Thursday, bloody thursday.....

Ain't it odd whenever you get up, its a thursday, and you wish it wasn't? If I were born as a day in the week, I'd really hate being Thursday.....or Monday for that matter. Thursday's always that pesky little day you have to get over to arrive at Friday, which is when the REAL party starts.

Honestly, I don't even know why we bother showing up for work on Fridays. No one gets anything done on Fridays, for the simple fact that our minds get into warp 9 from the word go and zooms right into the weekend leaving our bodies to go mouldy sitting down in the office.

Assessment day is over, thank goodness! One thing I've learnt from last night's assessment video.....NEVER, EVER watch yourself on playback when you record yourself. Its perhaps odd, but although I stand a pretty tall 6ft 3.5in, I've never seen the world as a small place where a person my size would dwarf anything. I mean, I used to drive a Kancil, for crying out loud, and I felt the car was perfectly fine. If you don't know what a Kancil is, well, picture a one-seater lawn mower with a roof and air-conditioning and you'd not be far off ;) But seriously, looking at myself on playback, the bike, itself a solid cast metal contraption standing at least 3 feet tall and weighing a good solid 75kilo's, looked like a kid's tricycle beneath me!

I was really touched though.....some members of my class who normally didn't attend my Wednesday classes took time off to head down to the gym just to give support to their gargantuan instructor for the night. Some of them I actually thought of as complete asses till last night.

Theres this one guy, Mr. X, who annoys me as much as flies do when you're trying to have lunch. The type thats loud, brash and smells oddly like durian even if you're 6ft away from him . If you wonder what Durians are, its a fruit revered here in Malaysia as the "King of Fruits", though a friend once put it quite aptly into descriptive words as "the best textured pudding eaten in a very badly kept toilet". He wasnt very far off, truth be told.


The offensive "King of Fruits"

But anyway, Mr. X actually took time off work, drove halfway across town and fought KL's infamous gridlock to get to class to show his support, though I thought his whole "thumbs up" action at the end of the assessment in front of the video cam was a bit OTT....;) But that kinda made me realise one thing - people you want to write off for the smallest faults often can surprise you in the biggest of ways.....

The opposite, of course, can be true as well, that of people you hold in high regard only to realise that they are complete asses.

Take one example - my Head of Dept.....popularly known as "Dufus" in my office. We had such high hopes for this man when he was hired to take charge of our department. That illusion however, was quickly shattered when he started snoring at his cubicle within the first week at work. I kid you not. The man had, somehow, somewhere, mastered the art of sleeping in vertical alignment on his office chair without keeling over. Thing is, if he limited that whole act to the office, it'd not be a problem, really....I mean, maybe the man has an over-active sex life (though if you looked at him you'd never believe it - he's best described as looking like a confused guppy at feeding time) and can't catch a wink of sleep at home, but noooo......the man has to fall asleep even when we're at meetings with clients! Its awfully humiliating to justify to clients why your boss is snoring during a meeting with the top management staff of the company present. Amused, they're certainly not. Neither are we......

In any case, getting back on track, we expected a whole lot from this man, who once owned his own firm prior to joining us here at the Firm (I capitalise this name, cos its very much like the movie namesake....once you sign up, you've sold your soul to the Devil). Let's just say that we were mildly dissapointed. OK...maybe not mildly. This is a man who claims that software can be patented, for crying out loud! In the US, maybe....but any first year law grad could tell you thats BS.....I think our clients realised that too....but despite our constant protestations to our senior partner about the state of stupidity that our head of dept is obviously a permanent resident of, he remains in the Firm.....and constantly makes life a living hell for all of us in the department.

If there's a bright side to all this, is the fact that we don't really see him much these days in the office. Marketing. What a convenient term for "I'm sleeping in late/going out for an extended lunch with friends". He often disappears for days on end, but really, I'm not one to complain. The less I see of dufus, the happier my life is in the office.......

Gloomy day again in KL.....haze is back and so is my sore throat....the day's only beginning. My body is here in the office, but my mind is really in bed, saturday morning, curled up in cold sheets kept icy cool by an air conditioner set at maximum chill....ahhh....now THATS life!


Kuala Lumpur's landmark obscured by the haze