The company I'm working a summer job with has requested that I attend a training day in a month's time. I'm quite happy to attend the training day - it looks valuable. However, it starts at 09:40am, and it's a long way away.
I don't have a car (as a student, it wouldn't make sense for me to have one), so I'd be travelling on public transit. It would probably take me an hour to walk to the train station on my end, then catching various train connections will take 3 hours, and then it'll take another 40 minutes to take a bus from the station on the other end and walk to the training location. So, looks like I'd have to leave at 6am. That seems pretty reasonable/normal - I got up at 6am every day to go to high school.
Unfortunately, I grew up in a rural area where you had to drive to get anywhere, and I never quite got the hang of using public transit or walking places without getting lost. Typically, to make sure I get somewhere on time, I assume I'll miss a couple trains and spend half an hour wandering around lost looking for the bus station and another half an hour wandering around lost looking for my final destination. Plus, I have ADHD and mornings are the hardest time for me - getting up, getting dressed, showering, brushing teeth, eating breakfast, figuring out where I put my keys, brushing my hair etc typically takes me 2 hours. When you add on all of this, I'm looking at a wake-up time more like 2am or 3am. But I don't particularly want to admit to them that I'm so disorganised and unpractised on public transit that it would take me twice as long as a normal person to navigate someplace - this is a pretty new job and I want to make a good impression!
They said in the mass-email that they are happy to offer overnight accommodation (at their expense) on the night before the training day for those travelling from "far afield". But this company has bases all over Britain - I don't know if by "far afield", they mean "if you're travelling all the way from Scotland to the southern English coast", or if they mean "if you're travelling from outside the city".
So, my question is: Would it be reasonable for someone to request overnight accommodation before a training day in order to avoid having to get up at 6am, or would this come off as lazy/greedy? What is the 'normal' distance for someone to have to travel, before they can reasonably say that they need overnight accommodation?
Alternately, would it make too bad an impression to just state that I struggle with public transit and would have to get up at 3am? If that's unlikely to make them think badly of me, I may just do that.
