Have you tried rebooting?

Hong Kong – Smell the (semi) fresh air again!

// March 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll

Since I arrived in HK a few days back, the air pollution has been off the charts. It was so bad that I had to constantly have water around me. I am so glad that its somewhat back to normal. Well, the smog is still unavoidable, but at least it ain’t hazardous.

Travel for work?

// March 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll

It’s a cliche these days when you hear people saying “Man, I’m so sick of traveling”. Being in Singapore, traveling rarely means going from Seletar to Changi, so the reaction to the statement above would usually have 2 different responses.

1. Those who rarely travels for work
“Yeah, I wish I could travel and you, stop bragging about it”

2. Those who do travel often
“Seriously, it sounds nice and all, but you lose more than you get”

I do travel quite a little for my work and personally, I still do enjoy it. I might not enjoy it as much as I used to, but nonetheless, I wouldn’t say its totally no fun. When I used to work in Australia, I used to travel maybe once or twice a week to say Melbourne, Brisbane or Adelaide. It was good fun then, and when the occasional NZ trips come up, I was jumping for joy. I suppose being young and not having seen the world back then made trips a little more exciting. Also the fact that I get to travel and see the world (in this case Australia/NZ) without burning a hole in your pocket seemed alot better. Then came my next role which was based out of Singapore. Then suddenly the flurry of HK, China, Indonesia, US, UK and Japan trips were a weekly fixture. More excitement!

Now after doing it consistently for a few years, I must say after a while, its kinda losing its “excitement”

• After 9/11, traveling has been a royal pain in the a**. The amount of checks you get at the airport, and the hoops you jump through just to get on the plane, sometimes is just not worth the effort. When you come from certain countries, you get this look from some immigration officers like you are some terrorist. No fun there.
• If you are fortunate to travel in a team, then great, if not, the dinners where you dine alone aren’t all that much fun. You might be sitting in the best restaurant in the world with no one enjoying it with you.
• With the downturn on the economy affecting everyone, organisations are reducing travel and dropping the business classes whenever possible. So while traveling 3 hours on economy class is all fine and well, try doing an international flight of 15 hours on economy and see how that feels. I’m not particularly small, in fact I’m anything but small. The economy seats are just the worst inventions ever.
• For me, my projects are usually billable and when I travel outside of Singapore, I’m under the knife to complete a particular project under a given timeline just so we can achieve maximum profitability. Every minute I’m on the road, it eats up more and more of the profit margin. So like Edward Murphy would say “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”, which is usually the case with technology (usually) makes me work harder than when I’m not traveling.
• The last thing for me is how much I miss my wife. Don’t require explanation there. For those with family, you do miss out a big portion of your kids growing up. Might not mean much now, but trust me it will. I know, because I am a product of a traveling parent.

So how do you know if you are traveling too much? When you find that you have nothing else to watch on “Krisworld” Singapore Airlines, then you know you have arrived.