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‘I’m going to Singapore for a business trip.’

The immediate reaction to my statement is ‘Wow!’

My boss is a frequent traveler. He is out of town at least thrice a month. I thought he was having fun till I had to go for my own little business trip.

I was asked to go to our head office in Singapore and so, off I went.

Since I’m just a junior staff, my flight would be the cheapest of the options. We might all think that going for a business trip means you’ll also get a business class or first class flight right? How I wish. Ha ha.

So my departure from Dubai is at 03:30am. This departure time was actually horrible. I had a nap at 9:30 pm, woke up at 11pm, left home by 11:30pm and was in the airport since then till the time of departure. I almost wanted to lie down in the airport.

I was so happy the moment I boarded the plane as I could finally sleep then. But I was in and out of sleep. It was 6.5 hours of sleeping and waking in between. Half-awake while eating cold chicken sandwich while watching Leonardo di Caprio’s The Revenant (nice choice of movie. Watching a man getting ripped off by a grizzly bear while eating cold sandwhich. How appetizing!).

Traveling: Expectation vs Reality

I reached Singapore at around 3pm. I walked out of the plane half asleep half zombie. I reached the hotel at almost 4pm. I had some time to freshen up, walk around, have a decent dinner and then I tried to lie down.

The next day, I went to our head office. I was half asleep the whole day. My body has not adjusted to the time difference. I woke up at 6:30am Singapore time which is still 2:30am Dubai time. I was able to successfully wake up but I was on zombie mode the whole day.

My boss laughed when I complained about the flight timing as I have always, ruthlessly booked his flights around early morning. And I would book crazy flights like Dubai to Madrid to Casablanca to Frankfurt or Dubai to Saudi to Dubai to Singapore to Bangkok to Vietnam.  Seriously! I felt bad! So all this time, my boss was having his horrible flight schedules and I was just happily booking the flights in the office.

I only had one direct 6.5-hour flight, not even a connecting flight and I’m almost a zombie.

Business trips can be considered as a privilege as long as it is funded by the company since you get a chance to travel to the company’s expense but really, this isn’t as fun as I thought it would be.