Road Hard and Put Up Wet

By Howard Nevin

"Road Hard and Put Up Wet" is a reflection on 40+ years of travel and being a “road warrior.” All of the stories are business travel-related, and while most of the related stories and incidents are humorous, some are not, such as stopping a suicide. When you travel over 4 million miles by air domestically and internationally, visit hundreds of cities, ... well, it’s not fun as many people think business traveling is. Sometimes you have colleagues sharing the experiences, and sometimes you are very much alone. The book is a reflection on life on the road, and what happens when you are, and are not, looking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard Nevin
• Release date: Oct 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311909756

Howard Nevin

Howard is a native of Washington D.C. and now lives in Maryland. He has written three other books, and over 120 articles for major trade publications, including a a long running column in Government Computer News.Howard is married with three grown children and seven grandchildren.

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What people are saying about Road Hard and Put Up Wet

"In Road Hard, Put Up Wet Howard Nevin writes a personal story of his life as a 'road warrior' that at once touches the nerves and memories of all of us who, like Howard, spent countless hours in the air, at airports, in meetings, hotels, rental cars; everywhere but home. His anecdotes are touching and very real. A super read and personal reflection from Howard to each of us who shared the journey. Buy it and read it on your next trip. it will make it better, I promise." John Dunwoody, President, Lakeview Consulting

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"I have known the author of Road Hard and Put Up Wet, Howard Nevin, since 1968 and have always considered him one of my success stories. I was a teacher at RCA for that infamous course that started Howard on his travels and travails. While reading, I had many a flash-back...some pleasant...some not. It also made me want to send it to my daughter-in-law who is currently a road warrior of Howard Nevin ilk. This is a must read for anyone who has sacrificed family time and had to find normalcy in the insanity of mega travel." Paula Steelman, Retired Road Warrior and friend of the extraordinary Mr. Nevin...a true honor.

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"Despite the humor and sadness Mr. Nevin encountered on his travels and related in his book, one thing really came across: the indomitable nature of the human spirit under the stress of life and work. I recommend this to everyone." Lisa Riordan, Customer Service Manager, healthcare firm, business traveler

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Howard Nevin has crafted a highly personal memoir of his life as a business traveler. Touching, very real, and memorable - and I related to many of his stories. His reflections are also the tale of all of us who labored long and hard for their employers and their families away from home, alone and lonely, constantly alert and prepared, satisfied, over-joyed, in despair, wired, tired and drained. It is the story of one of us, and all of us who travel on business! Barent Fake, Managing Director, Executive Advisors, LLC.

Road Hard and Put Up Wet

By

Howard Nevin

Copyright 2013, Howard L. Nevin, All Rights Reserved.

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this

book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only,

then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Disclaimers and Notices:

Nothing in this book is an endorsement of any product or service.

In no way should any reference to product(s) or companies be construed or interpreted

as endorsements of any of those products, services, or entities,

nor is any comment intended to be a criticism of the travel industry, or any other entity.

Cover Art Design Copyright 2013, Howard L. Nevin, All Rights Reserved.

Dedications

To my wife Dee, who truly is my strength.

===

To my son Todd whose youth passed me by.

Married with a wonderful wife and four beautiful children,

I love you each and all, deeply. My pride is unbounded.

===

To Diane and Liz, my ex-wives, who separately lived through over 25 years of my travel.

Ironically, that was not the worst of it.

===

To Christine in Munich:

Your indomitable spirit uplifted ME and everyone around you.

===

To Jerry (my son’s godfather), who was taken by leukemia:

your brotherhood and counsel was a godsend. I miss you, my brother, daily.

===

To my co-workers at the Navy PRL: thank you for your taking the time

to take me under your wings, and guide me. I hope I never let you down.

===

To my friends and colleagues in offices and on these many trips…

those of you still here and those of you now gone.

The emails of colleagues’ passing are too frequent, and the sense of loss is profound.

Thanks, more than you know.

===

And to my global community of friends,

thanks for being there…even when years got in the way.

=O=O=O=

Table of Contents

Thoughts to Consider As You Read This

A Forward for a Retrospective

Travel Shapes You as Much as Your Life and Job Shape Your Travel

Buses

Planes

Trains

Automobiles

Where You Stay…and How You Play …

Celebrities

knock Knock KNOCK

Humor Helps

"Oh, the Humanity!"

When It Gets Medical…

Take a Meeting

Dreams Come and Go

A Reflection on Personal Impact

About the Author

Thoughts to Consider As You Read This

=O=O=O=

Every day is a gift, every good thing a blessing,

and everything else is part of a never-ending education.

=O=O=O=

When you touch one life, you touch many more than you may realize.

=O=O=O=

Never lose sight of what is most precious to you.

Once lost, it may be hard to find again.

=O=O=O=

Forward for a Retrospective

===

I turned 61 when I was looking, and started writing this a few months later after I was diagnosed with cancer. I beat the cancer, and am a survivor.

Sixty-two came and went as I finished it, and editing it. Then it sat fallow on my computer for four years, and I decided to dust it off. After recent discussions with peers and fellow travelers, and comparing notes, this is probably very well-timed.

Killing time while waiting for a flight in the Milwaukee Airport I talked with people. The wind chill was 40 below outside; we compared travel notes. I won.

I see that as a dubious honor at best.

This book -- it is not a memoir -- has had many forms…and many content changes.

Other birthdays had crept up on me, or raced towards me, but crossing 30, 40, 50 and 60 were events. Turning 61 set me back on my heels: I simply felt older, despite my still (I am told) relatively youthful appearance, etc. At 61, I celebrated over 40 years of traveling commercially, and over 40 years of traveling on business -- which is the predominant focus of this book.

It started that way, but as I wrote it, it came to be an unintended review of my life and the things that shaped me, including travel. Comparing notes with fellow travelers, I am not alone: others have been similarly affected or shaped by their travels and things that happened to, and around, them. Again, this isn’t a memoir; it’s sharing experiences most readers will be able to relate to, others not.

I have usually seen myself as an any man, since I am not alone in the world of business travel, and I know others who have fared far worse than I have. When I passed 65 and hit 66, well, that really set me to thinking. I recently turned 67, and that made me think more.

From time-to-time in days long past, when on travel I used to sing or hum Anthony Newley’s rendition of What Kind of Fool Am I? from the musical Stop The World - I Want To Get Off. The words don’t quite work, but the title does. I also liked the title of the James Coburn movie Dead Heat on a Merry-go-Round. Traveling always seemed that way, as have some of my business efforts -- you wind up where you started...a zero-sum game being played.

The song and the movie’s title became something of a philosophy for me for a long time. When I started to encounter travails and risk on travel, I added Cast Your Fate to The Winds by Vince Guraldi to my whistle and hum playlist. When I was a teenager, I met Mr. Guraldi at the Carter Baron Amphitheater in northwest DC. That was courtesy of my father, a DC policeman, who got me in backstage. Carter Baron was in my father’s precinct.

=O=O=O=

My friends always thought that all the business traveling I did was fun.

Not hardly. Nope. No way. Not at all.

I have been bounced, jolted, banged around; being on airplanes that rapidly drop in turbulence is no fun. I have been through a couple of earthquakes on travel, missed the big ones in San Francisco by a day, missed tornadoes, and been involved in two car accidents, innumerable near miss car accidents…and I’ve been on a couple of planes with some reasonable chance of crashing.

I once noted that "Being a traveler really is to be an active player in a potentially violent contact sport." And a number of trips involved or ended with me getting some minor to major medical treatment. Sometimes, especially when I was somewhere else, that was the height of loneliness. When your energy is spent convincing your family thousands of miles away that you are okay, sometimes that leaves little energy for you to even believe the same thing.

To my friends and family, running around the country, the Caribbean, Canada and Europe was exciting. Oh, yeah, sure. But all of my trips to the Pacific, the U.S. trade mission to Japan of which I was to be a part, and two trips to Alaska were cancelled on me. Those I do miss.

In early 1990, I had a two week trip in Europe. On return, friends always asked about the wonderful sights (they assumed) I saw. None, was the answer, unless you count the hotel rooms. And I scarcely remembered them. I saw more in Amsterdam in four days in 2007 than I saw in Europe during one eight-week trip. Go figure.

A bit later, I had an eight-week trip to Europe. I sent friends postcards of all the beautiful places in the countries and cities I was visiting, each one inscribed with the message "Another lovely place I did not see," or I flew 200 miles south of this, or I hear it was closed for repair but got nowhere near it anyway, or This burned down before I even had a chance to miss it …

I don’t know how many cards I sent, but the message got across. That trip was in two parts, by the way, which is mentioned a bit later.

I did send some postcards from England in 1990, but that really didn’t count: They were of things I had seen six years earlier. I sent none from Ireland in 2007. I came back with digital images now ensconced on my backup drive.

Needless to say, those early cards were the hoot of conversation at dinners when I returned from that one trip the second time.

The first time I returned from that specific 8 week (split 2-week/6-week) trip -- trippus intermissionus as I called it, my [second] wife Liz literally met me at Dulles Airport in Virginia, kissed me hello, gave me a new suitcase, kissed me good bye and I flew to Dallas for four days for a conference at which I was speaking. From Dallas I flew back to Virginia again to be get another repacked suitcase for another stint in Europe. But I did have one night at home.

Strip me naked and air drop me in any of 100 or so airports, and by God, I am a survivor -- though the thought of me naked in an airport would close them down. I am past the point of blushing, but the hoots would be ego-denting.

I think I know more about airports in some cities than I know about the cities themselves.

In fact, I DO know more about airports in some cities than the cities themselves.

But since airports are changing all the time, what was there yesterday has probably changed. I ran into that in Philadelphia, DC, Portland, Denver and other cities from time-to-time. When one airline changed its pier and normal gates, I almost missed a flight instinctively going to the gate that flight had left from for over a year. It took the ticket agent to set me straight. She was kind enough to call the other gate and tell them to expect a running traveler. They held closing the door for 3 minutes but that did not delay departure. And no one onboard noticed. But in that moment of entry, I went from a traveler to another soul on board. That nomenclature can set you to thinking.

This book is not about where I went, or my business activities there, but instead recounts many of the travel happenings and incidents while on business travel over 40+ years.

In my career in information technology (IT), I have worked with clients in over 30 industry verticals, including healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, energy, government, and many more on a global basis. That work has led me to many places, changed my career, and changed my life as well.

As I wrote it, originally intending to talk about the insanity and craziness of business travel, I started to think about and then relate to how that travel affected me. That changed the context somewhat, and the import of it a lot, at least to me.

MOST of it was funny, then or in retrospect, though sitting in a hotel room or under the bouncing chandelier in a restaurant during an earthquake is not on my Disney rides card, nor is driving through a nor’easter with torrential rains and high winds changing the straight ahead drive into a wind-pushed, tree limb-evading slalom.

And mogul dodging, too, in a snow and ice storm in Chicago (or Denver or Minneapolis or Boston or …) never made to my hit parade of thrill rides either. Sliding downhill sideways through a busy intersection in San Francisco was not on my bucket (or any other) list, nor was avoiding getting smashed between two 18-wheelers in a snow and ice storm on I-95 a mere 50 miles from my home.. Those things test you.

And They Build Character.

More on that concept later in the book.

Planes. Trains. Automobiles. Buses. Subways. The London Underground. DC Metro. BART. Hotels from the upside to the downside. Celebrities I have met in airports and hotels.

Life is full.

And a traveling life is full of memories, some of which are fondly recalled, some not. And yes,

--I have travelled more than 4 million miles by air, and have driven at least 1.6 million miles

--Suffered over 1,400 delayed flights (at a minimum)

--Stayed at over 800 different hotels internationally

--Ate at 8,000 (or more) restaurants

--Had 4 apartments while on extended travel

--Went through 71 major US airports, and had over 1,300 rental cars

--Was involved in two train wrecks ... in the same day

--Survived seven in-flight emergencies

--Visited 10 countries plus US protectorates

--Went through 21 international airports

--Had 4 major medical emergencies while on travel

--Stopped one attempted suicide -- and one assault with a straight razor

--Missed a hijacking due to having to change planes because of a last minute schedule/meeting change

--Had four cancelled meetings that probably save my life (including one at the Pentagon on 9/11),

--Had to travel in snow storms, blizzards, ice storms, floods, wind storms, rain storms, and through/near tornadoes, AND

--Attended more black tie (I have TWO tuxedos) and business attire galas, balls, business event soirees, and major events such as those than I can count...

among other things.

And these other things, the one-offs I call them, were often challenging, such being a momentary suspect in an on-board theft of a flight attendant’s pocket book, or finding a tarantula in your sink in a Texas motel. Other anecdotal things pop up throughout this book.

All of these events and this life style wrapped around travel shape you…not just those incidents but the memories of them. When you travel and have inconveniences, you adjust to lessen those types of inconveniences in the future if possible.

But consider this: when you stop someone from committing suicide, how do you incorporate that in your action plans for things that might happen?

=O=O=O=

Travel takes a toll. I see that more in fellow travelers than ever before. Part of it is the work-while-you-travel mindset, and has been enhanced by the BYOD -- bring you own device -- mentality. People are working more and more on travel with smartphones and tablets and laptops than I have ever seen. It’s more than a bit saddening to me to witness that.

But I did it too. So who am I to comment on it other than in passing?

At dinner, a clinical psychologist I know asked me how I had stood up to it for so long. My answer had two parts: (1) I had to, or find another career, and (2) I had to, or find another career.

I really didn’t have another reason, though over time I found one, or came to realize it, and the reason is mentioned a bit later.

But sometimes the toll, and risk, is severe:

--A close friend died of a heart attack at Dulles Airport as he was getting off a plane. Job stress had been extreme after he changed jobs, coupled with too much life stress -- his wife was fighting cancer, her own stress and his cross-compounded by his job and travel stress and her illness.

--Another colleague never showed up at the work site out of town. They found him dead in his locked hotel room.

--My cousin died in his hotel room on a business trip in Canada. He was under intense pressure on a project he was doing for a major financial services firm.

--I stopped a suicide while I was on a business trip; though that person was at home, she was, metaphorically, on a trip to of her own that had her far away from her home, her touchstone(s), and her ability -- or willingness -- to face a harsh and unwanted heartbreaking reality that stemmed, in part from her job and job pressures. (That story is recounted below.)

--I woke up with metal shards in my eye in a hotel in Texas and spent the morning in the emergency room having metal removed from my eye. The shards were NOT there when I went to sleep. But they were there when I woke up, and the hotel had NO clue. (That story is recounted below.)

--On travel, I got a call one night from a panicked project manager: there was a serious hazmat incident at his site, and our staff was at risk. We had to make up a protocol on the fly to address it since none existed. Thankfully, ALL of my staff came through unharmed, and within two days, we had a new a rock-solid protocol defined and in place for such events in the future, God forbid. None ever did occur, thankfully, but that risk, never considered, became a planning point in all future engagements with customers in MANY industry segments.

But there are other stresses that occur in life, and travel fertilizes or exacerbates them.

Ironically, travel has never been a stress point in my relationship with my wife Doreen (Dee), heading into its 18th year of marriage. My wife loves to travel. The other forms of stress on us these past six years (health issues, my employer went bankrupt just at the start of the recession...) have not busted us either, so we sigh, hold each other’s hands, and move ahead…always move ahead.

A few years ago I wrote a piece for a web site -- motivateus.com -- on what motivated me.

As prolific as I can be, this consideration of what motivates me brought me up short: I had a problem really putting my finger on it. After five drafts it hit me: bottom line -- "I won’t be defeated today so I can have a better tomorrow."

Not a bad life goal, all-in-all.

In the scheme of things though, the past is something best viewed in the rear view mirror, I have come to say. I prefer to remember and learn than to repeat and suffer.

As the saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, I did things differently and sometimes got the same results, and did things the same way with very different results, so I guess I am insane or not…that remains to be seen.

But sometimes there is no controlling it; you see your past in front of you, repeating itself. That is scary. It makes you wonder what the future will be like knowing what happened in the past.

Forty-plus years on the road never inured me to the majority of the travails of travel. I can remember only a handful of trips that actually went really well, or as planned. But, one perseveres when it is your job. While there were truly times when the situation was threatening or scary, they are far worse than those of simple inconvenience or insanity. Those threatening and scary events’ memories linger in the back of your mind, only to be rapidly pulled forward in flashbacks based on the situation in which you find yourself at any instant in time.

=O=O=O=

The phrase Road Warrior has been around for some time. Once, I took a different slant on it.

I was living in Minneapolis and in New Jersey working on a project when I found out that I had been nominated, and selected, to give a presentation at the annual Electronic Messaging Association conference in Los Angeles in six weeks. Subject: how a project I ran was achieved. My boss nominated me without notice, trying to get some PR for the firm.

Basically, we were integrating and updating the multiple and incompatible email systems for a global manufacturer’s 12 business units in as many countries. We had found issue after issue, ultimately calling for some serious out of the box thinking, unfortunate cost escalations for the client, and more back-end complexity than anticipated. But, we had no idea this was the case when my firm took on the project, and candidly, the client that hired us didn’t know either.

So I started to work on the briefing in New Jersey, toning down the client management errors and the lack of knowledge of its own systems, and focused on the issues we encountered, some of which were not even known by the users of the systems. I had dispatched a team member to Europe for two weeks which became nearly four as he travelled from location to location, getting a definitive grip on what we needed to do while I had the team in the US developing a solution in real time. He called me every day, and emailed trip/meeting notes. The surprises kept coming.

The effort went from a nearly no-brainer button mushroom in size project to rocket science/nuclear mushroom in size, and kept growing.

I finished the briefing and commentary on the road, in Louisville, Kentucky. I was on a different project there, commuting back and forth to Minneapolis from Louisville and other places. After review, I emailed the presentation to the conference manager who was preparing the handouts.

When the time came, I went to Minneapolis, repacked and went to LA. My boss was attending and he picked me up at LAX. He took me to a pleasant hotel near the convention center, but in a neighborhood with only one restaurant -- vegetarian Chinese. Fortunately, I like Chinese food and this restaurant was great.

I unpacked, dry ran the presentation and realized it was twice as long as my time would permit. I cut out some slides, and changed my presentation notes. At the same time, I was dealing with other projects in which I was involved at the same time telephonically while I did the presentation changes. A client had gone off the reservation and I spent the night working out a repair plan for that.

The next day I walked to the Conference, met the other two people who would be giving similar presentations in our one hour group session, and briefly got to know each other. I had 11 cell calls in the 30 minutes we were together. Neither of the other presenters traveled much, and they were -- what? -- surprised? -- that I was talking with staff in four locations for the projects.

One of them innocuously said to me, Real Road Warrior, huh? I looked at him -- with only two hours of sleep , and answered: "No, Road WEARIER." They both laughed. I closed my eyes.

In our session, the first person gave a great short briefing. I stood up and said I was going to truncate my briefing for time, and the third presenter suddenly stood up, and graciously gave up HIS time for me to give the full briefing. My whole deck was in the 5" binder of handouts and he had read it. He told me in our ready room it was a lot more interesting than his. I don’t think he would have said that if he had been involved in the project itself.

I gave the full briefing, occasionally drawing ooohs and OMGs as I detailed out this effort. Surprisingly, I got a standing round of applause. I never knew if it was because of our success or that I gave what may have been my best presentation ever out of 2,000 or so I had given -- or that I had simply survived that mushroom project. But during the rest of the conference, people did come over to me, introduce themselves, compliment me, and ask questions.

That was a very good day and feeling for me. That sense of achievement and contribution ebbed on my flight home to Minneapolis where I had to catch another plane and go east again.

Oh. I had nine calls while on the podium, all of which went into voice mail since I turned the phone off, and 11 calls at the airport.

Yep ... Road Wearier.

=O=O=O=

It was after that trip that for no reason one day it hit me that I felt an identification with the phrase "rode hard and put up wet," referring to a horse.

But, I preferred to think of it as "road hard and put up wet."

Personal travel is not (generally) recounted here, and it too has had its moments…lots of moments, actually. E.g., being midway on a flight from the Caribbean back to DC with a major medical emergency suddenly occurring on-board. Or being caught up in Cancun with a thousand other travelers trying to clear customs and your plane leaves without you, or clearing customs in Jamaica when the Immigration agent refuses to believe you did not buy, use, or have in your possession, any pot, and the hassle that ensued. FYI -- Didn’t…didn’t…didn’t. Never did, either.

I think my life on the road is a bit more than average in the richness of experience, and I have no measure yet as to that the real end-results of all of that travel were or will be -- the end results are not yet in. I turned 61 in October, 2007, and was diagnosed with a malignant cancer two months later; I had three increasingly invasive and expansive surgeries in January, February and April of ‘08, and after the final path reports, was clean, the outlook positive, as was my mindset. I AM a survivor. Here it is, six years later, and I’m still cooking along.

Of course, my employer announced financial difficulties in January 2008, and stopped paying people. Some were released, some quit. Some of us, including me, were kept on to keep the firm afloat while we sought other funds. THEN the firm went bankrupt and out of business without warning, throwing those of us still there on the street. We received no pay for the prior months of stay-afloat work. That event shut down my travel, raised my stress. So what else is new?

Oh…cancer-clear. I was diagnosed with a fourth cancer in October 2009 which was surgically removed in November 2009. No recurrences. And this is now 2013. Still cooking along.

I keep on going. Kind of like the metal-in-the-eye thing -- deal with it and keep on going.

It’s all very relative.

Life has a way of doing its own thing, regardless of your plans, and that is business travel in spades, for sure. Life is what happens when you are making other plans. Never a truer statement made at any time by anyone.

Business travel -- the simple time away from home and important personal relationships -- is something you avoid by not doing it; or business travel is something you can’t avoid, whether it is a lot or a little.

What happens on those trips, near at home or afar, will affect you, since we are each the sum -- or perhaps greater than the sum(?) -- of our own life experiences. I have always tried to ensure I was not LESS than the sum as travel wore on me. But I have seen colleagues become lessened by their travel experiences, and even change as people. Travel affects different people in different ways.

My pre-business life experiences often seemed to me to be concentrated between the last two years in high school and college here in Washington DC, my birthplace.

My father, a policeman, had taken ill in my junior year in high school (1963), and my senior year is mostly a blur of school, the few extracurricular activities I could squeeze in, and shuttling to and from the hospitals to see him during his frequent stays due to his debilitating illness. His subsequent progressively fast slide into depression was tragic to watch, was also debilitating to the family as a whole around the country. His physical decline was as swift, and equally painful to watch and live with.

Despite my love for writing, and an early inclination to go into advertising, my true desire and TOP occupational dream was to be a Naval aviator. Other dreams once had me going to a good college away from DC, and those faded early on.

I was in the high school honors (college prep) track in DC; that track was among the first in the nation, I was told. I prepared for college. When my father took ill in 1963, I helped my mother run the business my father had started to have something to do after retirement; I worked the weekends and sometime night jobs for extra money, and stayed the course. But it was too much for both of us, and a year after my father died she sold the business for inventory value.

Sad as I was to see that happen, it lifted a great burden off both of our shoulders. But in that year, I ran the company, trimmed our customers by 20%, recovered all outstanding debt, and increased sales 50% over the prior year with fewer customers. Part-time. My father had trained me well.

I graduated from high school in June 1964. My mother came to the ceremony; my father, still very ill, could not come, and told me how he regretted missing it. I missed him there, too.

That summer was also a blur as I prepared for college, having been accepted to George Washington University; I worked three jobs - helping run the family business and two other part-time jobs.

In September 1964, I began college; some of it was easy, some was tough. Honors track did not prepare me for some of what I ran into. Distracted by my father’s illness, and increased anxiety and family issues at home, I lapsed in my studies.

It got tougher in November 1968 when I found my father dead of a heart attack. The rule of the house was if Dad fell asleep on the couch, or in the recliner, let him stay there. Cover him, make him comfortable, but let him rest. He had fallen asleep on November 16th, 1964 watching TV, and did not awaken.

In March of 1964 he made a promise to his favorite niece Dottie that he would dance with her at her wedding in September 1964 -- which he did on September 17th. He had promised my mother he would throw her a grand 30th anniversary party in October, 1964, which he did, on October 17th, and he died a month to the day after the anniversary party: Wedding: 9/17/64, party: 10/17/64, and death: 11/17/64, respectively. Forty-nine years later, I still do not like September, October and November very much. I definitely don’t like the number 17, and for one more reason you’ll see later.

From that point on, life was a greater blur. Simple survival was an issue -- my father did not leave