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ROAD WARRIORS: Julie Aiken

Marketplace Staff Dec 20, 2010
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ROAD WARRIORS: Julie Aiken

Marketplace Staff Dec 20, 2010
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Kai Ryssdal: We tend to think of business travel as involving airplanes. People in suits jetting off to some conference or another, sometimes in exotic locales, more often not. But what if your job means hours behind the wheel, driving yourself from sales call to sales call?

Producer Michael Rapheal takes the title of our series Road Warriors literally today with a woman for whom driving the highways of Los Angeles is part of the job.


Julie Aiken: I’m Julie Aiken. I’m in pharmaceutical sales. When I’m out on the road for work, I listen to the “Longest Road” by Morgan Page.

Actually, a love song, but the lyrics say, “You go the longest road to nowhere.” And frankly, that’s just very ironic, because when you’re stuck in L.A. traffic, you really feel like you’re going nowhere and you really aren’t. What I call a sort of “traffic trance” that you fall into when you’re stuck in traffic in L.A., it helps you move past that and I may strategize for my next call, I might get energized before a meeting or plan my next vacation, especially when I’m sitting in traffic by LAX and there’s flights taking off and landing, and I’m just watching them coming and going while I’m sitting there.

You know, there’s parts of the job that are very freeing. There’s other parts of the job that can be sometimes be frustrating, but currently, now, the job I have is awesome. I love my customers, I love what I do. I just don’t like the fact that sometimes it takes so long to get where I’m trying to go.

People need to realize that when you don’t have control in your situation, your job — and I think a lot of people feel that way in our economy right now — that having a playlist and having something that’s so personal to you can be so motivating and so refreshing and energizing, that I think you shouldn’t lose sight of that.

Ryssdal: The music page on our website has more of Julie’s favorites. You can offer up picks of your own as well.

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