A month or so ago my boss was like “Hey, Sarah, we need some help with our Grand Cayman trip. Would you mind going down on the site visit next week and then also staying for a full week during our event down there?”
I tried to nod and smile in a professional manner rather than jump up and down with pure joy. I think I half succeeded.
The trip wrapped up on Monday and it was just as glorious as I’d imagined. Sure, we worked and we actually worked pretty hard. But working at the Ritz-Carlton in Grand Cayman is still better than basically any other work day.
As I said my good-byes and hugged all the locals who had been such great people to work alongside that week, it made me think a lot about how you really don’t know where life will take you. (Yeah, this is going to be one of those blog posts.)
It’s one of the strangest things about travel though. You often leave a place assuming you may never see it again. And even more often, you leave people assuming you’ll never see them again. It bothers me.
My point in this absurdly drawn out entry is that I want an app developer to create an app that allows you to do something as simple as tapping phones with someone and that connects you permanently. So, let’s say I’m down in Grand Cayman, as I’m saying my good-byes and giving hugs, we give quick phone taps.
Then, two years later, when I’m walking into the Ritz-Carlton in Miami and one of the workers from Grand Cayman is now the GM there, our phones beep, notifying us that the other is within 100 feet and offering us the chance to message each other. Or when I’m on a flight and I have a layover in Dallas, and so do they, our phones beep, and now we can grab a coffee and catch up.
Maybe I want to be polite, but I don’t actually ever want to see the person again? No problem. We bump phones, I walk off and block them. They never know.
This past summer I was randomly reunited with a friend I’d spent a summer in France with 19 years ago. It was completely random. We re-met in a pretty dramatic way (I was introducing her to a crowd of about 800 people), but a few weeks later we grabbed drinks on a quiet patio and caught up on the last two decades. It was pretty incredible.
So anyway, someone make this app. Because I really want to use it.
Sarah Crosland 