Closure
Marnee shuffled into my cubicle and kept looking over her shoulder. "She's resigning."
"Who is?" I said. My fingers froze in mid-air while I was typing on my laptop. The campaign report, the most urgent thing I needed to get done, had to wait.
"Dense is."
"... Oh."
"You're shocked."
"I didn't think it would be today. I never thought the day would come."
Marnee, nonplussed, sat her self down on one of two sleek visitor chairs. She straightened the pile of unchecked color-proofs on my table. "You're forgetting. We've all been wanting her to find' a better home' outside. If she stayed any longer, the flagship category is going to self-destruct."
She's right. We had been whining about Dense's perpetual absences, the cause of which we surmised to be her flight-not-fight syndrome. She had always found a way to vanish when dark clouds from the markets appear, leaving her two direct reports desperately running for shelter.
"How did you know?" I asked.
"The Queen herself told me, right after meeting her for some admin stuff. You know, she looked pretty relieved when she told me. I guessed she was glad she didn't have to play Donald Trump with Dense's
pasaway attendance. Dense is talented when it comes to wheedling her way out of things. As for her resignation, I don't think anybody else knows. Although I think I saw Dense talking to her people about her decision to quit a while ago."
Suddenly my evil self was glad Dense was going, short of screaming "Yahoo!" but the angel on my shoulder slapped me so hard, saying I shouldn't rejoice at other people's misery, even if they were people I didn't like.
"Changes things, doesn't it?" said Marnee, who by now was fixed on the colorproof on the table, circling the unsightly flaws on the model's neck with my blue art pen.
"Come to think of it, with her gone most of the time," I pondered, "I don't think it does."
Marnee looked up from the proof and nodded.
Labels: employees, office politics
Remembering
Three years ago, tsunamis swept away thousands of lives off the shores of Asia.
May they always be remembered.
(Photo taken by one of our campaign planners while we were in Krabi, which is very near Phuket, one of the hardest hit towns in Thailand.)
A Rotten Tomato in the Queen's Garden
"I got your present," I said to Marnee. She gave me strawberry and mint flavored condoms. "Red and green. Perfect for the holidays."
"Sorry I couldn't get you the ribbed ones. Store ran out. I know how much you love them."
"Loka loka." And threw her a crumpled ball of paper. Monito monita ended days ago, but Marnee was still in the mood for giving away naughty presents. Yesterday she sent old Jonders from accounting a big can of whipped cream. Marnee had meant it to mean something else -- but Jonders? Jonders just thought that Nestle All Purpose was still the best for fruit salad.
"So, you think Dense is going to get anything?" Marnee picked up the big boxed gift on my table. It was from one of my planners. I kinda guessed it was a memo pad.
"I don't know," I said. Dense was almost always in our conversations lately. The reason we called her Dense was because everybody in the team, except Sts. Agnes and Jane from CategMan, hated her to pieces. She acts like she doesn't know. We all wanted her to "move on" to another line of work, like organic farming.
Marnee rolled her eyes up. "I can't understand why the Queen hasn't
let her go like she did to Charms. Charms was ineffecient, but not thick. At least she knew she wasn't wanted. She resigned the moment she felt it. Poor girl." We called our big boss the Queen, and that's because she went about our day to day speaking with a genuine English accent. We loved her for it. We pretended we were in some bizarre sitcom spinoff.
"The Queen must be biding her time. You can't fire someone like Dense just like that. You have to have grounds for it."
"But duh? She's got grounds since two years ago. Let's list them, shall we? Half a year's worth of absence without leave, lying about her leave, shirking reports, shirking strategy creation, shirking execution, lying about her neck condition, lying about her hepatitis, going on trips while her staff groped about operational stuff, and yes, lying lying lying. The biggest category in the company is going to suffer with her leading it. She has no leadership to speak of. Bah, Aling Josie could do a better job e!"
"You've really got it going, Marnee. Keep it cool," I said. Aling Josie was the cleaning lady.
"Hey. You were angrier over Dense than I'll ever be. "
"That's true." Months ago, I took Dense's favorite fountain pen and threw it out the window after she failed, yet again, on another deliverable. I had hoped it landed on her brand new car. But I had forgiven her since then. Or, forgiven may not be the right word. Maybe
forgotten is more apt? I had started to
forget she existed.
"How could she sleep at night, that witch!" Marnee was probably thinking about
that time where Dense fooled her into doing one of
her reports for Global by namedropping The Queen. And it wasn't an easy report. Marnee chaffed her fingers doing the numbers.
"Are you giving her anything for Christmas?" I asked.
"If I could give her a heart, I would. She hasn't had one, I think."
Pink-tied Glen walked up to us sucking on a long green popsicle. "Thanks for the pop, Marnee," he said, and winked. "What are you girls talking about? Dense again?"
"Yeah," I said. "I think we'd better stop talking about her. Ever. It's evil, you know. It's one of the seven capital sins."
"Well, you may forgive just this one interesting piece of info," Glen licked the melting popsicle from stem to tip. "I have heard from the royal grapevine that Dense may be off by the New Year."
"No," Marnee said, disbelieving.
"Yep," Glen said. "I think Her Royal Highness has finally put together the case against her."
"Do you feel sorry?" Marnee asked me. "What would you feel if you saw her tight little ass kicked out of the office forever?"
"I never thought that it would occur," I said. "But how could you feel sorry for
a pebble in a shoe?"
"Well done, Stepmother," Glen said, getting the analogy, and off he disappeared into the blue cubicles, licking the rest of the popsicle.
"The New Year is going to be very exciting," Marnee said.
You betcha.
Labels: employees, office politics
Christmas is a-Comin'!
I guess everybody's on a shopping frenzy. There were only a handful of people watching movies (at least in the theatre we were in -- I expected The Golden Compass to be packed that night, but nope, there were like ten of us there when the movie started), and most of the people I've talked to had been worrying about finding the time to tick-off their long gift lists.
I love giving gifts! Especially if the gift makes the receiver squeal with glee. "It's purrfect!" "I love it!" "It's exactly what I need!" are words I want to hear, and then I feel I've done a good job being Ms Santa Claus. Unfortunately, now, being what, ten days to Christmas, I still haven't bought my family anything (I've finished the friends bit -- they were easy). I've yet to squeeze my brain for brilliant ideas.
Anyway, if
you've been thinking of what to give me, here's my wish list. And just in case you don't know, my webname and second name being "Christie" does have something to do with my birthday.
- Black pointy shoes, with a low heel, preferably with cushioned sole, Size 9 (feet correlates to boob size, i've found)
- Gift Certificate for a body massage (because my back is as knotted as a pretzel with all the stress from work)
- Gift Certificate at a beauty salon -- hair spa, manicure, pedicure, brow shaping (I am so tired of looking like a wreck)
- A classic, 2-tone metal-strapped watch (preferably in the make and style that lasts)
- An iPod shuffle in hot pink
- A nice dress I can wear to work (preferably in jersey material, the wrap type)
- Three different types of tops that go well with jeans
With all the available vacation leave days I need to use, here are some things I so want to do (of course, listing them has no guarantee that I'd fulfill each one... but it's a start)
- Completing Simbang Gabi, something I had never ever done
- Singing my heart out at the Red Box (in the room with the stage) until the wee hours of the morning
- Celebrating my birthday with family and friends in the garden
- Treating my family to a concert (if there's one with Jed Madela in, we've got to be in it!)
- Listening to a full orchestra playing Christmas pieces
- Doing random acts of kindness to strangers (i.e. paying for the toll fees of the ten cars behind you)
- Ultimate fantasy Number 1: Open to All Street Dancing to House Music
- Ultimate fantasy Number 2: Dream date at the top of a skyscraper
I hope everybody's going to have a wonderful Christmas this year.
Merry Christmas!
Labels: lists
Books, Blessings, Resolutions
I am soooo excited that December's around the corner! Friends coming home for our annual get-together, my nephew's first Christmas tree (well, okay, second -- but last year he just slept ALL the time so he didn't notice), possibly our first father-side family reunion (which we decided to do after 50 percent of the original clan members opted to seek greener pastures ... in the After Life), and of course, Christmas! The dawn masses, the recollections, and even just the overall energy and faith everywhere which just comes at this time of the year. (Christmas
is about Christ being born. Sometimes I'm guilty of forgetting that too.)
Another reason to celebrate is that the Philippine Speculative Fiction 3 (edited by Dean and Nikki Alfar) will be launched on the 8th. Have been elated to see some of the best Pinoy writers in the anthology -- and I so wish to see them in person, just to confirm that it's not a dream haha.
Isn't that the most beautiful cover you've ever seen? Photo stolen from Dean's site. :-D
The launch is on:
8th December 2007 Saturday
4PM Fully Booked Flagship Store
Bonifacio High Street, Taguig
Speaking of launches, friend Tyron Caliente will also have another story "Girlfriend in a Coma" appearing in the antho "Very Short Stories for Harried Readers" edited by Vince Groyon. This collection of flash fic will be out by December, and Tyron uses his real name there, but I'm not sure if he wants me to say it here. Check it out at his site.
Talking to PGS's Kenneth the other day made me realize that although I missed the shot at greatness twice this year (Palanca and the Graphic Fiction Awards; good luck to the shortlisted authors, btw), it had been a great year for getting my stories accepted and published. I'm crossing my fingers for two stories which I hope to come out in the 1st Quarter, but even if they don't, Ha! C'est la vie. There are more opportunities out there, for as long as I keep on working and reworking stories.
This year I also got to meet more writers and publishers, and it has been an amazing experience, drinking in every Litcritter session I could attend, learning as much as I can, and having fun with the most imaginative and creative people I've ever met. I don't feel like I'm the same writer twelve months ago. In a good kind of way. (I'd probably still have awful sentence constructions, like this and the previous one, but at least I know that they are hideous.)
Anyway...
Next year I'm planning to take bold steps in my profession. (Nope, hindi ako magsho-showbiz pero hindi naman ako sarado sa option an iyon haha). I might try finish my degree (Kara, your continuous ribbing is finally getting to me). I would be braver in things I would not mention here, because, well, they're too sensational haha. I hope to be wiser. (Hmm. It's beginning to sound like an old song.) I hope to use less parentheses.
Ah, well. Here's to life and more of it.
Labels: lit, reflections
Terminos*
*With apologies to Dean.And so it happened that a neatly printed piece of paper was handed to B that Friday morning, B given a few minutes to read it, then having understood what it meant, got up from his workstation, and was escorted out of the building.
The Office fired him because he tampered with his timesheet (log ins, log outs), declaring OT pay as much as 20 thousand pesos a month (even greater than his salary). Of course I asked AD , who was his group manager, "But didn't his manager approve of those OT hours before they got to the payroll?" Answered me back that, yeah, he knew. I was sure that W, who was B's direct superior, was going to get a whippin' from AD in Filipino, English, and the four Chinese dialects that AD was fluent in, later in the afternoon for having been so negligent.
And then at the end of that Friday afternoon, Ant rapped on my invisible door (we worked in cubes of blue felt and steel) to say good bye. He was the demand planner for the other market in our region; an expat, and he was imported all the way from KL to MLA to work six months ago. He too, was terminated, but this time for his incompetence, and worse, his propensity to cover up his foibles badly (he got caught with every cover-up, because he was too dumb to explain his stupidity). His manager was a close friend of mine, and she was stressed with Ant, whom she just inherited from the last manager who got him. They gave him a grace period of three weeks to shape up, or else he gets the boot. He got the boot, and Friday became his last day. We weren't really close, but what the heck, I hugged the poor puppy back (you know, with the kind of hug that you pat the person's back but you're still two feet away from him as if there's a stick blocking his chest from getting to yours... it's the don't-get-so-close-to-me hug). Then I said "All the best," and I wanted to mean it, because a small evil voice in my head was saying "Good riddance."
And then I heard that some ex-officemates of mine who had claimed that life after the Office working for some other company was a whole LOT better than what they left, were rumored to be calling it quits with their present employers. Unfortunately this dispels my illusions of greener pastures with other offices... C'est la vie.
Labels: employees
50% off When You Die Before Nov 2
It was my Dad who first saw it -- the billboard perched at the Shell Station in Magallanes. It had an image of an angel looking over... yes, a coffin, on top of which had "50% DISCOUNT" in red letters.
Dad says to Mom, "Uy! May promo! Tara, mamatay na tayo!" Mom says, "Oo nga, no? Tara!"
(Now you know where I get my sense of humor...)
I looked it up on the web, sure enough, the promo exists! Got it
here. But I pasted the mechanics for your, ehem, enjoyment? Scrutiny.
DEATHCARE WEEK 50% DISCOUNT PROMO OFFICIAL MECHANICS
(FOR THE ST. PETER CHAPELS ONLY)
Promo Period is from October 27 to November 2, 2007. This includes:
- Services we received on October 27 even if death occurred on
October 25 or 26, 2007. - All deaths which occurred up to November 2, 2007 even if we receive the
body/or service up to November 4, 2007. - The promo is applicable to Upgrading and At-Need services only; all other
extra services will be charged at regular rates. - Senior Citizens’ Discount has been incorporated into the promo
discount. No additional discount will be provided. - The promo is not applicable to pre-need services.
- Pre-selling or reservation is not allowed. The actual date of death
will be the basis for the discount. - Excess viewing days charges are not entitled to the 50% discount.
No full payment, No Interment policy still holds throughout the promo
period.
See Posters and Print Ads for more Details.
My verdict? RUBBISH. There is actually no point to this promotion because it's not targetting an incremental in preneed (see points 5 & 6). No one would actually want to die before a certain time period (nor in his/her right mind, want to send a loved one to the other side to avail of halfpriced services). Have admired St. Peter's Plan as a company, but in this particular promotion on which they obviously spent a significant amount of cash (there's another one along EDSA, near Guada), it is absolutely insensitive and tasteless.
Really.
Labels: ads
