“Don’t Stop” by Red Hot Chili Peppers lends some mood to what could have been a sunny day… “The world I love, the tears I drop to be part of the wave, can’t stop. Ever wonder if it’s all for you? The world I love, the trains I hop to be part of the wave, can’t stop. Come and tell me when it’s time to…”
On Friday, I had enough of my firewall not behaving how it should, so uninstalled it. With a laugh, I proceeded to remove it from my computer. Little did I know it would be the firewall who had the last laugh. Upon restarting, I was greeted with a fully disfunctional desktop. Basically, no programs could be executed. I could only browse through the files on my hard drive. Now, this would be about as useful as an underwater hair-dryer and about as fun as watching paint dry. The firewall uninstallation went according to its own plan and had left my computer shafted, to put it bluntly. I had decided long ago that if anything like this would happen, I’d just format the drive and install Windows XP instead of 98 again. As I sat watching the format meter work its way up to 100% I thought of what it would be like to start afresh from scratch again. OK, it would have been more dramatic if I hadn’t partitioned my drive (and hence not lose all the files on my computer), but I wasn’t referring to starting afresh on the computer. I was referring to starting afresh with life. I thought of all the things I could have done differently and even after some moments pondering, all these things I would have done differently would still fit on the head of a pin. A really really tiny pin. My mum is a believer of karma; basically that what goes around comes around and that all our actions have repercussions in the future. Maybe I wouldn’t have done anything differently because I believe in karma too to an extent and think that things would have turned out differently for the worse. Or maybe it’s because the past is something I can’t change and hence not worth thinking about changing.
If you work in an office, you’re bound to hear some fantastic quotes and slips of the Freudian variety from people. On Thursday, I was quietly reading away other people’s accounts of dates from hell when I overheard “My Easter egg’s melted.” It’s Easter, you see, and our workplace gives out chocolate eggs to its employees. Everything from glorious white chocolate Kit Kat to Mini Eggs. This line was followed up shortly by, “They should make eggs that don’t melt,” which was met by sighs of “Duhhhhh!” from my corner. I was glad to be in the corner of the room, because I can overlook everyone else in my half of the room, plus the air-conditioning unit is right behind me and my team leader, S, is right next to me with numerous freebies from work cluttered on his desk and a stash of wine and chocolate underneath his desk. If a bomb were to land on the building and we were trapped in rubble, I’m sure his freebies and snacks could sustain me for a good week, buying time for my rescue team. For all these reasons, the corner we are in has been renamed “The Secret Agent Corner.” We basically sit there with our feet up, getting on with doing our work and just making sure no one else on the team goes slack and misses their targets. With my shoes off and my feet up, one hand holding a glass of ice chilled H20 and the other hand cradling the back of my head, I wonder how perfect it would be if I just had a box of Pocky and a cup of boba tea too. Ah, working life can be harsh.
S is quite the ladies man. He has one woman in his life who he refers to as his official girlfriend but then he also has a number of other women too, who all seem to be oblivious of the others. He hasn’t really divulged how many he has going at the same time, but it’s definitely more than 1! He’s actually a nice guy, but that cheating nature of his makes me dislike him somewhat. We had a chat about how he’s able to do that and the near misses (with the Missus) when he was nearly found out. One time, there was a girl in his bed and he was downstairs. His girlfriend came in, went to the kitchen and then left without going upstairs.
Me: So what would you have done if she went upstairs into your room?
S: She wouldn’t have.
Me: But what if she did. What would you say then?
S: I’ll just say she slept in my bed and I slept downstairs.
Me: But you’ve got another woman in the house!
S: It’s alright, she’ll understand.
Hmmm, I’m not so sure of that. I certainly know I wouldn’t let it go in her situation (If there was a naked woman in my girlfriend’s bed I’d be livid!). Surely his girlfriend must have some sort of idea about his womanising ways. I wonder how she’s able to really trust him. Being the type of person who would barely (excuse the choice of word) be able to look at another woman if in a relationship, I had to ask him how he was able to do what he does. Why does he need more than one woman? His answer: It’s not serious. It wouldn’t be so bad if his own girlfriend were doing the same thing, but he tells me that none of the women he sees know anything about the other women. So, even if it isn’t his official girlfriend who gets hurt, certainly the other women he sees stand to get hurt. Bizarre. I don’t understand how people can do that. I guess it’s the continuous thrill of the chase and people get their kicks anyway they can in the world. They should try Pocky. It certainly packs some kick.
After work, headed over to make an appearance at M who just lives around the corner from me and was having a barbecue. Had some interesting discussions about fighting and how the general concensus was that “women are worse than men” and that “drunk leary (sp?) girls is the devil.” Saw some of the footage that M shot from his trip to Amsterdam, which included a (clearly crazy) Chinese woman singing at the top of her voice on the street in her native tongue. The only English she seemed to know was “You give me Euro” (as in the currency, not the abbreviation of rock band “Europe”). Plus also some footage of 2 dogs doing the dirty and then another one joining in for a threesome. The camcorder footage was shakey during this part, accompanied with lots of trademark laughter from M, who has trouble keeping pale and quiet even when he sees 2 dogs going at it. Though funny and weird at the same time, I felt I really needed to go wash my eyeballs out with soap and water after seeing that. That was just wrong.
We looked through old photographs and amongst the guys there were debates over who the prettiest girl in the sixth form was, who the daftest was, etc. The pretty girl debate must have turned some cogs in M’s girlfriend’s mind because after that, she seemed to be really really curious about what guys thought about other girls. Throughout the evening, the other guys would throw in jokes such as “Oh, M didn’t you used to date her?” Now if M’s girlfriend believed these jokes everytime she heard them, M would be quite the hypothetical stud.
