Office musings

sayonara to the idyllic slow mornings of january. i've hit the ground running the past couple of days at work, and now i'm taking a deep breath before i plow into some more work.

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there is nothing more nerve-wracking panic-inducing fun and exciting than coming to work and seeing, first thing in the morning, a loooong string of emails originating from the boss of all bosses, trickling through pretty much all of our clients and all of their flunkies, down to my boss, and finally coming to rest in my inbox to be implemented, like, now na.

or so i thought.

because my boss gave me a gigantic farking whopper of a surprise in the evening. it was such a shock that immediately afterwards, i repaired to mcdonald's to stuff myself with grease -- despite being on the home stretch of my two-week south beach diet.

i must say, chomping on twister fries does great things for one's anxiety.

the surprise? let's just say i'm going to be working extra hard, starting monday.

--

speaking of really, really bad days, a man tried to commit suicide near my office this morning. rather, he climbed up on the billboard scaffolding mounted to the top floor of the mrt station right outside my building.

thing is, the roof of the station is barely a storey below the scaffolding. so if he had jumped, he wouldn't have splattered all over edsa and died. he would have just had a really bad accident that he'd have to live with for the rest of his life -- assuming that he wouldn't try to end it again soon after.

many of us gathered round the picture windows calling "advice" to the beleaguered figure: "mapipilayan ka lang!" "hindi ka mamamatay niyan, ang baba-baba!" "akyat pa!" from a distance, it was almost comical.

but they showed him on the news tonight. he was a thin man in a red t-shirt and denim shorts, with salt-and-pepper hair and stringy calves. i didn't catch the news commentary, but i saw him coming down from the scaffolding, and then facing the cameras with his head in his hands, sobbing.

then all of a sudden it didn't seem funny anymore. i was suddenly glad he hadn't gone up any higher on the scaffolding, and that he had chosen not to die.

or maybe he had already made his choice not to die when he settled on the lower rungs of the scaffold. maybe he just needed his story to be told. we all need that, sometimes.