What not to do on a business trip

Many years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Penang for work. I was accompanied by my boss at the time who is still a great friend and mentor. I’d like to share with you our experience which may be to the extreme of what I believe majority of business trips share on the hush – Down time. So not to overwhelm you, I’ll break the trip into four short chapters.

• Roller coaster rides – Why not?
• Massage instead of meetings
• Camcorder for duds
• Missed plane no money

Roller coaster rides – Why not?
When in the KL business district, also known as the Golden Triangle, you are surrounded by mega shopping centres. We’re talking massive, MASSIVE, centres. Large enough to host its own indoor theme park – YES! A gigantic indoor theme park holding 133,000 square feet of thrilling rides including a 7 story high roller coaster! In between meetings, this was a ride too good to pass up.

Standing in our business attire, we entered Cosmos World Theme Park in the Time Square shopping centre like 2 gladiators ready to conquer this man-made beast. But first, we needed tickets. Lining up and looking completely out of place with these young, tiny children, who may have been teenagers, we asked the lady behind the ticket counter for two seats on the monster ride. Taking one look at my boss, she calmly informed me there was an age limit to this ride as they would like to avoid heart attacks. My boss, hard of hearing due to the crazy theme park music and flashing lights (not his age) smiled sweetly at the girl while I convinced her that this ride will not be the end of him.

Success! The ride was ours. And I mean completely ours, nobody else had hopped on.

We made polite conversation while strapped in, waiting for the Supersonic Odyssey to start, quietly discussing quality control and regulations ‘Australia would never allow an indoor roller coaster of this size! It would be too dangerous, the risk of shoppers getting hurt and lawsuits too great..yeah, how do they get away with this here?’ As we began inching forward, what seemed like the entire infrastructure for the whole left side of the shopping centre shook, this action incurred a thunderous, rattling noise which turned out to be the scariest part of the entire 2 minutes of this event. For me anyway, my boss came out a little worse for wear. Shaken, but not stirred, we climbed out, smoothed the creases from our suits, and started making our way to the next meeting.