I suddenly recalled of an incident…

It was circa 1992, while I was working as an intern during my school holidays for an advertising firm (called Libra), my colleague Johnson summoned me to the office to meet him there. Located 3 floors below the workshop (where I was working), I capered down happily into the office. Johnson was standing near the office entrance and then gave to me a bunch of documents. Note: my back was facing the entrance.

Johnson : “Hey Mike… can you get these documents to Miss Wong?”
[Johnson was my supervisor and a friend]

Me : “Sure dude. But I need to know who is Miss Wong first. I have no idea who she is. And also tell me, where to find her?”

Johnson : “You don’t know who is Miss Wong? Where have you been, kid? You remember that tall lady? The one with glasses?”

Me : “Hmmm… nope… that doesn’t ring a bell. How does she look like? Is she hot? heheh” *wink wink*

Johnson : “She’s the boss’s first wife… haven’t you seen her before? The one who sits at the 3rd floor office desk?”
[Believe me or not... the boss has 2 wives working in Libra... and they are not hostile towards each other]

Me : “Is it the one who always come up to our workshop? That skinny lady?”

Johnson : “Yes. That’s her. That’s the Miss Wong I’m talking about…”

Me : “Oooooh… that damn old hag is it? Why can’t you just describe properly next time goddamn it? Addressing her ‘Miss Wong’ is very misleading man… she’s so old, wrinkled and saggy like that. You should address her as Aunty Wong next time… Hahahh”
[I actually quoted 'see lau ee' in Hokkien - which literally translates to 'damn old hag']

Johnson was quiet and did not respond to me at all. His face was as livid as a fish’s belly and his cheeks were intermittently twitching. I initially thought that he must be having a spontaneous food poisoning or something (you know, shit happens). Or maybe he didn’t like my crude and derogatory remarks about Miss Wong, he must have liked her too much I guess. I was like staring at him for approximately 2 seconds. But he’d just stand there without saying a thing.

It was then, I realized that there was somebody standing behind me… because I could see Johnson’s eyes were fixated to something behind me. When I turned around expecting not the worst, I saw Miss Wong looking at me with a cold hard look. She was emotionless, you know, like she had a thousand thoughts running through her mind at that very second. Like a dog. What happened next was pretty blur to me. I kind of forgotten how I reacted but, it was pretty embarrassing.

I just remember that I immediately gave her the documents without saying a thing… and skedaddled the hell out of there, up a few flights of stairs to the workshop. In just 10 - 20 minutes, the news was widespread like a wild fire in workshop and the office. The fellowship of colleagues can be heard laughing like jackasses upon learning about the blunder I had… while I waited with bated breath for the worst to happen.

But it never happened. Miss Wong took it with such a steady sport. In matter of days, it was all forgotten and Miss Wong even treated me a great lunch when I left the company after the holidays. Maybe, Miss Wong wasn’t such a bad person I thought she was after all.

I had plenty of crazy and funny experiences during my employment at Libra. I would be blogging more about it under the title Libra : something

Many of my friends have been asking me… who will be your boss after Rob left? Not wanting to keep my friends and readers itching in suspense, I now have 2 new bosses. 1st - work boss, 2nd - administrative boss.

Work boss - the guy who needs to know every fuck I do at work. This includes my job scope and project for quarter/year and also my career development as an engineer.

Administrative boss - the guy who approves my annual leave whenever I don’t feel like working… and the guy who gives a shit about my welfare during working hours.

So, who’s my new boss?
My new work boss is Pete. If you can still remember, he is the same guy who organized the calamitous karaoke farewell for my ex-colleague CK. Pete is an ok guy… although he lacked of the intelligence to even know what exactly am I doing everyday. One thing I like about him is — he actually LISTENS whenever someone speaks. Now, that’s a very rare trait to be found nowadays. Another beautiful thing about Pete is, he’d approve anything that I pass to him, no questions asked.

My administrative boss is - unexpectedly - my colleague Kermit. Kermit is in his late 30’s and is a senior engineer. His pay is a few times higher than mine, so, he can be my boss.

How’s life after Rob left?
I hate to admit this but, it’s getting really boring for me and my colleagues after Rob left. As if we’ve lost a purpose in life… by losing a common object to hate at. We used to be able to vent all our anger and frustration by talking behind his back or laugh at his ass. But now that we’ve lost our dummy, our stress have nowhere to go. Rob is like the Japs in WW II that surrendered and ended the war. When the war ended, we start to become complacent and put on weight. Eventually, we’ll all be too fat to trim our own toe nails.

Same thing here. Rob’s departure made our brain too free from worries and lack of exercise. And eventually, our brains will all turn slow, rusty and infested by fungus. Seriously, I think I need to look for a surrogate for Rob’s position… else we’d risk of bringing down the whole chain of ecosystem…

I saw a documentary on Discovery today and just learned that a cockroach actually has 2 brains! If you flunked your math, let me shed some lights for you here - that’s 1 brain extra compared to us humans. Amazing… isn’t it? The ‘other’ brain is located at its ass. So… beheading a cockroach will not actually kill it… you will have to behead and ‘be-ass’ that fucker to be able to really kill it.

I didn’t know of anyone who has an extra brain but… I actually know someone with his brain located inside the ass like a cockroach - yes, as you may have guessed it correctly, he’s my ex-boss - Rob. To put it quite simply, my boss Rob is equivalent to a cockroach without a head! He’d be so thrilled to learn about that.

Yesterday, when the time approaches 4pm, the sky suddenly turned gloomy and dark. So dark that I thought there was an eclipse or something. And then all of the sudden, water started to jet down from the heavy sky. It rained cats and dogs. It was so heavy, that I reckoned that one would be stripped naked if exposed long enough under the rain.

At about 4.30pm, Rob came over to my cubicle to bid me farewell. He started by saying “Alright guys… all the best” and he then stretched out his cold skeletal hand for a handshake. Being a gentleman that I am, I replied while shaking his rotten hand “All the best to you too…”, rather insincerely. Deep inside my heart, I wanted this guy to flop bad and eat dirt. But that had to be veiled to preserve my integrity as a civilized person.

He looked particularly jolly at the final few minutes at the office. Everyone else looked happy too. He went around shaking everyone’s hand to say goodbye, like we all are going to miss him. Little did he know that it was quite the opposite. We’re all hoping that he’d get it all over soon and get the fuck out of there already. What a moron.

He finally left after about a good 25 minutes of drama later. And right after he left, I cited a poem out loud to my colleagues - in mandarin. (I know nuts about Mandarin… and has very little talent in poetry).

The air is so fresh [inhale a long deep breath]
The sun is so bright [looking and pointing out at the storm out there]
I feel like a newborn [looking at the office fluorescent light above]

Alright, it didn’t quite sound like a fucking poem. They didn’t rhyme and sounded damn spastic. But it did elevate some morale there… because I could see heads bobbing up from their respective cubes to check out who was citing a stupid poem in the middle of the office. I was greeted with laughters and cheers from them. But I know they weren’t laughing at my absurd poem. They were actually laughing that their nightmare was finally over and a new dawn has come.

At 5.20pm, I walked out from the office building feeling like a new person. On the way out, my friends shook my hand and congratulated me as if I’ve gotten a promotion. It was an unforgettable experience.

Weather - hazy.

Not sure why the weather was so hazy this morning. So bad that I can hardly see beyond 500 meters. Was it due to the massive burning at Indonesia again? Or could some kind of special effect of some spaceships that are going to land on Earth? I don’t know, and I don’t really care either. I only know and cared about one thing today — it was Rob’s last day!

Omg. I have waited for this for so long. That festering undead boss of mine is finally leaving us for good! I will be celebrating this tonight with a grand dinner. Well, the dinner’s not really organized in conjunction of Rob’s departure but… I’d be happy to celebrate for that reason. A celebration of freedom.

So what makes me hate my boss so much? Many reasons, people. I’ll try to summarize them up into a few vital points for you people to understand…

The Look
- He’s an emaciated shit. God he’s so fucking thin that I could break his arms with my bare hands. And yet, he would boast about having a black belt in karate, and being the fittest. Black belt my foot.

- He’s fucking ugly. If it isn’t for the limbs to hint us that he is actually human, one might easily mistaken him for some kind of overgrown mutated parasite that has crept out of a very sick buffalo’s anus. He once tried to pick up our admin girl, asking her out for a date or something… The girl bluntly cut him off and said “You don’t even qualify the smallest fraction of my lowest acceptable requirements”. Like my friend Alvin quoted : “He is a person that only his own biological mother will love.” An eyesore to the public. An organic mistake. A total disaster.

The Brain
- He has an IQ less than 50. Anything less than that, he will not be able to tell the difference between a rock and a dog. There was once he asked me to analyze a piece of cracked LCD display after he deliberately dropped it onto the floor. I had to explain to him the nature of fragile materials vs. gravity — that they will actually break if you drop it from a certain height (eg. drop a wine glass on the floor and it will break). But still, he couldn’t figure it out and kept asking me “Why it broke? Please investigate and give me a report”. I did the report anyway - but it consisted only a couple of short sentences — “LCD panel cracked due to it’s fragile nature. Root cause was due to someone dropping it onto the cold hard floor”. He bought off the report.

- He is slow. Whenever he is in a meeting, he will always ask a lot of incoherent questions. When someone shoots him a sarcastic reply, he will not notice it and nor feel embarrassed about himself. He’s simply, too simple and dumb. A good example would be the mineral water incident. A dimwit he is.

The Demeanor
- He is a sycophant. He likes to jack up his boss’ balls up to the chin and is his pet cocksucker. Shoe polishing is his strongest trait. He doesn’t give a shit if anyone thinks of him lowly… the most important thing for him is to keep his boss happy.

- Rob is a hypocrite. He knows nothing about the thing he does but likes to act as if he’s the smartest person in the company. Example: He once asked me if an oscilloscope could point out the root cause of a product failure (I’ve written about it before). If you do not know how stupid is this, then imagine if a hammer can churn out a suspension bridge. It’s just a tool, you tool.

Alright, I believe that will be enough for anyone to have an inkling on what kind of person Rob is. So I hope this justifies my hatred for him. If you don’t feel the same way like I do already, then it’s too bad for you. You’re probably another asshole like him. A social garbage. A cancer of humanity. A dent on a paint job. A scratch on a CD. Whatever.