The “authoritative figures” at our institution thrive on this sort of thing, that being taking a practical and relatable real-life experience and then turning it into a lesion to be included the dynamic curriculum. Our growing list of sponsors and backers love this sort of thing as well, one of which I’m proud to say was formulated on a cross-continental deployment on which I found myself having to sit it out at no less than two airports due to one stupid flight delay.

It’s not so much a lesson in opportunism or even full-on capitalism, but I suppose rather a lesson in dedicating some pockets of the time you have on this earth to maximising efficiency. These are the periods of time during which one essentially shuts out the world and focuses their full attention on a set of tasks they may have, or even better, focus on a singular task which you resolve to knock out the park.

So I was to attend a new-age teachers’ course in Eastern Europe, a deployment for which one naturally gets paid overtime, but one which I would have otherwise enjoyed going on in any case. My flight ticket was booked through a travel agency specialising in organising travel logistics for business travellers, so everything was left up to them for once. I didn’t have to worry about a single organisational aspect of the trip apart from getting cleaned up and showing up of course.

Except something did go wrong, in the form of a flight delay on the first leg of the flight. Now ordinarily having to catch the next flight which is something like two hours away from one you might have missed isn’t too much of a problem and it happens, but when you’re working with some very tight margins with regards to details such as your connecting flight, then a delayed flight can become a major problem. In this instance it did indeed become a major problem because the connecting flight’s subsequent flight was a full 24 hours later, which means that I was stuck at the airport for about 23 of those 24 hours – can you just imagine.

Anyway, I came prepared, determined not to miss out on the conference I was all set to attend, so I informed the organisers and they swiftly set up a video conference so that I could “attend” the workshop virtually. How about that for some efficiency?

So despite the challenges pertaining to the delayed flight, I managed to get done the work which I needed to get done, but now things get really interesting when some of the other factors are taken into account.

I made contact with flight delay compensation experts and it turns out I was eligible for some major, major compensation, so not only did I only miss the first day of the workshop and later go on to have a great time after joining from the second day, I also made quite a bit of good, extra money on the side, all while getting what needed to be done, done!

So that’s a good lesson in efficiency, a version of which now forms part of the progressive curriculum at our centre.