Finally, vacation time. June 20th. But first, we have to start at… June 19th. It’s some lessons learned.
I booked the Scoot flight direct from Singapore to Sydney, nonstop, from 2am SGT to 11.35am AUT at June 20. That meant nearly 8 hours in a plane. June 19 is still a workday, so I had to complete it. However, the day before, after lunch, my supervisor handed me an almost-impossible task: modify an existing Sitefinity project to modify and add widgets that will use Elasticsearch’s Elser APIs alongside a Claude AI endpoint (also from Elastic) to make a prototype “AI searching” function. My supervisor already made some headway by prototyping the API and prompt sequences using Postman, so I only have to translate that to a functional webpage using Sitefinity.
Of course, things never went smoothly. First day was more of a learning thing, and second day was more of trying out how the APIs should behave, what the body construction should be, and anticipating their response. Took me until 8.30pm on June 19th to finish and make a functional page out of what was given, I needed the overtime to make it happen. Much anxiety was expended here. And I have a flight in 5 hours. Fortunately, I anticipated the matter and packed my entire set the night before – backpack and check-in luggage. So for me, it was just a matter of getting home on time, getting my stuff, and booking a vehicle thru Grab to the airport.
However, this vexed me inside. I was used to getting to the airport around 4 hours before my flight. Cutting it to nearly 3 hours is a bit unsettling, as I am admittedly a creature of comfort. But a spade is a spade, I chose an early flight, I suppose I had to thank heavens that my workplace wasn’t the unforgiving corporate environment that I had 8 years ago, things could’ve been worse than a 2-hour overtime. But lesson learned: next time, file a half-day afternoon leave before a morning flight. I am not going to risk this kind of last-minute workstuff ever again.
With that settled, the rest of the night went nearly as planned: go home, get luggage, book ride to airport. Except for “get home early and take a shower”, that I scrapped. No choice, time wasn’t on the good side. I wore the same office jeans, but at home I quickly changed to a longsleeve sports shirt from UA, put on the ankle protector sleeve, donned a cap, and put on some extra sprays of the cologne. With that, I got to the airport around 10pm, and cleared the departure stuff 30 minutes later.
Usually I got something good and filling for late dinner at the airports when I depart, but this time I was leery and unsure. This is the longest flight I ever had, and I am not keen on using the plane toilet yet (20+ flights and still no plane toilet use). So I made sure I ate only what’s necessary without triggering anything that made me want to go shit or makes me hungrier hours later. I ended up drinking a bottle of Rokeby choco milk with increased protein and ate a granola bar. For the plane, I planned to keep a couple of the energy gels I packed in my pocket, and a granola bar, should help with any hunger pangs.
Once boarding proceeded, I realize that I was also boarding a big-ass plane again. It’s a big Boeing with a 3-3-3 seat layout for Economy. First one I rode like this was on a trip from Singapore to Japan years ago, that one was also a big-ass plane. Thankfully, I also prebooked for seat selection so I won’t have to gamble with a shitty seat location. For me, always a window seat, to the left side of the plane. Paying extra to ensure that luxury on long flights never failed me.
Once boarded and plane has reached the point where the flight attendants can start pushing carts, I started to make prep for sleeping. I brought an eyemask and a pair of earplugs with me, these should help. However, shit helped only a bit. Earplugs were nice though, can barely hear people talking. The cheap eyemask I bought from Decathlon was some blue dookie. It actually hurt my eyes when I wore them for a prolonged period of time. It was tight. So what I did was to cover my eyes with my handkerchief, and then wore the eyemask over it so that there was some cushion between it and my eyes. It helped some. But unfortunately, plane is a Boeing, as I mentioned. The plane’s rumble was distracting as I leaned on the window, so I tried to just sleep straight on the seat. But after a few hours, my legs started to curse me. So what happened in the flight duration was me napping, not sleeping. Nap a bit, then stretch legs a bit, nap again, stretch legs a bit again. I envy the people in the plane who could sleep for long periods of time in the plane. I spent some unfortunate “can’t sleep yet” moments playing Solitaire on my phone.
Briathrail // Albert 2MNG 
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