Unbreakable

I rolled my feet several times over the weekend (not on purpose and not at the same time) but amazingly I away away from the experience with nary a sprain. First time I rolled a foot was during a squash game on Saturday and I rolled the other foot a couple of times after. To my surprise I didn’t feel any pain in my ankles. Then on Sunday, I rolled my foot when I landed wrongly after a smash (don’t get excited, I can’t do really smashing smashes) during a badminton game. I almost fell to the ground but luckily, I kept my footing. I felt pretty sure that the landing was a bad one. I thought I got myself a sprain. I gingerly rotated my ankle and was pleasantly astonished to find no pain whatsoever. Though I didn’t really want to be injured, I would’ve welcomed an excuse to get off work. Yeah, it all boils down to that. Too bad I seem to have become unbreakable over the weekend.

Easter Surprise

I had one of the most ridiculous arguments with my boss last Thursday. What complicated it was that it was over the phone because he was working from home in anticipation of the public holiday. We were working on the financials of a new product and he was arguing that the profit margin should be lower. I kept telling him that the effect the new product would be for lower spending customers to substitute the new product for the old. The higher spenders would continue buying the older product resulting in the higher profit margin. However, he would listen. He wanted me to subtract something, add something and multiply something. I don’t really remember the specifics but I do remember that it made absolutely no sense and I didn’t sugarcoat my disagreement. I said that what he wanted wouldn’t work but I would do an analysis and send it along in a few minutes. This was at five thirty and the next day was a public holiday.

I quickly put together something simple and direct in a spreadsheet and sent it off in an email. As I log off from my desktop, the phone on my desk rang. I ignored it and walked out the office door. The next day was a holiday. I knew it was probably bound to bite me in the ass but I didn’t want it to affect my four-day weekend. I put the whole incident out of my mind so I wasn’t expecting what happened this morning. When my boss arrived, first thing that he said was that I did a good job the previous Thursday. He said he had been looking at it from the wrong angle and that my spreadsheet helped him see the right angle. Sometimes the win comes when you least expect it and I’ll take whenever I can be it big or small.

Sad Tidings

Sad tidings on what is supposedly a day of good tidings. Just got home from dinner and as is my habit I checked my email. The top message proclaimed sad news. The seven year old daughter of a friend suffered a cardiac arrest due to a rare viral infection. It’s beyond my comprehension how something like this can happen on this particular day. I am not a parent but I know that I cannot imagine what kind of grief my friend and his wife must be going through. Please say a prayer for Niña and her parents.

Earplugs Please

One of these days I just might strangle my blithering idiot of a boss. Yes, he’s a blithering idiot! He talks half of the time and more than half of it is nonsense.

So here’s what happened.

The blithering idiot asks me to do some analysis. I do the spreadsheet and after I’m done he asks me to take him through it. He keeps interrupting with question and he never gets the flow of the equations. The blithering idiot complains that what I did was not useful for his purposes. At this point I excuse myself and say that I need to go have lunch. I say that the file is saved on the server if he wants to work on it. I needed to cool off and lunch was the quickest excuse that I could think of.

When I get back from lunch, I find the blithering idiot working on the spreadsheet. He stops for five minutes to give me something else to do. Five minutes after I start working, he calls me over to ask for help on the spreadsheet. I am trying to figure out how he’s equations flow in order to get the number that he wants. He blithers on about how the data is not right, about how I did it wrong, about how he can’t do everything himself and about how I should be picking up the slack. I could have grabbed my chair right then and smacked him over the head with it but instead I grab the mouse and the keyboard and entered a few equations into the spreadsheet.

He takes a look at the spreadsheet again and declares that it’s going to work after all. He takes a look at one of my equations and says that it’s wrong. He changes it and result is wrong. He tries a variety of equations that are all wrong. Ultimately, he ends ups with my original equation with some of the items switched around. His self congratulatory blithering makes me want to hurl but I manage to resist pointing out that it’s my original equation anyway.

I go back to my computer to continue the stuff that I was working on. The blithering idiot then asks me how I’m doing on the work that he assigned. I was talking to you, I deadpan.

I swear, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Burn Out

Be careful what you wish for. Taking too long to adjust. Spoiled rotten by jobs that didn’t require too much thinking. Still enjoying it but it gets exhausting. Brain might start working again in a year or so.

Shot And Shot Back

I am totally exhausted and quite bruised and battered. I think that’s what four hour of paintball will do to you. It wasn’t exactly four continuous hours but still, it’s freakin’ exhausting. And those paintballs hurt leavings marks from light bruises to welts depending on how far away it was fired. And I got hit, not as much as some but I think it was a lot. I hate those freaking teenagers. Going all Rambo and just wasting their bullets by just firing everywhere and firing up really close (that really hurts and leaves a really round welt). Getting hit is not the only thing causing all the hurt. All that running and crouching and kneeling take their toll on the legs and knees. After all that, the only reward you get is seeing a couple of your paintballs make contact and splat onto someone’s camouflage jumpsuit. Okay, so I had fun. Can you blame me?

Kaboom!

So they fired up the large hadron collider. Supposedly, it will help scientists understand the secrets of the big bang. For some reason, it conjures science fiction-y images of a technician accidentally leaning on a button and starting the universe. Of course that would also mean the end of our universe. Is that what they call a paradox?

Fling Into Something

My curvy new fling is a demanding mistress. She demands that I must always hold her in my arms. In the beginning my hands and fingers were clumsy causing her to make annoyed noises. I began to think that I might have to give her up but it’s a good thing that in the age of the internet it’s possible to learn things you wouldn’t normally learn from the person next door. So I learned how to hold her and my fingers began working a bit of magic and we started making music together. It’s not always beautiful but my hands are still learning and little by little they are learning the right way to stroke her.

Only now the problem is that she’s becoming more demanding. She sits at home waiting for me at night. When I get there, her mere presence draws me in and I am powerless to resist. I hold her in my arms and my fingers move. Time passes and before I know it, midnight has come and gone and I have to sleep for morning will inevitably arrives in a few hours and with it the responsibilities of reality. When I wake up she is there demanding that my hands continue their learning and foolish me just follows her wishes. An hour passes before I realize that I have to go and work but I am still reluctant to leave.

All day in the office all I think about is coming home at night and continuing my learning with my hands. I’m beginning to think that this is turning into something more than just a fling.