Not dumb at all. This is a professional service firm, so there is no real head office per se, but rather your "home office" - I just simplified it a bit for hn purposes.

Couple of reasons. Each country rolls their own custom image. Plus I need an office that has the encryption keys for the full disk encryption. Plus only 3 offices globally carry copies of my data (used when they can't pull the data off the hdd).

If I'm flying anyway I might as well go to home office - I know they have all the required stuff for my laptop.