Busybodies at Work

All right, I do realize that my blog has started to spawn flies after lying unused for almost two months.

The truth is, ever since school started again, I have been so busy that all my days and nights just seem to blend into one phantasmagorical landscape. It’s a lot worse this semester because I have more assignments than ever before – 11 in total. And they are all 2,500-word essay-type assignments that are incredibly research-heavy and require the usage of maybe 8 different books and journals. That’s a conservative estimate, by the way.

In consequence, the bibliography is enough to kill me. I can literally spend 4 hours just doing the bibliographies for my assignments.

The good thing (or bad, depending which way you look at it) is that time really flies. It seems like only yesterday when I was staggering around half-drunk in Butter Factory celebrating my birthday and before I really noticed it, 3 months have gone by.

The speed at which my days are flashing past me is so incredible, it scares me at times. But at the same time, it exhilarates me because my days are packed full and every day brings something new and interesting to do.

I thought life was going to get dull after my favourite colleague C left for another job that is paying him frigging twice the amount he was getting in our company. C is my favourite because he is a real clown and constantly makes me laugh. I’ve lost count of the amount of times we have lunch or dinner together where he tells us funny stories that make us laugh so hard we have to clutch our aching stomachs.

We had a farewell dinner for C at Brazil 2 weeks ago, where C and I gorged our way through chunks of fresh lamb, beef, chicken and the to-die-for buttered salmon. As you can probably tell by now, the both of us are the best people to bring along to buffets because we’d make sure we get our money’s worth and more besides. Jess and our other colleague J were there as well, but J has always had a small appetite because he is a scrawny bamboo pole of a guy and Jessie was rather off-colour that day appetite-wise.

As usual, C kept all of us entertained throughout the night with his stories. That dude is one of the most crazy and colourful characters I’ve ever met. He’s my little ray of sunshine indeed (that’s what I used to call him). Which is why I thought work was going to get boring without him.

But far from being boring, everything exploded in a scandal of Hiroshima proportions that kept us and the bosses talking for weeks. What happened was probably the biggest scandal ever in the history of our rather stodgy company.

Two days after C left, I got called into our big boss’s office by my supervisor, who is my sort of “small” boss. I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary at first because it’s normal in my office to have these little meetings between the big and small bosses regarding one account or another. I just assumed we were going to talk about some upcoming contract renewals.

But when I entered the office, I saw Mr. Incompetent, who is also C’s small boss, sitting there looking grim. And I knew immediately it was not going to be good because Mr. Incompetent deals with a totally different aspect in the company; he is not involved with our end at all.

So they sat me down, and with all 3 bosses facing me, they informed me (rather gleefully, I might add) that after C left, they had accessed his email inbox and found all the emails between him and the rest of our group of colleagues. AND they had found all the personal emails between me and him only – all 400-plus of them. AND they had gone to the trouble of retrieving the emails he deleted.

Needless to say, they now had a birds’ eye view of what was going on in our personal lives, our gripes about our professional lives, and perhaps worst of all, they’d found all the insults hurled at Mr. Incompetent.

Try “gold-digging bald gorilla”, for a start. But in all fairness, Mr. Incompetent IS bald, and he digs his nose all the time. AND then flicks his nice ripe boogers onto the carpeted floor.

So the inquisition began.

“What was C so unhappy about? Are you unhappy about anything? Why did C say this in this email? Why did you say that in that email?”

I crossed my legs languidly and leaned back in my chair with my arms folded across my chest, looking to all the world like the perfect picture of innocence and insouciance – but in fact I’d folded my arms because I wanted to hide the trembling of my hands. I don’t believe my mind has ever worked so fast before, as it whizzed and whirled and twisted, all my synapses firing at full throttle and my neurons flying from axon to axon, while I spoke calmly, clearly, coolly, and concocted plausible and nice-sounding explanations for C’s conduct and the contents of our emails.

The bosses seemed satisfied by that, though I’m not certain that I did pull the wool completely over their eyes. But nevertheless, they said they accepted my explanations and they would leave it at that since “C has already left us”. But they would be “monitoring” all of us from now on – meaning our entire gang who was involved in this email shit (though none of them got called up but me because C and I had the most email conversations going).

So I thought that was that, when the bosses changed tack and started telling me how they look upon me as a “little sister” that they “care about”, and so because of that they are concerned with the company I am keeping.

Small Boss went so far as to tell me that if I “hang out with negative people, all my relationships will be negative” and I won’t get a “good guy”. This was followed by Mr. Incompetent telling me that they only “want the best for me” and that I need to be careful when choosing a guy for myself. Then Small Boss chipped in again saying that they think I need to get a good Christian boy who will share the same values as me since I’m Catholic.

I was a little confused. What did my personal choices in men have to do with this email stuff?

Then I figured – they thought I was in some sort of relationship with C, based on the emails we’d sent each other. Which could not be further from the damn truth! But what was worse was the fact that these people went through and read my highly personal emails and then attempted to give me advice on something they know nuts about and which they got all wrong anyway!

I didn’t tell them they were wrong though. I smiled, nodded and asked them bluntly if they were saying such stuff because they were worried I’d be negatively influenced by C.

They looked shocked that I was so quick on the uptake (like, duh) and began protesting vigorously. “No of course not!” “We’re only advising you because you’re like a younger sister to us!” “No that’s not what we mean at all!”

“Well, good,” I told them. “Because if I was so easily influenced I’d have left along with C.”

The bosses had the grace to look a little uncomfortable as they exchanged shifty looks with each other. But then again, that was that and I didn’t really care what they thought. I got the feeling they were being kaypoh and trying to dig information about what was really going on between C and me but I refused to give them anything to feed on.

Let them keep guessing. That’s what livens up their mundane working days anyway.