01747: The Longest Shift

Photo Credit: binatanglakwatsero.com

The problem with works-related travel is that it tends to eat into your free time in a wide variety of ways. Apart from the time consumed by the actual act of traveling itself, travel schedules naturally disrupt your natural routine and the need to work with airline schedules means less than ideal arrival times. Case in point, the cheapest flight to Davao required me to get here just after lunch even though the reason I'm here involves an appointment at 10:00pm. So now I'm trying to pass the time here at the office until the meeting proper so that I can get back to my usual stuff.

As it stands, I doubt that I'll be able to get any decent sleep while I'm here, so I'll just do my best to stay awake until we're done here. Then it'll be straight back to the airport to catch my 06:00am flight back to Manila. So yeah, the absence of a tour guide means that I doubt I'll venture out to see any of the sights or things of that nature.

I can't really say much about Davao since I've only really experience the drive from the airport to the office, which took less than 15 minutes. It definitely feels a lot more provincial than Metro Manila given the narrower roads that are blissfully free of the ridiculous traffic we get back home. And I mean no insult by that statement - there are pros and cons to this sort of a life as opposed to the busy life back in Metro Manila. It sorts of feels like the time that I worked out of the company's Lubbock, Texas location. As much as I'm sure it was a lovely city, the nature of my trip had me alternating between my hotel and the office alone. It's a little worse here since I didn't even book a hotel.

But hey, the sacrifice of lack of sleep is worth making sure I get back home as soon as possible. And thus this all ends up feeling like as if I was working out of our Quezon City office for the day as opposed to our Makati headquarters. Either way, I still manage to get home in time for the more important stuff like time with Tobie and Yoshi.