Some trips are better left untaken.

In 2011 I was invited to go to The Grand Prix in Monaco, the most elite sporting event in the world, by the wrong guy. Granted, it was the guy I was “dating” long distance, but I’d known for some time that he wasn’t right for me. I ping-ponged back and forth for a good 18 months which couldn’t have been any fun for him. Yet every time he’d sense I was about to break it off for good, he’d invite me on some fantastic trip and I’d think, well, I could hang in there just a little bit longer. How bad could it be?

He was a very successful, interesting man who had lived all over the world. His 6 children also lived all over the world and he spent a lot of time traveling the world to see them, meeting them in places like London, Switzerland, NYC or Tel Aviv for a day or two. Being from the southern portion of the United States, this intrigued me. In general Americans don’t travel internationally as much as people from other parts of the world do. Our country is so large in comparison that the rest of the world seems too hard to get to. At this point in my life my international exploits had been limited to Mexico and Canada.

He also had friends all over the world and we were meeting a pair of them for the race with plans to stay at Cap d’Antibes, a swanky place on the French Riviera for a few days, then finish up the trip in London.

You learn a lot about a person when you travel with them. What I learned was that my friend had other layers besides his family, friends and businesses around the world: passive-aggressive kindness stuck between arrogance, insecurity and anger with some generosity on top. It was very confusing.

Little things went wrong fast on this trip. He lost his favorite pen in the lounge at JFK. The airlines lost track of his bag. He was anxious about both, hopping back and forth from one foot to the other.

We left the States from Chicago instead of Atlanta, which was a mistake. Flying from Chicago was an hour and a half shorter, which sounds like a good idea unless you take Ambien — then that 90 minutes is the difference between walking and sleepwalking.

Or a dream vacation and deportation.

We landed in Heathrow where I slept in a chair for two hours before the flight to Nice. I fell into a coma on that flight. I thought it was sleep deprivation that kept me from finding my passport quickly when we shuffled off the plane to passport control. I woke up completely when I realized it was gone. From that point on things happened fast, and in a foreign language. My Ambien-laced mind could not process the scene as it unfolded, even though I was at the center.

In the entire police and border patrol contingent in the Nice airport, there was only one guy who spoke a little English. When he learned what had happened, which was a miracle as I was barely speaking English myself in my sleep-deprived state of anxiety, he grabbed my hand and shouted, “RUN!”

I did not understand what we were doing or where we were going or why we were running. Like a true American, I had a flickering thought that this felt like a Tom Cruise movie. Turns out this guy was actually trying to help, hoping we could get back down the hallway and onto the plane to see if my passport was in the seat before they pulled the security tape across the hallway. We didn’t make it.

They radioed the crew on the airplane who started searching immediately. No luck. We checked lost and found. Not there. I asked what would happen and he said we would probably get temporary travel papers. We were obviously tourists; it was the biggest tourist weekend of the year in France.

And I had a whole wallet full of IDs. I just didn’t have my passport.

I was taken to the police station in the airport where they took all of my identification and sat me in a metal chair across from the captain’s desk. I don’t know if they just sounded rude because they were speaking French and I was scared, or if they really were rude. Either way, it had the same effect. They wouldn’t listen to me and even if they had, they couldn’t understand me.

My travel partner paced and fretted, wringing his hands. He occasionally interjected. I turned my back.

They took my driver’s license, asked me to write down my name, DOB and address. They said they could not let me stay in their country and they asked me to sign papers. I told them I couldn’t sign those papers because I didn’t know what the papers said. They were, of course, in French.

In the middle of the confusion, another drama was unfolding right in front of me. Inches from my chair a door opened, forcing me to move my legs to make room in the captain’s small office. There was a scuffle and then a group of men slammed the door and pushed past me. From the room they’d exited came a sound I couldn’t immediately place in the chaos of the moment.

It was the sound of a man screaming.  

It took a few minutes for me to realize that the computer monitor across from me was showing video from a closed circuit camera in that room, where the screaming man was lying in a fetal position in the corner.

They ignored me for a while as they figured out what to do with him, then eventually asked me to step back, taking my elbow to move me because I did not understand them. Then they carried the screaming man out of the office face down, arms behind his back like this was a saloon in the Wild West. His ankles and his arms from his wrists to his shoulders were bound with packing tape. He was still screaming. I expected them to give it a couple of heave-hoes and toss him out the door.

I looked at the officer who had helped me before and said, “What’s up with that guy?”

“Illegal alien.”

“You want me to sign where?”

With the illegal alien neatly dispatched, they returned their focus to me informing me that they would not let me out of the airport, but I could not stay in the police station. This left one option: a plane.

My travel partner stepped up at this point in a heroic display, pumping his fist and declaring we were tourists, headed for the Grand Prix with the tickets to prove it. The police politely replied that my travel partner had two choices: he could take his passport and his tickets, go on vacation and leave me here, or he could get back on the plane with me and go back to Heathrow.

I was deported.

I cried all the way back to London. Reason had left me but my passive-aggressive friend and all his layers went with me. At least there’s that.

They were more helpful and sympathetic in London, and they spoke English. However, the options are more limited than you think. Nobody has record of your passport except you or the person who stole it from you. A photocopy doesn’t do you any good. Neither does knowing your passport number, which I do.

Neither does a wallet full of IDs. A driver’s license, insurance card, social security card, credit cards, a YMCA membership card, a library card, a bank card. None of it can prove that you are who you say you are, even in England, our mother country.

While the airlines helped us explore our options, I started making phone calls. My confidence surged as I found the number to the U.S. Embassy in London. This had to be my ticket. It’s where 007 goes when he’s in trouble, right?

I dialed the number and wasn’t that surprised to get an automated attendant. What did surprise me is what she said.

“Thank you for calling the U.S. Embassy. We do not offer emergency passport assistance on holidays or weekends.”

This was Saturday, Memorial Day weekend, 2011.

The message goes on to say that you have to email them for an appointment. So you can’t just walk into the Embassy without an appointment and you can’t call them to make an appointment, even on a workday. You have to email them.  

We worked through every channel at the airport and finally reached Kristina Vanderberg, the director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s office in Heathrow Airport. She did a masterful job interviewing me without me knowing I was being interviewed. She was on her mobile phone with her counterparts in the U.S., having a seemingly casual conversation with me while they checked my background.

“I’m sorry about this,” Kristina said. “The weather’s going to be great at the Grand Prix this weekend.  What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“Mills,” I replied.

“You’ve had a different last name.”

“I’ve had two.”

“Yes, you have.”

Minutes later Kristina snapped her phone shut, looked at me and said, “We believe you are who you say you are. You are cleared to go to France. But we don’t know what they’ll do with you. They are a whole other country and all.”

I asked if she’d call them and she did. They said they remembered me from that morning and were not willing to revisit it. They would not let me in if I returned, even if England said I could. Case closed.

I ended up with temporary travel papers that would clear me to travel through England until I could get a temporary replacement passport, and we headed to the Ritz for the week. Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a nice place to stay through your misery.

I tried to focus on the positives over the next few days, but the anxiety of being in another country, even England, without a passport and with the wrong person was unbearable. Nothing was beautiful to me that week. Not the place or the countryside where we went for a couple of days or the shopping. The food sucked. The weather did too. All I wanted was my little blue passport book and a flight home.

My travel partner was equally anxious and became even more annoying than he already was.  He was overly solicitous. He would stroke me like a pet. He opened his fat wallet even wider. I couldn’t get a minute to myself; he stuck to me like glue, following me and my camera into flower gardens. I hid in the bathroom.

When you’re with the wrong person, any little wrinkle in your plans will cause a problem. A deportation before the Grand Prix might prompt a felony. The anger just underneath the surface was frightening. A pinprick could have made a mess.

Stress is a great teacher, and that week I was a great learner.

I learned that it doesn’t take long to feel disenfranchised and I wasn’t even the one with my hands taped behind my back. Compared to that guy, I only had a brush with it, and a luxurious one at that. But when you are shuttled into a system — especially in another country — your freedom is restricted and your identity is questioned, you feel powerless. You are no longer a valued individual. You are vulnerable. You can feel your dignity slipping away. There isn’t always someone you can call to help you.

I also learned that who you are with is more important than where you are or what you are doing. Compatibility is the most important thing in the world.

This is true in every aspect of life, including your business. Sometimes a client meets all your criteria except the one that matters — you don’t enjoy working with them. We’ve had some dog clients in our day, like the injectable tanning solution that was cool in Norway but illegal in the United States. Then there was the guy who lost everything in his sixth divorce, had a vision on a mountain that he’d be worth $100 million in a year, and found a new wife who was worth $101.  

There was the company that took advantage of a loophole in Medicare to sell millions of dollars worth of mobility scooters. Producing daily leads became like a drug for all of us. We lived for higher and higher numbers every day, struggling to prove conversions in a system patched together with rudimentary digital tracking plus back-of-the-envelope notes from the call center. It was at first exhilarating, then exhausting, and finally impossible.

Some of those clients had big wallets. All of them were fairly profitable, but none of them lasted very long. By the time each of these relationships was over, we were running for the door without a single backward glance.

Money seems like a good reason to take a client, and money is important, but if you take a client just for the money it’s just like going to Europe with the wrong guy. All the possibility is there, but none of the joy. You can travel to the world’s most exotic places and have every element except compatibility — time, money, something to do — and all you will remember are the things that went wrong.

Sometimes the thought of where a client could take you is enticing. That’s usually a bad idea too. The year before, I had broken things off with this same guy just three days before a two-week tour of Europe that he had meticulously planned. I emailed him from Minneapolis and canceled. After this terrible trip to London there would be one more to Venice, because it’s impossible to completely forego water taxis, but then I was done.  

Through trial and error I’ve learned that, just like boyfriends, there are several attributes that make a client a good fit, and they always hold true:

1. Experience – You have experience in their industry.

2. Passion – You are interested in what they do.

3. Potential – A multi-layered, multi-year relationship is possible.

4. Respect – They value and respect your work.

5. Need – They need what you do.

Those are great reasons, but none of them matter if you don’t have this one:

6. Chemistry - You are compatible. You click.

There is nothing worse than seeing the most beautiful things in the world with the wrong guy.

There is nothing worse than spending your day producing great work for the wrong client.

Chemistry is critical to a successful relationship. With chemistry comes resilience.  

In a creative industry you never get to the good work in the first project. It often comes only after great struggle. It takes time to get to know the client, to understand their desires and aspirations. If you can’t stand to be with them long enough to do that, you’ll never get to the great work, and even if you do, they won’t recognize it.

Without chemistry, resilience isn’t possible. But once you have it, you can get through almost anything together: budget cuts, a recession, turnover, industry changes, product failures, deportation on a dream vacation.

I never looked back after the Venice trip. And I never think about the Venice trip, which is a shame because it is one of the truly unique places in the world.  

Experiences are wasted when you’re with the wrong person. So is work.