The last 4 days have been nothing but intense! They had been excruciatingly exhausting, especially after being cooped up in a function room at some place all day for a full 4 days in light of training and workshop sessions. I love going for workshops whenever I get the chance to. To me, they make a great escape from the daily routine back in the office. However…
…such workshop sessions usually leave me pretty brain-dead at the end of the day! More often than not, these workshops usually tend to start at 9 am S.H.A.R.P and can be unfortunately be held at some far flung, yet somewhat fancy places to accommodate the number of participants.
If that happens, it usually means that one has to get up extra early and buffer for any traffic jams to get to the venue on time! This, essentially was what I had to do for 4 consecutive days. All I have to say is this:
I BLOODY HATE BANGKOK’S TRAFFIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I inadvertently showed up 20 minutes late on the first day of training because of the damn traffic! TWENTY FRIGGING MINUTES and that’s after buffering almost 2 hours of traffic time! All because traffic got to a standstill for 45 minutes; and that’s just after about less than a km travelling in the cab from my place. In fact, every intersection came to a standstill thereafter. It was so bad that my cab had only been crawling for less than 2 km after one half hours of travelling time…and STILL with about 10 km more to go to get to my destination! I am hardly ever late for all, if not most of my appointments, and so I was fuming when I finally got to the destination. As with other training sessions, we have also been “trained’ that trainers don’t usually tolerate late comers, and late comers would usually have to pay some kind of penalty. It was the first day of training and being quite the punctual person that I am, I almost screamed at the trainer for making us travel to such inaccessible place. On top of that I supposedly had to be penalized by buying coffee for everyone! (That was when my brains started shooting out expletives in all languages I knew!) It really wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t the only one, who was late, but I cannot stand being the last one in. Especially so when I take the extra effort to get there earlier, not just on time!. It did take me a while to calm myself down and I decided to take the BTS then for the next few days.
On the 2nd day, I was but half an hour early just because I decided to do a train-and –cab it –combo to get to the venue.
I swear there must have been some curse or something as my luck ran out again on the 3rd day with the infallible plan of train-and-cab-it combo. For some reason, the train stalled for a good half an hour. The train was there, people were in, but it just wasn’t moving. At the same time, the station was getting crowded with more people queuing up, but they were not able to get into the train for some time. In fact, it got so ridiculously crowded that I could only squeeze in on the 3rd train. You cannot imagine how agitated I was at that time. I just hate being late and I had barely enough minutes to spare! Fortunately, I got to the training room just in time. As I started to grumble to my colleagues on my misfortune with transportation, I was later told that the reason they had to stall the train for a while was because someone apparently had fallen off the edge and into the tracks right about the time I was there.
Yikes!
Fortunately she was alright and was unscathed. I honestly didn’t think anyone who fall into the track would survive, really.
What a week! Traffic here can be as unpredictable as cat’s affection for me. Can’t wait for the weekend to come for a little bit of reprieve.
