Downside #19

Your stories go on for too long

Of course this is partly a side-effect of spending half your working life trying to work up 30 seconds visiting a town into 17 pages of informative text, but then as you spend the other half trying to cut down 100,000 words of fulsomeness into a pithy hotel review, your self-editing skills should really be up to scratch too. No, the real problem is that every single story has to start with an explanation of what the hell you were doing in this situation in the first place, how it came about, and, in many cases, who you actually are. It's bad enough having to recite every movement and random twist of events that led up to, say, that time you had to leg-wrestle an angry crocodile in the Buenos Aires jungle while chanting Portuguese poetry to settle a khat-fuelled bet with the angry father of two pregnant lambada dancers; when you take into account a few natural embellishments, digressions and bar pauses, and then have to actually explain the context of the trip, your exact route and how much the flights cost as well, you're into Homeric territory before you even get to the 'and then he bit me' part. Either way, everyone ends up thinking you're a boring, long-winded, self-obsessed, bull-shitting conversation-dominator, when under normal circumstances it might have taken them way longer to work that out. Curses.