The Colour Of Disappointment

It hits you in waves. Sort of.

I hardly realised how much the knowledge that the long anticipated adventure laden vacation in Cambodia being unceremoniously cancelled due to a series of unfortunate events would effect me until somewhere last week when a reply to the group e-mail reached me and confirmed my greatest fears. Of course I saw this coming earlier, but when things are not in print you kind of have the tendency to ignore the inevitable and hope for the best, because deep down inside you feel that there is a still an iota of hope.

The thing is, this Cambodia plan had been in the works since 2007 until we decided to take the proverbial bull by it's horns to make it happen this year. The planning was long, involved tonnes of e-mails and lots of research but we managed to squeeze in everything every one of us wanted to see in the 6 day itinerary including a brief visit to Tonle Sap lake, a place we learned about in geography in school! And somehow as planning went underway, H1N1 came into the picture and we postponed the buying of the tickets. Now I'd like to think that by doing that we had ultimately made the trip far beyond our reach, and is to be solely blamed for it being cancelled now, but I know it isn't so. Even if we had bought the flight tickets, not having one of the members as originally planned would not be as fun (especially since she was the one who started the ball rolling and suggested November, hardly thinking that for some reason, someone else would have a more valid reason to take leave in November instead of her)... because part of this vacation is to spend time with friends and not merely walking under the hot sun with hats and backpacks looking at interesting stuff while your disinterested guide spews out random information (all rehearsed, of course) about what you're seeing.

To think that the one major thing that kept you going about your everyday life knowing that you will have an excellent November was taken away from you so suddenly, like someone pulling a rug from beneath your feet (if you have the habit of standing on rugs, that is) A major disappointment indeed!

As if living with that knowledge is not enough, there's also the sudden terrible news (in the same week, which makes things much worse) of the non-existence of the annual plant shutdown in the brief history of my (almost) five years working there. Now, I've always used this plant shutdown to also temporarily shutdown the part of my brain that remembers machine parameters and product specs and problems because that is the one time where no one will call you to ask anything work related because no one will be working (which is a totally different scenario from normal vacations where you are requested to keep your phone on at all times to answer questions which only you know the answers to) and it is something all of us at work look forward to because it is a chance to rejuvenate and when you return after a week away, you're always so much more enthusiastic and productive.

So there you have it, two major disappointments in a week, not to mention a couple of other not so major ones which I have chosen not to dwell on because it will not be of any help and will only serve to lengthen this already long post.