Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Down Time

The last few days I've been feeling sorry for myself, as somehow, somewhere in the potential bacterial breeding ground that is a giant aircraft, I managed to pick up some sort of bug and was now sniffling and snuffling through the day. As always, I began knocking back the echinacea, vitamin C and water in the hope that it might chase off whatever I'd caught in the minimum of time.

I'd felt fine the morning of my Hong Kong trip but by the time I got up the next morning I had a touch of a sore throat. Nothing to keep me from sightseeing though! But by the time we'd got back to the hotel at the end of (a very long) day, I was fast sounding like the penguin in Toy Story that lost it's squeaker.

Thankfully today I'm mostly back to normal so hopefully I'll be able to fly my next trip. Of course I'll call sick if required but unfortunately as I have leave after that I'll cop an 'absent from work' on my roster and I'd really rather not thanks very much... but, it can't be avoided if I'm sick. Ugh. I was doing so well, not getting sick with anything like this since just before I moved overseas!!

Today was spent in a somewhat frustrating and time consuming process of trying to fix a problem with the tickets for my leave. Getting home was no problem, but going elsewhere that I needed to go was fast becoming an issue. Normally, we just book tickets online but for some reason the system wasn't letting me. Online help wasn't, and trying to phone through to the call centre went unanswered for hours. Finally, I did what they told me to do last time and made the trip into the office to visit the ticketing desk.

Again, as last time, they refused to help me, until I had to plead my case and explain that as no one was answering the phone, and had been giving me the wrong info for weeks, that today was the last day I could possibly get the tickets. Normally, I could have requested them today and picked them up right before my leave, but with tomorrow being a public holiday here I didn't wat to risk missing the ticket collection. (I can't get these emailed to me like I can with everything else).

As with many things in this country, it took a lot of waiting around, a lot of re-explaining my story to several different people and a LOT of errors and wrong info before I finally had tickets in my hot little hand. It was an epic four and a half hours waiting until I got them, so needless to say I am glad to be back at home recovering and away from the freezing a/c of the office. I'm only a bit ashamed of getting a tad emotional with the supervisor but I think it was what finally convinced him to make them help me!! :P

Not much else was going on, as I was pretty much just resting and doing things around the house. I did go to the mall to pick up a few things, one of which was a scrapbook as some friends and I are planning on starting a 'craft n wine' night- bring whatever we're working on, have a few glasses of wine and watch some tv box sets. Yay!!!!

It's getting really hot in Dubai now, I felt the need to be outside for a little bit, so went to the pool with my book but I only lasted 40mins before the heat sent me scurrying back inside. It's sure going to be a change being in Oz during winter- family tells me there was a huge storm the last few days and it even hailed in my city!!!! I'd better pack warm clothes...

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