Another Momentary Panic...

I woke up this morning, and went to retrieve my passport and plane tickets from the safe in my room, since I had a feeling that our travel service from home hadn’t changed my return flights to Karachi from today to Friday, as I had requested. I keyed in my little code, the green light went on, and then…the handle wouldn’t turn. I tried it again, thinking maybe I had tried to turn the handle too soon, or not soon enough, and nothing. So I called down to the front desk and said that my safe was stuck, and I needed someone to come and help me open it. “No problem, Miss. I send someone right away!”

A few minutes later, a guy showed up with a handful of batteries, and apparently no English skills, since my attempt at a polite “good morning” was greeted with silence. He plopped down in front of the safe, jimmied off a little panel in the front, and pulled out the four AA batteries in the safe, and put new ones in their place. Then got up, said “fixed”, and went to leave. I asked him to stay to make sure that I could get the safe open, and he looked a little exasperated, but stayed in the doorway nonetheless. The safe then popped open, and my passport and tickets were staring back at me from the inside. The maintenance guy departed silently, and I continued about my morning routine.

We arrived at the office, and after getting settled and speaking with the new resettlement person, I went over to the Thai Airlines office to make sure that my ticket had been changed. My ticket, it turns out, had not been changed, so I’m glad I went in to check. They confirmed a seat for me on Friday, and I then trotted over to the Cathay Pacific office to make sure that they could do the same. After having secured a seat on both flights for Friday, I made my way back to the office, after almost 90 minutes of running around, taking care of something the travel office could have taken care of in about 15 minutes or less, if they’d done it when I asked them to, five days ago. Ah well – no harm done; it was nice to get some air, and it makes the morning go by faster. Now it’s back to more data entry and analysis, and legal research. In light of my whole “not sleeping well for the past few weeks” thing, staying alert today could prove to be a little rough. It’s only 10:30 right now, and it’s not looking good…if only I could tolerate caffeine.

I’m going through more numbers in the government’s statistical yearbook, and they’re still off, which is frustrating. Again, I’m just using my own numbers so that someone looking at my charts and spreadsheets won’t question whether or not I’m new to the wonderful world of addition.

I just had an interesting conversation with the Senior VP for Asia – out of nowhere, he asked me if I would be willing to relocate to Delhi, Bangkok, or Hanoi, and actually expected an answer on the spot. I told him that I didn’t think so, but I’d have to think about it, then asked him what the work would be. After some hemming and hawing, it turns out that the position he has in mind is essentially someone to crank out proposals and occasionally fill in on project work. D was also part of this conversation and said that there was no way she’d do it. He then was saying something about how Asian people respond better to these kinds of requests because they don’t have the same “baggage” that Americans and Europeans of our age tend to have, they feel it’s their duty to do what their employer says. By “baggage”, he clearly meant “desire to have a life”, because that was the primary reason cited by both D and me as to why we wouldn’t want to do it – I have a life in DC that I like very much, and she has a life in Paris. And I don’t know that it’s necessarily an accurate way to characterize Asian people as well – but clearly he was using a broad brush. I wouldn’t rule out relocating one day, and maybe one day not all that far in the future, but it’s not time for me to leave yet. I feel like I’ve finally started to put down some of my own roots somewhere, and it’s a nice feeling. Now, if this had been some great career opportunity, that would be one thing, and I might seriously feel like I had a dilemma on my hands. However, for me to leave my life behind, even if it was only for a few years, for a position that my current boss wouldn’t hire me for because I was overqualified, would just be dumb. (When I first interviewed with the company, it was for the position of proposal coordinator, and in the interview, my boss basically said that I was way overqualified. He did, however, hang onto my resume and call me a few months later for the job I have now.) I’ll have plenty of opportunities to travel and see places like Delhi, Bangkok, and Hanoi, but to go for something that would be a step down, professionally speaking, just wouldn’t make sense. And it was funny to hear it dressed up as a great opportunity, and then to have my reluctance to say that I would do it as a snap decision be chalked up to a culturally-ingrained character flaw.

He also said not to mention to my boss that he’d asked me. Well, *no kidding*. I don’t want to get anywhere near that hornet’s nest. If they’ve got issues with each other, they can sort those out without me.

Well, it’s nearing 7 pm and we’re all still glued to our desks, having arrived at 8 am. My eyes are going to give out soon, so I think I’ll have to bail, regardless of whether or not anyone else is with me. It would be nice to have some company, but it’s hardly essential. I don’t want to go grocery shopping for only three more days worth of food, so the pantry at the temporary Casa del Mandy is looking a little bare and scary. But I’ve made it a lot farther through that 5 kg bag of rice I bought than I initially thought I would. (It was the smallest size I could find in the mini-mart.)