evil bitch

i had a perfectly chill and (mostly) peaceful 10 months at my last workplace, and then we had a change of managers.

this woman, the first time i ever came across her was during my first month on the job, we were at a training session and after that 2 short hours, i didn't know her name or who the hell she was, but i knew that i had to be careful of her.

first impressions - devious, annoying, dangerous.

as time went on, we made friends with some people from her team and found out more about her. my first impressions were wrong.

she was way worse than that.

during the meeting when my manager announced that she was taking over, this woman was all smiles and tried her very best to make us like her. it was so awkward to watch her repeat over and over again (no kidding) that she was "very nice," "very understanding," and that we shouldn't "believe what other people say" about her.

so she took over, and the first month she was still putting on her lovely face, smiling, smiling, that fucking awful and fake smile, it reminded me of a ghost story i once read about a demon which had a permanent wide smile etched on its face.

i was already planning to leave and she gave me all the motivation i ever needed. i resigned within that month, but even that was a little too late because soon after that, things got really bad.

some of the things she's done:
- said that we were stupid even before she took over and had zero contact with us
- told her team that she wanted to 'kill' one of my colleagues, tricked him into doing some work for her and then completely destroyed him
- implement changes and when they turned out to be wrong, blamed it on my colleague
- questioned and made snide remarks about my colleagues' upbringing
- twisted facts and conjured lies like it was the most normal thing to do
- tried her very best to make my previous manager look bad
- threatened to cancel all our leave
- bully one of her previous staff to the point where she would cry every sunday because she was afraid of going to work
- have her staff buy breakfast for her every morning, and then complain when the food isn't nice or "why did you buy this when you know i don't like it?!"

somewhere in between, i had the misfortune of crossing paths with her and ended up having a big 'discussion' with her, my whole team, and my previous manager. i wasn't gonna let this old bitch step over me so it wasn't very pleasant. she pulled out all her dirty tricks and i didn't hold back.

when it was over, one of the guys said to me "wah, just now the way you laugh at her fucking sarcastic man, if you do it outside, people will beat you up."

in the end, everyone from my team were going to resign and that's when she started to panic and try to trick some of them to stay. she managed to hit 3 of them in the right spots and they remained behind to be her slaves.

funny enough, when i talk to those that have been with her for a long time, they all know what kind of a fucked up person she is (no dispute there, really) but some of them still manage to find some glimmer of hope from their endless suffering.

it's as though they've already been taking her shit for so long that they are now immune to it and instead magnify the slightest good deeds to help brighten their days.

one of the common comments i hear from them is that she can be very good to the people she likes. she will protect them, help them, etc. and so those who choose to work under her will always do every damn thing to remain in her good books.

and then one girl told me: "i think she is a really good person, she's only like that at work." i didn't know what to say.

find it in the silence

"i once knew this girl who thought she was god. she didn't give sight to the blind or raise the dead. she didn't even teach anything, not really, and she never told me anything i probably didn't already know. on the other hand, she didn't expect to be worshiped, nor did she ask for money. given her high opinion of herself, some might call that a miracle. i don't know, maybe she was god. her name was sati, and she had blonde hair and blue eyes."

it was the last day of april when i had many hours to spare and ended up in the library. there were so many books to choose from, and as is usually the case for me, i ended up looking for books that i've been interested in reading or authors that i've had experience with.

i had little luck as i strolled through the aisles, making it all the way to P before i found something. i was actually trying to find christopher pike's the last vampire, which i had read all the way back in secondary school and first piqued my interest in the vampire genre, but it wasn't there and my eyes fell on something else.

sati.

i came across this book before in the same library, but never been drawn to it until that day, and as i began reading, i realised that i've even read the first chapter before but gave up because i didn't like the premise.

i guess i was very fortunate that it came back to me at just the right time, when i could be completely open and agreeable to the ideas in it rather than laughing it off as a stupid work of fiction.

throughout the years i've learnt that whenever we come across any sort of stimulus, we only take away from it the bits that resonate the most within us at that particular moment. at that moment, i wasn't searching for answers but it gave me all the answers.

it also brought me peace and at the end, a strange sense of loss that everything that had just changed my life was only a stupid work of fiction.