The idea of studying numbers on a sheet of white never appealed to me. I’m still carrying the effects of last night like a bad drug run. I came home today with a throbbing head. The bosses in KL turned up the pressure and both of us succumbed; it wasn’t an urgent need, but my boss over here didn’t know the difference.

And like all good Horatios, I got dragged into the mess. Papers were drawn out, invoices stacked and a slew of instructions followed: take this tabulation and slice and dice; take that tabulation and correlate; take this sheet of paper and try to make sense of it. On top of the avalanche from last night, today began like a slow crawl up a steep hill. The work was done, but ‘fine tuning’ is a much hated phrase around here: it usually means re-doing work you are told can be done better, or more elaborate.


In this instance, ‘more elaborate’ fit the bill perfectly. The call was to expand everything we’d done the night before and push the envelope a bit. I couldn’t do it, but we don’t say “can’t” over here, we say “when do you want it”. That’s the attitude they want you to have: go getter, never say die, on the ball, all the sort of catchphrases popularized by dodgy leadership types since “hoo-fucking-rah” made an appearance in our lexicon.

Add the utter misery of today with an expectation of more tomorrow: I sat for an hour going through some papers an ex-colleague fucked over and I’m wondering what to make of it. I’ll be seeing an old client tomorrow, one of those antiques who we’ve dealt with countless times and screwed over: I’m just as clueless about our history with Client X, but I’m in for a gala time tomorrow.

“He’s a snake,” my boss said. A snake, a cold-blooded thing that crawls, shiny scales and dead-eyed stare, “and he will try to fuck with you”.

“Thanks for the confidence-booster, man. I really needed it,” I said. We were down by the kopitiam near our office, and rain was begining to splatter like hailstones on the awning above. My boss was preoccupied by the pictures in his handphone, which looked like pixelated mess of colours. The smell of ozone mixed in with the stinging stench of fried chilli, and the throbbing in my head became more insistent. I was not having a good day, of course.

“I don’t know how to corner him,” I said.

“Who, what, when,” he said, and my two other colleagues sitting across from us laughed.

“Fuck you, it’s ‘who, what, when, why, and how’ lah. My father taught me that when I was six,” I said.

“Precisely,” he said.

“But my interrogation must have a purpose. A question has an answer presupposed by the question already, the same with tomorrow,” I said, airily.

“Ya whatever, just make sure you catch him at it,” he said, looking up from his handphone.

“That’s the problem, convincing him to say what I want him to say”.

“Do what you have to do, lah”.

“And what if I can’t get him to admit to it?” I said, pausing: it’s not good to make provisions for eventual defeat, I thought.

“You can,” he said absently. My other colleague fielded questions about Client X as I sipped on my hot teh-tarik. I didn’t know what to say, or what to ask. The rain got heavier and water-logged drains quickly made their presence felt. I studied the swirls of water responding in peaks and troughs to the falling rain and tried not to think about it. You reach a stage in your career, I surmised, when people think you can do the impossible.

I wasn’t feeling confident about tomorrow and I’m still not feeling confident about tomorrow as I type this. My ex-colleague had left behind scant information, information that I would need if I was to face that monster. A turkey is how my boss described Client X, and I pictured myself laughing wildly at the image of a goitered, long-necked man.

How do I go about this. You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent, rule number 1. And he’s a genius, so if I’m reading him right (arrogant, demanding, cocksure of his connections according to my boss), he’d move to nip the interview at the bud: “what’s the necessity? there never was a need for an interview, so why now?”

I had the scenario play in my head as I was driving back home. Reel him in, I thought. Let him speak, and then catch him in a contradiction. Question and answer, yes and no. Maybe create a false sense of security: bastard’s already decided that we’ll hold the interview in his office — he controls the environment. He will be sitting behind his big faux-mahagony with interlaced fingers groping the top of his receding hair and he will hold forth. Do a Smiley’s People, maybe: unfazed, uninterested, uncaring. Not a flicker of emotion — or maybe smile indulgingly. Yes, smile indulgingly like the buffoon I want him to believe I am.

Or appear to insult his intelligence, or… no, no, quite the opposite: maintain the fiction that he has the upper hand, maintain the semblance of an inexperienced, bewildered youngster coming up against a man of much fortitude and experience. Play the servant, no, no.. play the disbelieving servant: “Surely master isn’t that stupid, is he?” would work perfectly. Because I’ve got to remember: he thinks he knows what he’s doing, and he thinks he knows what I will be doing, therefore I must subvert his assumptions and turn them against him. A well-placed comment, or appearing to agree with him… maybe.

“Don’t think about it,” my boss said, “you’ll have some time to go through the information you need tomorrow”.

“There is no avoiding war, it can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy”
— Machiavelli

Hmmmm.