Life, Laughter and Everything Else

 "An end of an era", as my colleague aptly put it. It surely felt like it. After almost 3 years of memories, the occupants of the tiny office in Hackesher Markt were to be moved to one of the big, gleaming company offices, like chess pieces in the game of capitalism. After 3 years we would all start on our own ways, an eventuality we all knew was coming, just not on such a short notice. At a corporate level, such a move produced all the right words that provided visibility and hopefully a promotion and an office with a view for someone; strategic resource redistribution, cost optimisation etc etc. Though to the ones parting, that little office was one of the few solaces in this rat race. It had offered friends in the place of politically correct colleagues, it had offered juicy gossip, offered an avenue to let out all the frustration around toxic bosses and meaningless tasks, offered song and laughter at the expense of each other and the neighbors next door. It had offered co...

I remember that Friday evening, fresh into my job, my manager unloading a multitude of tasks on me at the last moment while she quietly made her exit. Sitting there raging over my situation, I had came to a conclusion that perhaps Singapore was not the place for me. The country somehow seemed to possess a backwardness in thought that did not sit well with my ethos and I started making plans for my own exit. Almost 5 years later, that Friday would repeat. About to wrap up a rather tiring week, out of the blue, my Manager would assign an 'urgent' task without any justification whatsoever, a task that had me raging as it would have me chasing people I have never met to provide me information as soon as possible though I had little authority over these people, which ranks among my least favourite activities. Though this time I was no longer in Singapore but all the way in Berlin, Germany, a country that I had chosen for its reputation as respecting an employees boundaries. However ...

I am in the middle of negotiating a promotion at work. Being one of the longest serving members of the team with a record of having delivered results and having handled my whole process without any backup, I went in with what I felt was a good justification for a bump in my position. Alas, the person I was talking to was yet another new face, the 7th Manager I had in nearly 2 years. The poor soul had not the least idea what my past achievements were (and probably neither what my job was) and he came up with a development plan that would allow me to get that bump. In other words, he decided to buy some time. I was enraged. While other less experienced colleagues had bosses who pushed for their promotion without asking them to get on any plans, or in some cases, got promoted by pulling the right strings, here I was being cast aside like a fly. Day and I night, I raged about it, insulted, hurt, depressed by this treatment that I felt was the most unfair. Talking about it would disrupt a d...

It would happen in a moment. A conversation that was going fluently would come to an abrupt end and be replaced by another that was familiar yet foreign. I would feel totally lost, unsure how to reinsert myself into the conversation, how to pick it up again. Meanwhile they would continue blabbering away in their mother tongue, effectively excommunicating me from the liveliness. The sense of loss would turn towards anger against the newcomer. Though I should have been used to it by now. In Singapore, experiences like this was quite common. Being a minority, one tended to be forgotten as colleagues and friends would switch to Chinese and I would sit there at a loss for words. Some friends would sympathise and ‘switch to Channel 5’ (an English speaking television channel and the term used to refer to a request to speak English). Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not, for all needed to agree to this. Interestingly, it was not just Indian friends who would complain about being lost...

Change is hard, all the more when one is very comfortable with the present. Family, friends, job, security and the time to pursue my hobbies, I had everything here with me. But I felt discomfort in the comfort, for comfort rarely taught a man anything. Going through 2 years in the army, spending extended time away from loved ones in Houston, the phases of my life I experienced the most pain, those were the experiences that shaped me and made me better. So I decided to uproot myself, thousands of miles away for a couple of years, where I would be by myself and less protected, for the sake of putting myself through that discomfort. Something about it did not make much sense, Why volunteer to go through pain when you have happiness at your doorstep? Besides, what about the opportunity costs? 2 years of lost incomes, savings withdrawn to the point of exhaustion, a Masters that might not amount to anything. And so on and so forth. Though it somehow occurred to me that my concerns w...

I believe it was George W. Bush (of all people), who once said, that an accountability system without a consequence is not an accountability system. Not that I would profess to be a fan of his, but as Trump replied on when asked if he wanted to be associated with a fascist because he quoted Mussolini, 'No I do not want to be associated with Mussolini but I wanted to be associated with interesting quotes". Though before I get off topic as I regularly do of late, I felt it was worth sharing a type of technique that I had tried out to achieve a couple of my long due goals and maybe explore the psychology behind why it worked. I cannot recall how the idea came into my mind (perhaps during one of the long wannabe-meditative walks that ends up with a well crafted story of how I was actually a secret superhero about to wreak vengeance on all the bad guys in the world). The method was simple. Get a group of friends and every friend in the group had to set a goal, that was to be appr...

The first guy handled the machine, which was one of those bulky yet somewhat cool contraptions you saw cleaners in shopping centres use to sweep and mop the floor. He held the two handles by the side while it rotated in small circular motions on the marble floor without stop, making it a shade shinier with each rotation. The second guy, well, he held the door open while the first one completed the task, which was interesting because I had before seen lift doors held open by slotting a thick folded paper strategically between the doors. But for some reason, that did not seem applicable for this lift. Then there was the last guy, obviously the supervisor, given his skin tone was a lot lighter than the other two, who kept barking out instructions. Three guys, just to polish a marble floor about 2 metres by 2 metres. This was the sight that greeted me when I came back home after a year long stay in the US, which involved a project to do more work with less people ie productivity improvem...

13 hours, 5 days in a row.The idea used to be an anathema to me and yet here I was, slogging away from 730 to 830, until when the last of the never ending urgent reports were done, I grabbed my bag and made for the exit. The sticky note on my table at home displayed in cursive, hastily written what was to be done if I had reached home at 8. 8:00 - 8:30 Exercise 830 - 9:00 Shower, eat 9:00 - 9:30 Excel/VBA 9:30 - 10:00 Write 10:00 - 10:30 whatever And then sleep. Now I reached home at 9:15 with just about enough time to have dinner, make some polite conversation with my parents and head to bed before waking up the next day and repeating the whole routine again. There was either not enough time, energy or the will to exercise, learn, reflect or even just water the garden. Not that this left me depressed. Work was engaging that the hours flew by, and after a period of prolonged unemployment, I was just thankful I had it. Though, somewhere in the deepest recesses of my hea...

I had to go back to work on a Sunday. For 4 hours, to solve some technicality issue that a colleagues was neither qualified nor had a pay grade high enough to solve. In normal circumstances, this would have been painful, the time meant for leisure being spent at work. But the pain was eased. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "100 dollars in the bank", I boasted. Easy money. They concurred, for they did not enjoy the luxury of overtime."Like that, not bad lar", they affirmed my statement, my opinion. Of course, I was paid for what they did for free. My time was not wasted. Because they paid me 25 dollars an hour. "I do OT daily. Go to work an hour early and there is enough work for me to stay an hour more later", I claim proudly. "Your treat today man!", they respond, hoping, only to see their hopes dashed by my own stinginess. The more you have, the less you become willing to share it. The greed to accumulate, not that it made me s...

"I want to go into supply chain. Work for the next two years. Apply for a Masters in Germany and work there. Probably get married slightly after that."  Like Mao, so was my grand 5 year plan. Though, on one of my rare strolls, I peered at this plan more closely. Where did it come from? 2 years ago, sitting in an office was an anathema to me. Formal long sleeve shirts were the last thing I wanted to wear and the fatigued, emotionless smartphone addicted employee returning to his home the last thing I wanted to look like. As I left my part time work today, after hours tidying up slides according to the liking of my boss who, despite my insistence, still stuck to his concept of cramming words onto the slides, I felt like them, tired. (Just during lunch earlier, I had come across a young entrepreneur, who smiling with a cigarette between his fingers, complained how one was always too tired to do anything by the time one reached home. A uniquely Singaporean experience, he h...

My left hand lies curled in a tight fist between my thighs, while the right presses stiffly against the coarse leather of the steering wheel, bearing the burden of the task. Though to call it a burden would be an overstatement of an activity that once gave me a sleepless 23 hour flight but now bordered on mindlessness. Now, being on the that road, at that time, when even the sun was too lazy to rise from its sleep, was second nature to me. Thoughts raced through my mind, thoughts about the destination I was headed to. The bulk of them recollected old frustrations and the remainder imagined new ones. My left fist curl tighter as I sped ahead in the air conditioned cocoon. I try to keep to the right of the two lanes as I drove, quasi subconsciously,  at 60 miles per hour on a a 65 mile per hour lane, which still had an additional legally tolerable 10 mile per hour buffer. Lost in my unending imaginings, I stay at that speed until an even slower traveler in front jerk me i...