Long, Dreary Friday Night

Every week, we will count down to Friday, count down to the impending respite and freedom. Come Friday, we start to wind down. Even our brains retard from a Pentium 4 to a 486. Our minds start drifting to the activities after work.

Not this Friday.

The first email we got was to immediately investigate some of the operating expenditure (opex) variance for May and to have the analyses ready by mid-day. On dear, I had not even looked at the numbers, much less any explanation for the swing in the numbers. There are so many sets of numbers – this month versus last month, year-to-date actual versus year-to-date budget and year-to-date actual this year versus last year. Within each category of costs, there are so many cost items. Then there are so many departments. Sigh! I do not even know where to start.

After pulling the numbers, I tried to identify at high level some of the major differences and immediately engage the business people to confirm and validate some of my high level explanations. After getting the explanations ready, the next step was to go through with our bosses.

Initially, a meeting was called at 4 pm. This was already very close to knocking off time. Notwithstanding, we still held high hopes that it should not drag behind 6 pm. Then, it was postponed to 5.30 pm. What?!?! It was already knocked-off time and I already arranged to meet someone! I immediately let my friend knew of the change and we agreed to rearranged our date.

Am I jinxed? Everytime, I have arranged to meet someone, there would be a last-minute meeting called which would cause me to scramble for last minute changes. Fortunately, my friends have been rather forgiving thus far. On those days when I have nothing planned on Fri, office would be a day of peace and serenity.

Amidst my grumbling to my colleague about how “suay” (unlucky) I have been and their optimistic beliefs that we could still end early, we gathered at the meeting room at 530 pm.

We were like a bunch of school girls waiting for the last bell which signified the end of the lessons to ring. We fidgeted, constantly checked our watches and mobiles, made faces and frowns at each other. We kept urging our bosses to go to the next topic and maintained a straight face while they were telling jokes, killing off any chance for them to digress and drag the meeting further. Yet, our PC seemed to work against us. When we were trying to create new slides, there was a text box which mentioned something about “happy-go-lucky” and some “friendly buddy” kept appearing. This caused us to spend time removing these text boxes.

Finally, the slides were done. 2 hours have passed. We started to close our laptops and packed before our bosses announced the end of the meeting. We rushed out immediately when our bosses dismissed us.

My colleague who had optimistic belief that the meeting would end on time did not change her appointment with her friend at 545 pm. This made her grossly late. Well, as I have cancelled my appointment, it was time to go home.

What a way to end the end of a working week…