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Reader question: Please explain “master plan” and this sentence: “Don’t wake me up without a master plan.” My comments: If the speaker had his way, he might as well stay in bed all day. Master plan here means an overall plan for all activities to be scheduled for the coming day. Suppose that these are tourists to Beijing, and the speaker, a child a young man (for it sounds like some youngster speaking) is talking to his parents. He wants to know before hand what exactly they’re going to do tomorrow. He wants to know exactly when, for instance, he’s going to be asked up for breakfast, what park they’re going to visit in the morning, whether they’re going there by bus, the subway or taxi, where exactly they’re going to have lunch and in the afternoon, whether they’re going to visit the Summer Palace or the Fragrant Hills, whether they’re going to have a banquet with their auntie’s family downtown for dinner and whether they’ll allow him to go to the karaoke bar with a few former school buddies afterwards, if, that is, the parents insist, he has any energy left after another eventful day. In other words, the young person wants to have minute details of the next day’s travel schedule in hand. Otherwise, he’s not going to get up at all – he won’t be roaming round the capital city with his parents again “like a group of flies with their head cut off” (or he just might have said as much). | 
