Com Air

The shrill scream of the alarm clock wakes the darkened Toluca Lake home, rousing Laura O’Brien at her usual hour--3:30 a.m. The real estate broker rolls out of bed with a groan and takes the first step of her daily 1,000-mile journey into commuter hell.

Going to work means leaving her Los Angeles suburban home and boarding a Southwest Airlines plane for San Jose. Every day. For the last three years, O’Brien has spent each weekday in Silicon Valley working on real-estate deals for high-tech companies. The time-strapped 42-year-old finds empty office space for her clients to lease--and anything else they need to set up shop.

As the glimmer of Internet wealth in Northern California sparks an explosion of gold-rush dreams, the ordinary acts of everyday life have become extraordinary challenges for modern workers. In this dot-com age, an average workday means pulling a 12- or 14-hour stretch at the office. Time off has become an outdated concept. And going to the office can mean boarding a commercial airplane.

That such commutes even exist is an irony in today’s wired culture, as technology has long promised to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Yet in an age of videoconferencing and e-mail, corporate America has realized that the most crucial business relationships must be nurtured in person, not by modem.

O’Brien, who works for real estate giant CB Richard Ellis Inc., will fly more than 200,000 miles this year. For O’Brien, the daily commute is the central force of her life, around which everything else revolves. Her health. Her identity. Her relationships.

*

O’Brien’s husband, Peter, is still asleep this Wednesday morning. As he peacefully snoozes, she makes dozens of calls and checks piles of e-mail from contacts in Asia and Europe. Fingers dancing over the keyboard, she pauses to snatch up a cup of espresso and slam the steaming brew down her throat.

It’s not enough. She heads to the kitchen to grab another shot. It’s 6:45 a.m. Her flight leaves at 7:05.

Glancing at her watch, O’Brien dashes out the front door. O’Brien won’t see her husband, an attorney, for at least another 12 hours. If everything goes perfectly, she will have just one hour with him tonight. If she misses her flight, they will have 10 minutes. Maybe less.

O’Brien has budgeted exactly seven minutes for the drive from her Toluca Lake home to Burbank Airport. Each day, a family member drives O’Brien to the Southwest terminal. Today, her mother, Shirley Duenckel, plays chauffeur.

“What’s new, Mom?” she asks, slipping into the front seat of the roomy Cadillac.

Duenckel, a residential real estate agent, cheerfully updates her daughter with local gossip--”Guess who moved into the corner house?”--and family memories--”Do you remember the time I showed that house, honey, to the singer of the Stray Cats?”

The white Seville hits a red light. Distracted, O’Brien glances at her watch. It’s 6:51 a.m.

Oh, god. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.

Green light. The car turns and swings to the curb.

It’s 6:52 a.m.

Oh god oh god oh god.

Rollerbag in hand, cell phone in ear, O’Brien bolts toward the gates.

Airport workers instantly recognize her, the Norm of the Burbank Airport. “Running late, Laura?” asks a janitor as he empties a trash can. Security guards at the X-ray machine smile and wish her a good morning.

O’Brien nods but doesn’t stop until she reaches Gate 6 and joins the crowd of other business people waiting to check into Southwest Airlines Flight 1561.

These travelers hail from the computer, finance, and management consulting industries--all eager to plunder new markets and digital media. Technology drove their centers of business away from the traditional hubs, and plunked them down into the new power centers. Austin, Texas. Dover, Del. San Jose.

As the markets moved, workers refused to drag their loved ones across the country in search of a job. Home was home. It didn’t have to change, thanks to cheap airfares and frequent flights. The only limitation: a person’s tolerance for cramped seats and those endless bags of tiny, stale pretzels.

Passengers file quietly into the plane. It’s 7:03 a.m. Of the 137 people booked on this 737 plane, only three claim to be traveling for pleasure.

Assaulted by the scent of stale coffee and morning breath, O’Brien slips into a faux-leather middle seat and reaches for her laptop. A soft humming sound fills the air as several dozen of the machines are simultaneously booted up.

The plane levels off. Across the aisle from O’Brien, two young men in Silicon Valley’s uniform of khakis and white golf shirts reach for the same in-flight phone, credit cards in hand.

They smile, their faces cool and polite.

Says the man on the aisle: “I’ve got a conference call. It’ll take just a minute.”

Counters the man at the window: “I’ve got a client to call. Just a second, I swear.”

Smiles fade into sneers and tense silence, as the men pout like fussy children. The standoff ends when one reaches into his wallet and pulls out a $20.

Cash is exchanged.

“I swear, I’ll be less than five minutes,” says the winner as he dials.

*

Flying is a routine part of business life, “like getting on a subway or calling a cab,” says Richard Sweet, senior director of marketing and sales for Southwest Airlines Co. “The Internet economy has been a boon.”

Technology, however, was supposed to abolish the need for such travel. A few years ago, the airlines fretted about what the growth of the Internet and videoconferencing would mean for the industry. Physical location would become irrelevant; business travel obsolete.

Instead, the opposite happened. Technology became the starting point in most long-distance business relationships. All the real work--closing deals, negotiating terms, outwitting the competition--demands that people see each other in person. Just on the loop between LAX and San Jose International Airport, the number of Southwest passengers has skyrocketed from 154,270 in 1993 to 586,720 in 1998.

The digital boom put O’Brien on this airplane.

Growing up in Toluca Lake, she dreamed of “a career where my job could be translated onto a car license plate. An ‘ATTY’ or maybe even a ‘DDS.’ ”

Instead, in the summer after her sophomore year at CSU Northridge, O’Brien answered an ad for a receptionist at a local commercial real estate firm. She began a steady climb through the ranks and became a broker, engaged in the business of finding space for her clients to lease.

Several years ago, as Silicon Valley boomed and entrepreneurs gobbled up every free square foot of office space, O’Brien spotted an opportunity. She realized that someone needed to be a liason between companies that offer real estate services and the technology corporations that demanded more. Get that front door in pine, not oak. Change this paint from ghost white to eggshell white. Make this cubicle feel open and friendly, not like a cattle feeding pen.

O’Brien helped create a team that has since become one of her company’s elite--in the top 5% of performers, says one of her bosses. This year, she says, her group will pull in about $13 million in revenues.

Corporate success, however, strained O’Brien’s already frenetic schedule. Weekly meetings became daily conferences that customers wanted O’Brien to attend. About three years ago, she began to fly to San Jose every Tuesday and Thursday. Eventually, twice became three times a week.

That’s OK, she reasoned. Fridays and Mondays were off-limits.

Opportunities arose, intoxicating with promise. There was always another client to pitch, another cubicle crisis to solve. It was easy to book the Mondays and fill those Fridays.

And each time she did, she swore it would be just that once. Next week, she’d say, things will ease up.

They never did and her grueling travel schedule expanded.

She started flying four times a week. Then five.

“It just happened,” O’Brien said. “I’m not sure how. All I know is I can’t work any other way. I can’t afford it.”

*

The plane lands at 8:10 a.m. Moments later, O’Brien is charging toward a bathroom. A good airport bathroom, she says, is crucial. Clean is important. Quiet is better, especially when you’re on the cell phone talking to executives at a Fortune 500 company.

O’Brien slips into her favorite ladies room to spruce herself up, a feat given the morgue-like pall cast by the icy fluorescent lights. O’Brien, whose face is all bony angles and edgy drive, used to love beauty products and great clothes. The pretty Chanel powder compacts, a sleek Armani suit. But her beauty routine now must be four strokes of a comb through her close-cropped locks. A dab of pink lipstick, so pale it fades with the first sip of coffee. Forget the fancy suits and high heels. Her uniform is black loafers, black pants and a crisp, cotton shirt.

No jewelry, except for her wedding band. And definitely no earrings. They get in the way of her lifeline, the cell phone. It rings just as O’Brien finishes brushing her teeth.

A frazzled account manager back at CB Richard Ellis is on the line, asking about BEA Systems Inc. The San Jose-based software maker is a major client, someone whom O’Brien and her team have worked with for several years. O’Brien outlines the latest negotiations for BEA’s offices in Texas and touches on potential problems she must overcome later today.

She walks out of the bathroom, still talking. Overhead, a recording warns visitors not to park at the curb.

“Laura?” interrupts the caller. “Where are you?”

“You know I’m in San Jose.”

“No. I mean right now.”

O’Brien looks around, bemused. What can she say?

She has no office, no desk, no personal mementos perched on a corner shelf. She operates from a virtual office, a “work from anywhere” approach that has long been touted as the future of knowledge workers. The deskbound have long envied such freedom, of escaping their cubicle bondage.

But with no physical space to call her own, O’Brien must lug armfuls of stuff--contracts, meeting notes, both her breakfast and her lunch--as she races from one appointment to the next. Her desk is anything flat, and near both a phone jack and an electrical plug. In the San Jose airport, it’s a water fountain near a baggage carousel and an advertisement that reads “Know No Limits.”

Her bosses thought about moving O’Brien to San Jose, but she refused to consider it. Even if she’d agreed, the cost would be high: To match O’Brien’s Los Angeles lifestyle, the company would have had to bump her salary “enormously,” say executives at the brokerage firm. O’Brien says she makes “well into the six figures” a year, a combination of her salary, stock benefits and various sales commissions. Her charming 1930s home in Toluca Lake--with its 2,000 square feet of hardwood floors and a stand of shady trees--is worth about $550,000. The price tag could jump to at least $2 million, though, if it were located in Silicon Valley.

In Santa Clara County--home to Hewlett-Packard Co., Yahoo! and a host of other computer and software firms--the median single-family house price hit nearly $540,000 in June, with most neighborhoods offering nothing for less than $700,000, according to the Santa Clara County Assn. of Realtors. Responding to the squeeze, workers are forced to move to outlying counties--or to towns as far out as Sacramento--to find affordable housing. Mark Erickson, a friend of O’Brien’s who often drives her around Silicon Valley, lives near Walnut Creek. He commutes 90 minutes each way “on a good day. On a bad day, it’s a two-hour drive.”

Ultimately, CB executives realized that it would be cheaper and easier for them to eat the cost of O’Brien’s travel and buy her Southwest fares in bulk over the Internet.

“It only costs about $50,000 per year to keep me in the air, including cell phone [costs],” O’Brien said.

*

The salary doesn’t keep her on this taxing work schedule. Neither does the excitement of her job, nor the cost of buying a new house up north. It’s her family.

Her parents and her sister live within a couple of miles. Her husband, an attorney with a well-established clientele, can’t move.

Sure, it would be easier for O’Brien to just spend her weeknights in a hotel room, or crash on a friend’s couch. Then she’d have time to sleep more than six hours a night, the freedom to work out regularly or grab a leisurely dinner with friends. But those are luxuries in which she won’t indulge, because the price--seeing her family even less than she does now--is too high. For a woman whose life is blocked out in five-minute chunks, she values every spare second she can grab.

“Laura needs the excitement of her job, but her family keeps her in balance,” said her husband, Peter, 58. “Much of Laura’s life deals with tiny packets of time. You may not think 15 or 20 minutes is enough, but she finds it rewarding. We make it work.”

Getting home today, however, is not going to be easy. The president of ONI Systems, a San Jose network-equipment maker, is giddy at the thought of his company going public the following morning. He just pranced out of the building and is gone.

Oh well.

O’Brien can meet with other ONI executives, who are running a bit late because of the impending IPO. She waits and watches the clock. Finally, she steps into a conference room and calmly pitches her plan. Occasionally, she peeks at her watch.

It’s 4:30 p.m.

The pitch continues.

It’s 5:10 p.m.

Southwest flight 565 leaves San Jose for Burbank at 5:35 p.m. It’s not the last flight of the night, but it’s the only one that gets her home early enough to spend time with her family.

The meeting ends. Her face flushed, O’Brien scrambles downstairs, stumbling on the bottom step. Erickson’s car waits outside, motor racing. Nothing, though, will get them through the nearly 5-mile-long wall of brake lights.

It’s 5:22 p.m. O’Brien, her lips tightly pressed, calls the airline.

“Is the flight on time? Are you sure?” Sigh. “OK. Thanks.”

It’s 5:30 p.m. Nothing moves.

O’Brien calls her husband.

“I can catch the next flight. Gets me in at 7:45. Maybe 8. Can you come get me?”

She pauses.

“Oh, right. Forgot about that. I understand. I’ll catch a cab home.”

Tonight, like most weeknights, Laura won’t see much of Peter. She’ll walk through the front door well after 8 p.m. and slip off her shoes. The couple will have a few minutes to catch up.

It’s 9 p.m. She slips into bed.

Six-and-a-half hours later, the alarm clock will shriek. It will only be Thursday.

P.J. Huffstutter can be reached at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.