Thankful for all the times that I've been to Bangkok, but come this year, if there be one lesson I've learnt, it is that not all trips are vacations, and not all trips begin well.
This was a long night.
Which, in fact, had actually begun well.
Check-in was smooth, immigration was smooth, we went near the now-familiar last-flight Gate A6 that had been assigned to Thai Lion Air and waited.
But then s*** started to begin.
Thirty minutes prior to boarding, I had discovered, to my horror, that the Talk360 app I'd downloaded on the previous trip was really, genuinely, no more working.
It had, in fact, not been working for a few days prior now, but I had assumed the error message to be simply one of those situations where the network is weak, nothing more.
But full panic set in when we touched down in Bangkok's Don Mueang International Airport (one hour late!) and the app still didn't work.
All through the Grab journey to Urbana Langsuan we were talking to the customer service chatbot but it was no use. They had no way of resolving it other than telling me to update the app, and they didn't quite know what the problem exactly was, either.
We checked in, and in the room we tried Zoom Global- but the registration needed three days to set up and approve, and there wasn't time. What made matters feel worse was that Zoom- having policied that we had signed up for the plan (never mind whether we got to use it or not) wouldn't do immediate refunds.
I was desperate.
Really desperate.
Eventually I tried Rebel on another phone using the Giga number, and thankfully it worked.
You can imagine what kind of a night it was when only at 3am Thai time did we manage to fall asleep.
This was not the way I wanted to spend my first night in Bangkok.
And not the way I wanted to spend it ever again.