Bangkok 2.0: How Five Adults Spent Nine Months Not Leaving Singapore While One of Them Blamed DBS for S$118

The Accused: Five Adults, Zero Boarding Passes

Bernice: “Mother” / The Spreadsheet Dictator Nobody Obeys

Bernice is not the organiser of this group. She is its unpaid civil service, its central bank and its only working organ, and she runs all three out of a Google Sheet with a tab called Plan C (if Rahul), the single most accurate forecast produced in Singapore this year. The others call her Mother, which is what you call a woman once you have decided she will be doing your admin until she dies. As she announced one Monday, to four people who had already muted her:

Not asking again, she said, in the tone a smoke alarm uses to promise it will stop. Followed, that Friday, by:

Here is the twist nobody in this chat has the spine to tell her. Bernice put S$590 for five seats on her own card, paid S$212 in change fees and soaked up every excuse like a sponge with an accounting degree, and in doing so she taught four adults that letting her down costs nothing. Then, after nine months of building the plane with her bare hands, she personally flew it into a mountain and called it audit season.

Rahul: “Mr Tonight” / The Human Pending Transaction

Rahul owes S$118 and has been handling it like a developing nation restructuring its sovereign debt. Every request for money gets the same two words, PayNow tonight, a phrase that in his hands has lost all connection to money, to the evening and to the truth. The group calls him Mr Tonight, a title he earned the way other men earn a criminal record: through sheer commitment. Asked, in plain English, whether he had paid:

He confirms things the way a horoscope confirms things. Asked what exactly had been confirmed:

The intention. This is a man who would bring a vision board to his own bankruptcy hearing. He said yes to every one of the four trips with the same sparkle, went on none of them and finally paid on 9 August, the morning after the trip had already been cancelled, which makes Rahul the only man in Singapore who settles his debts the way you send flowers to a funeral.

Zhi Hao: “Uncle Hao” / The Lottery Mystic Without a Passport

Zhi Hao is what happens when a man discovers luck and decides it is a personality. He won S$310 on 4D in February and paid his share within the hour, the only competent financial act in this entire chat, and it was funded by a lottery. Since then he has spent his nights forwarding TikToks of Bangkok noodle stalls into a trip with no date, like a man choosing curtains for a house nobody has built on land he does not own. As he so humbly put it, with the winnings still warm:

Destiny, it turned out, comes with a document checklist. Followed, a few weeks later, by:

The universe did not check, and neither did Zhi Hao. His passport had five months and three weeks of life left, a week short of being allowed onto a plane, and he kept promising to renew it next week until the August long weekend was dead and buried. He renewed it on 11 August, the day after, like a fireman turning up to admire the ashes.

Aisyah: The Sorry Just Saw Night Shift

Aisyah reads every message in this chat and answers all of them at 1.47am, like a radio station that only broadcasts once the whole city is asleep. A question asked over Tuesday breakfast gets its answer on Thursday after midnight, always opening with the same three words of legal defence. She is not late to the conversation; she is its historian. Here is a Tuesday question:

A yes or a no, with a deadline, put to a woman whose ticks had already turned blue. And here, two nights later, is the answer:

Her annual leave is controlled by a man she only ever calls boss, who has more say over this holiday than the five of them combined and who has never once been asked what happens in Q3. Either boss is real and running the most effective anti-tourism campaign in Southeast Asia, or he is the finest excuse ever invented. Either way, Aisyah has handed her whole life to a job title and her replies to a time zone that does not exist.

Colin: “Can Can” / The Human Thumbs-Up Emoji

Colin uploaded this chat, which is the first decision he has made since January, and I want him to know I noticed. Ask him where to eat and he says anything works; ask where he wants to go and he says wherever; ask what he actually thinks and the typing bubble appears, flickers like a dying tube light in a stairwell, and goes out. The complete range of his contributions to group democracy:

The group calls him Can Can, which sounds like a cabaret act and is about as useful in an emergency. And when even they had had enough:

Everybody thinks Colin is the easy one, and that is the scandal: four people with opinions and one man who agrees with all of them is not a friendship, it is a taxi with five passengers and no driver. Now he has handed the whole lot to me. A man who could not choose between two hawker centres for nine months has finally taken a stand, and the stand is asking a stranger to tell his friends what he thinks of them. Colin, this is not courage; it is your first opinion of the year, and you still could not be bothered to have it yourself.

Episode One: The Sheet, the Other Sheet and the Very Nervous Bank

On 12 January Bernice posted the Google Sheet: Itinerary v7 FINAL, Budget, Food Hit List, Packing, Who Owes Who, Plan B and Plan C (if Rahul). For a week nobody opened it. For a month nobody opened it. By March she was filling in other people’s columns for them and announcing it to the group, like a mother forging her children’s signatures on their own report books.

Then came the afternoon it all got honest:

Rahul invented an entire second spreadsheet rather than fill in the first, and Zhi Hao, instead of defending the woman who built the real one, asked whether the imaginary one had a food section. That was the admin. The money was worse. Bernice had fronted S$590 for five Scoot seats back on 9 February, and by spring the only person who had not paid her back was the man with two spreadsheets and, apparently, no bank.

Pressed for his S$118, Mr Tonight delivered his masterpiece:

Large for DBS. A grown man with a salary told the woman who had paid for his flight that the biggest bank in the country was frightened of a sum that would not cover one person’s chilli crab on the East Coast. The others did not defend her. They did something far worse: they laughed, sent a sticker of a crying cat, and let him keep her money until August.

Episode Two: Four Ways Not to Leave Singapore

The first trip, 3 to 6 April, was killed by Rahul’s client offsite, an event that has never been photographed, minuted or confirmed by a single person he works with. The Vesak weekend was executed by boss. The August long weekend was strangled by Zhi Hao’s passport. Each time Bernice paid the change fee, called it admin and went quietly back into the sheet to rename a tab Itinerary v8 FINAL FINAL.

By September she had dragged all four of them into the Deepavali weekend, and on 15 September the woman who had carried this trip on her back since January typed:

And the group, who had spent nine months cancelling on her, replied:

Mr Tonight, a man who killed the first trip for a meeting nobody has ever seen, was appalled. Uncle Hao blamed the universe, the same universe that had not renewed his passport. And Colin, at the most dramatic moment of the year, agreed with the cancellation of a trip he had also agreed to. Four trips, four murders, and the last one was committed by the detective.

The chat has since moved on to Hat Yai, because it is closer, which is the logic of people who could not reach the first place and concluded the problem was distance.

The Dishonours List

The Unpaid Internship of the Year goes to Bernice, for nine months of admin with a salary of one nickname and no thank-yous.

The Central Bank of Nothing goes to Rahul, for printing promises at a pace that would collapse a real economy.

The Psychic Hotline Award goes to Zhi Hao, who predicted a 4D number and could not predict his own passport.

The Graveyard Shift Medal goes to Aisyah, for answering every plan only after it had died.

The Lifetime Achievement in Having No Personality goes to Colin, who agreed with everyone so thoroughly that he vanished.

The Longest Departure Lounge in Singapore goes to the whole group: nine months, S$590 of flights and not one stamp in a passport, partly because one of the passports was useless.

The Sentencing

You did not plan a holiday; you rented the feeling of one, made Bernice pay the deposit and left her holding the keys. Bangkok has been waiting since January with the patience of a city that has survived worse tourists, but never any this committed to not arriving. Five adults, nine months, and the only thing that ever left Singapore was Bernice’s money.