” issue rather than a scientific one. Alas, that is the world we live in today.

But even though I miss all of the things that have made up my everyday life for so many years, I try to pause and reflect on these times. I sense that we are turning the corner, and in a matter of weeks, we will ease back into life as we knew it, but this event that we experienced together all around the world will be remembered. Once I am back on the road and this time passed and become part of my memory, I know that I will look back on my time at home with fondness and wish that I had taken advantage of it more.

Okay, that’s enough. Next week, I’ll talk about what we do when life starts getting back to normalcy, and what we are going to do about it.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is president of D.B. Management Group.