cookie-cutter comments

I didn’t want to quibble with him, so I said nothing.

I had the shock of my life last week when an email I replied, an email solicited by my boss, was rudely answered without so much as a “by-your-leave”. If he wanted to assfuck me, he should’ve had the decency to ask nicely. But he didn’t, and I was left feeling raw and enraged. My fingers twitched and I was dying to reply, but I held back.

It was a matter of simple, practical logic. Let’s put it in more concrete terms: the warranty for the contents of your safe deposit box will take effect if 1) the safe box was guarded at all times, and 2) if the safe box was properly locked and secured. [more..]

i love the numerical certainty of fevers. you catch it today, incubation lasts about 2 days (2.3? 2.1? who knows) and you find yourself sick. i blame zero and luthien (haha!) but i really blame the weather. unseasonally hot, my lips are parched and the air-conditioning isn’t helping much. everything’s cast in a golden yellow glow. i feel the heat radiating off the curtains, like the heat radiating off my forehead. [more..]

It’s late and my attempts at purging what refuse I had digested this evening hasn’t developed into a meaningful report. It’s all in pieces and I can’t make sense of it. That’s not a good thing, sir. Not making sense of madness is ok, but really, being the cause of that madness is quite another. I’m drifting, I don’t even know what I’m saying.

I had the shelling of my life this morning. It brought me back to my senses, and I wanted to throw punches. Throw punches. The last vestiges of decency cast aside for one, pleasurable smackdown. I was on the verge today, with him. But I took it out on a 3.30pm appointment instead. He sat down and I sat down and I dispensed with small talk.

I told him: “You’re over-charging”.

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I waited five minutes past our appointment before I called.

“My directors were down for lunch and I was inevitably delayed,” I said over the phone, after the crackling monotone on the other end projected a more human voice. Wait for it, I thought.

“But you were supposed to be here at 2.00pm and it’s 2.10 already!” he said. His voice was pitched high but thick, carrying a certain timbre. The inflection of his words felt accusatory, and I smiled. “I know,” I said, “and I’ll be there in 5 minutes, I apologize”.
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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.

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I’ve just got to blog about this today. It’s long, but abit of drama got lah. It began at 9.00 am, just barely after I checked in. I signed the register, part of the childish imperative of the higher-ups no doubt for keeping track of us worker bees. Anyway, not a minute after I settle down in my cubicle than I get the call: our morning appointment had arrived.

I got my boss (good boss, the friend boss) with whom I had worked a case. The details of the case itself must remain private for non-disclosure reasons, of course, but it’s nothing dramatic lah nothing hush-hush and definitely no national secret (you’d have gotten the point by now). The hush-hush bit about the case was the fact that we suspected foul play.
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You couldn’t pick a more melodramatic setting: by the light of a single table lamp, listening to Depeche Mode’s “Precious” on constant repeat, mulling over the events of the day and thinking of the allegorical implications of building construction.

A mite more pathetic than that character in Nick Hornby’s ‘About a boy’. That Hugh Grant whats-it vehicle. More like a moped on go-kart wheels.

Quite a bit happened in the morning which made me furious at the time, which only makes me feel sad and resigned. I’ll spare myself the details here, simply because there are none. I sat by my desk in utter incredulity. I’ve had it happen before, seen it happen before, but I couldn’t have imagined being a victim in my office.

So much the better, at least that peculiar illusion is now shattered.

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I was under the assumption that it would be war. I was assigned to a case for client I had previously dealt with, an assignment that ended up sour because the client wanted to keep more money to himself that was fair. (Fairness and money: disconnects?) I hunted down a probable saint and conned a car off of him, and I was soon on my way up north.

I had no lunch, no breakfast, and in a bad mood: I didn’t particularly like the client, and I didn’t particularly enjoy being part of a trussed up deal. Within minutes of our second meeting in 12 months I realized that was how this was going to play out. I couldn’t back out this time, and decided to wing it.
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A stick of dynamite everytime I blow up.

A fucking unconscienable comment, you bastard, that’s what it was: and you deserved every fucking word I dished out your way you bloody pint-sized goatfuck.

Right. If I had a therapist, she’d say “think happy thoughts, darling”, then flirt with me. My luck’s not going to change anytime soon, so I’d say counting to ten should’ve been a better option. I should’ve just reached out and showed him some love, fist-first. I mouthed off and walked away, instead. How much of a pussy am I now?
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The inevitability of it all caught me by surprise.

I suppose in every food chain, the higher you move up, the more you see. Or presume to see: let’s not be blinded by our own vanities, shall we? It becomes disorientating for a while, because there are so many viewpoints thrust upon you, apart from the new responsibilities that you found yourself shouldering quietly many months back suddenly accumulating into an almost apocryphal announcement.

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I was called in to the room today to discuss some work I was going to be doing on behalf of one of my bosses. It was just drudge work, and I knew it — but it was necessary, and the attention to detail required would mean I would be bogged down for many days. It’s extremely exhausting going through document after document and trying your darndest to determine if said documents were provided in good faith.

There was an argument about my involvement yesterday, but not the sort I would have fancied, really. It was over whether I really should be helping out. And that’s mostly because at this point in time, I feel like I’m snowed under a tonne of work. Fortunately, that argument was between my bosses, so I prefered not to get in the middle of things. I am currently carrying out some management work on behalf of one of my bosses, and that involves daily monitoring of some… duties. It’s not popular, and no one wants to do it, but I’ve found myself dragooned into it somehow.

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It could be a mistake to think so, but being offered money could be a pretext for more hanky-panky from connected Third Parties… it’s troubling to find out that I’ve become a target of such machinations. And not me only, but my other colleague as well.

This movie might describe my life at the moment.

The call came in about ½ an hour before 5.00pm from Kay. This evening. “The cash is in-” he said.

“What?” I said. I had worked up an active dislike for Kay. Kay: not his real name. Such consensual silence.

The setting sun shone harsh and saffron through the window, and the light made me frown. The heat on my skin was at odds with the air-conditioning, and the office was as quiet as ever.

“What was in?” I ask again, waiting for him to speak up.

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I once had the displeasure of dealing with a client, let’s call him SM, described as a ‘hard-nosed customer’. I don’t mean to sound elitist in what follows, so bear with me. It’s quite a long post, too.

SM’s “handlers” fear him, and when they speak of him, you can hear the strain on their voices; and I’m not just imagining things. This fella is what one would call a typical “bang-table” bastard. And that’s not all, minutes before my meeting with him, I was on the phone with one of his ‘handlers’:
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My Mandarin sucks ruthless ass, virtually non-existent and a joke.

That meant bringing a relatively new colleague along, for show and tell and a bit of info here and there; as it was generally an engineering job, I was sent along to watch over things. Let’s call him P. I arrive at work about 5 minutes shy of our agreed time, and shuffle off to Batu Pahat in my trusty Perodua steed. Being about 8 months old already, he was up for confirmation, and I thought he’d keep quiet about the lack thereof.
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