There is no excuse now to go somewhere and ask permission later. The stations leak like sieves in times of difficulty, and Head Office reigns supreme. Station leaders now spend more time answering emails than braving the blizzards of the Great White Hell. Recently one station leader found himself engaged in testy exchanges with dissenting colleagues in other buildings on the same station by email, with copies zinging back and forth to Head Office in Hobart. When communications were done by 'whizzer' it took so long that sometimes domestic problems at home dissipated by the time the message got through.
Most illnesses fix themselves up anyway.
In the 1990s there are regular instances of horrendous telephone bills. Things have become so sophisticated that there are no more jobs for radio operators, or communications officers as they have become. Today technicians service the whizzbang computers that make it all happen. So much so that NASA is using them for experiments to judge how astronauts will behave on long space journeys to other planets. There is no known psychological process for picking an ideal wintering team.