‘Have your pain killers got laxatives in?’ I asked my boss.
‘Why?’
‘You might sleep through breakfast tomorrow.’ I was on a work trip with my boss and I still hadn’t realised my error as I stood in his room hallway, next to the bathroom, while he called reception to check the breakfast end time.

‘It’s a good thing I wasn’t there or I’d have been on the floor laughing,’ Natasha, who works with me, said when I updated her as soon as I’d escaped to my room.

Travelling with a boss poses all sorts of problems. Having finished a day of meetings I called Hot Danish. We rowed over a bad ‘joke’. A few minutes after our heated call ended I overheard my neighbour run a bath. ‘Have you spoken to HD today?,’ my boss asked the following afternoon. What if he’d overheard my childish tantrum from three rooms away?

Even check-in poses embarrassments such as, ‘Are you sharing?’ (Although this is far less embarrassing than being mistaken for a then boyfriend’s daughter at one hotel. And he was a year younger than me.)

These days work is part of our lifestyle (we check our emails while we travel; we tweet and blog about work/life; we network when socialising; and our dilemmas include what to do about that person we met through work who sends a Facebook request) so when I’ve had a day of back-to-back meetings and reach for a glass of wine over dinner, I try to remember the check-in lady’s words and not share too much…