1 week to Fly Day! (which is on a Monday)

With much anticipation and a tinge of nerves, the fly off date is now 1 week away. Just bought a spanking new suitcase from Carrefour (28 inches I think) and I'm now looking for a value priced notebook backpack that I can take along as hand-carry/cabin luggage. While I do have a smaller trolley bag, I'll look like a total arse if I try to pull 2 trolley bags at the airport. Much better to have a small duffel bag to stuff the clothes in while the electronics and documents go into the notebook backpack.

Speaking of flying, I must look in askance at my IRAS colleagues for what I feel must go down in my history book as an example of Public Service Anal-itis. Since Personnel Branch was swamped with work in the early-May period, I took it on myself to source out my airline tickets to the US. There are several flight routes to get there on the various airlines, and, being the responsible employee that I am, opted for a decent carrier with one of the lowest (if not THE lowest airfare). I'll fly ANA to Chicago and then switch to a domestic to Detroit. The cost of the ANA flight was $1840.

So, I put forward my claim to PB and here's the what happened:
1) IRAS tells me that I should have gone through them for a ticket. According to PSC policy, public service organizations should favour SIA as a carrier. BUT, the SIA route is more expensive

2) Then, IRAS says that it's agent quoted only $1780 for the ANA ticket, so it won't reimburse me the full $1840.

So, I've saved IRAS some cash by NOT flying SIA, and IRAS still wants to cheap me of $60? I'm grateful for the scholarship and all, but this just completely stinks of bureaucracy and rules-lawyering.