So executive flights of fancy are back (Doc, please invent a shot for that)

The medical profession is to blame. These bemasked do-gooders were actually applauded in some countries every night for their efforts in combating COVID.

Those happy clappers only served to encourage these surgically sandalled types to apply their superior ATAR scores to come up with vaccinations that have ruined our peace and quiet at work. I am, of course, talking about the resumption of business travel.

For several glorious years, business travel consisted of nothing more inconvenient than shuffling in one’s slippers. Now for some poor souls they are confronted not only in remembering how to operate the locks to open their front doors, but have in prospect being farted at through a wafer thin economy class seat en-route to Brisbane or London.

Of course because it seems half the world is now at war, the route taken to get to a European city resembles the scrambled flight plans of a Russian oligarch, involving three low passes over Timbuktu, causing the journey to blow out like a pre-election budget.

I am getting ahead of myself, of course. No employee can board a flight these days before they have encountered the company travel policy. As most travel involves crossing some form of boundary, it is fitting that the travel policy is where the company’s avowed devotion to teamwork crosses over to a fiercely enforced hierarchy. In cricket there was a distinction between the gentlemen and the players.

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Gentlemen cricketers had their own changing rooms and gate onto the playing field quite apart from the low-born players obliged to take a wage for their labours. Cricket abolished this divisive anachronism in the early 1960s. However, get on a plane in the company of a member of the executive team, and you will find them turning left while you are obliged to turn right into a world of sardines marinated in battery-acid twist-topped sauvignon blanc.

If a miracle occurs and the Russians have not shot down your plane, when you land, you will then have to remain in your cramped fetid quarters while your colleagues in the executive disembark first. Having finally collected your meagre allowance of luggage, your expenses will just about stretch to an Uber ride to some fleapit probably in an industrial estate, where you are allowed to spend your $8.50 on a three-course degustation meal.

The return flight will be cancelled (due to COVID-induced labour shortages) so you will be obliged to hang around the airport until 8pm on a Friday night. You’ll eventually get home close to midnight having been doing about seven hours of unpaid overtime. You will be expected at work by 8am the following Monday having spent the weekend trying to make it up to your abandoned partner by taking “your turn” with childcare and/or domestic chores.