[Dark Side]

Fast forward 20 years later …

Currently I hold a dead-end job at Siglap Community Centre doing some high-level paperwork, and the only good thing abt my job is the location since it is very near to those dirty Joo Chiat joints, which I love too. If I manage to knock off from work on time or even earlier, I can still make it for the happy hour price, and get some early cheap fun with the Thai and Viet babes there. Without Desmond, of course, unless I stay later till after happy hour and wait for him to rush over to join me, which he sometimes does.

I consider myself pretty much advanced in years and am, by right, supposed to have climbed up the corporate ladder, if not 3 quarters up the ceiling, then at least half. That, sad to say, has not happened. I'm more like a quarter from below. My boss is a 26-year-old bitch who barks at me, and I follow her orders with a whimper, and sometimes if she's unhappy, then without a whimper. I'm not sure who is the dog here, since she barks and I whimper. Probably both. Some dogs, after all, do better than others. Whenever I’m in a bad mood after she bullies me, I make my way to Geylang Lorong 99 and bang my fave prostitute extra hard until she screams, and I imagine she’s my boss crying in pain. I get some perverse solace from that.

Over the years, I’ve held on and am still trying to hold on. Give me that much respect, will you? It’s obvious I never overperformed, but neither did I underperform too much, otherwise I would have been sacked long ago. But it is true that most of my colleagues did better than me for their appraisals over the years so they naturally got promoted faster than me. I used to have a boss who was older than me 8 years ago, but I guess I got complacent and ended up staying stagnant somehow.

The working world is such. I'm not sure whether I gave up trying to prove myself first, thus resulting in my falling upon evil days, or whether I fell upon evil days first, thus resulting in me not giving a fuck about proving myself anymore. Either way, what does it matter? It's been so long ago already and there seems absolutely no point in trying to figure out which came first. As long as you come, it doesn't matter which comes first.

Chicken or egg, you ask? I say: Fuck the chicken and fertilise the egg.