Things I do for performance bonus...

Hi all!



Sorry for the late updates, been terribly busy working. Right now damn stressed in work, ie. u know the term ‘pao suah pao hai’?


It’s Hokkien for ‘cover mountain, cover sea’. I’ve been tasked to do everything from teaching, coordinating, babysitting, modifying, to even the occasional courier service to shuttle a thumb drive between 2 lecturers who are too busy to meet each other to exchange said important information. I think it never occurred to them to mix business with pleasure, becos they lunch together everyday and sneak out during work hours to lim kopi together. How I know? Because they were always both never around when I need to look for them urgently.


So 1 lecturer took the energy to first send me an email asking to meet me in his office ASAP, so off I ran, wondering what emergency had befallen, but mostly wondering if I did something wrong.


I was also grumbling a bit, because he was on the 7th floor and I was in the lab on the 1st.


When I got there, panting, it struck me that ASAP apparently did not apply to him, becos he then proceed to make me wait 15min for his Majesty to chat animatedly away on the phone while I lingered, before finally setting me a task to retrieve valuable data from lecturer no. 2.


I was like, huh? Cannot do himself ah? But being a nice and above all, newbie, I shut my small but immensely powerful egg-cussing mouth and agreed sweetly. Since my experiment was to be boiled for a further 5 min, I decided I shall just make a quickie to lecturer no. 2, since he must be expecting me now. So, fast as lightning (about 1km/h)… I left his Majesty to cross the concrete plains to the next building, up 3 floors and knocked on lecturer no. 2’s door, panting heavily.


Oh, Damn! The frigging Prof was on the phone too! When I went in anyways, he gave me the finger - the all-important 1 single chao finger up in the air….


……indicating ‘a moment pls.’…….. (hands up for those who thinks otherwise …tsk tsk…)


I saw that crusty dirty finger full of cookie crumbs from the packet of Oreos he had been handling and tried damn hard to keep my own hands from forming another even more chao-er finger back at him.


I failed. But to my credit, I gripped my wayward hand behind my back to hide it. On the other hand, anyone passing by the window of the office shall witness a rude gesture being directed at them unknowingly…


Peace, I tell myself, and imagined my experiment shrinking in size from too much heat and the lab going up in flames ….


But a further 15 min of chit-chat on the phone hearing the one-sided conversation only made me more incensed…. Guess who was on the line? L no. 1! Who called to ask if I was already there, then started a small little conversation while I strained to keep my forehead unlined and to put my ears on high alert for sirens going off in the distance….


L no. 2 finally deigned to honour my presence with a slow click of the phone in the receiver only when I started fidgeting rudely, tapping my feet.


He turned to me and asked, ‘how may I help you?’


I stared back at him, speechless….


Then ‘Sir, if you don’t mind, Prof XXX, whom u were talking to just now, asked that I collect the data from you pronto.’


And he bloody feigned a look of pleasant surprise!


‘Oh! So he was talking about you?! My apologies….now let me see…where is the data…’


I was hopping around like I needed to find a bush while he slowly rummaged through his PC opening folders after folders to find the cause of all my troubles….


‘Yes! Found it! You have a flash drive?’


‘What?!’


‘A flash drive, girl, don’t tell me you don’t use it.’


I massaged my temple to give me an excuse to look away from him and to give me time to cool down…


‘You chao bugger Sir, the other chao buggerr Prof XXX said u are passing me a diskette.’


‘Oh boy, I’m afraid I have none….. Are u ok?’


‘F…no, sir, I’m not OK, I seem to be getting a headache. Stoopid Chao Buggers Running fast does that to me sometimes.’ I massaged harder to keep from spilling more words than I had to.


‘Oh dear, I should get my head checked if I were you.’


‘Yes, you would, you KNN Chao Bugger sir.’ I gave a small squeak at my audacity, but the rejoiner flew pass his head and placidly out the window.


Thankfully, after 5 minutes of rummaging through his piles of papers, stuffed animals, seashells and insects, he dug out a flash drive with an exclamation. By then, I also realised that L2 is not exactly a bad prof, just helpless. I watched him struggle with the simplest task of transferring the word document into his flash drive and offered some tips.


‘No, sir, just drag, sir. Don’t open it, sir!’


‘Wait! Don’t pull it out yet, have to stop it first….


All the while, he thanked me profusely. I wondered how he had been teaching his modules….


I said like 5 ‘welcomes’ and quickly let myself out of the room…and ran like a crazy rabid woman to save my experiment….


Eventually, the data was duly delivered to L1, who without the same incompetence, speedily transferred it onto his own desktop. I was on a warpath and feeling really upset over the experiment, which had turned into an overboiled lump of hard resin. I was ready to leave his room when the bastard called out,


‘Kueh, u can have this back.’


Taking an enormous breath, I turned around very slowly to give my Cool time to catch my running Temper. A mantra of Performance bonus! Performance bonus!! Performance bonus! Dooonnnggg! *temple gong* Managed to infinitesimally twitch the ends of my lips into a teeth-flashing grimace.


‘Bugger no. 2 Sir?’ *Through gritted teeth*


‘Pls take this flashdrive back to Prof YYY.’


‘Yessir. &%$#@#$ ’


And I managed to close the door without slamming it.



As you can see, there are no eggs being mentioned in this entry…because I’m sure they wont just be smelly already….more like extinct, the way I imagined them to be thrown onto Lecturer no. 1…



Later, L2 would have had heard a series of thumps right outside his wall. If he'd bothered to walk out and check, he would have noticed a few new dents on his newly installed blackboard....


Reason being, all them eggs in the world won’t be enough…


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I shall be damn busy the next few weeks trying to keep my temper down, so early apologies if there’s no updates and if I’ve not been visiting u guys! Sorry sorry!


Out!


Akk