Oh, Lola!

May 15, 2008

Not too long ago, I lived and breathed work. Demarcating between home and the office was difficult. I was a slave to my MSN and my cellphones. The lowest I sunk to was logging onto MSN at 11:00 in the evening so I could answer some non-Filipino’s work-related queries. No, wait, that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when when I returned to Cebu for a day, in the middle of my Christmas vacation, just so I could trawl through my PC for files to send to Korea. Turned out, I had already bundled those files off for the bosses months back. There was completely no need for me to be physically in Cebu had I been informed which files were needed, for whom, and why.

But I digress. The point I’m making here is that while work still has the nasty tendency to spill onto personal hours, I’ve become better at figuring out which lines to draw and where. I turn my mobile phones off after work and on weekends, for example, and I’ve learned to say no to weekend meetings - most of the time, anyway.

Yesterday, I filed for sick leave. I wasn’t really sick sick, but I was feeling sleepy, queasy, and nauseous. So, I went home by 2pm. Imagine my surprise when this nasty old hag demanded for my landline from the secretary, despite being told that I was on sick leave, so she could phone me later that night and talk shop. When the secretary refused, she slammed the phone down. How rude, but how oh so typical of her! I told the secretary to tell her I only entertain work-related calls at home in especially mitigating circumstances - when the office is on fire, for example, or when some freak electrical charge fries all of our PCs. In the meantime, whatever she needs me for can wait until I’m in the office the next day.

This woman, who’s probably as old as Methusalah by the way, has a PhD in education. Wherever she got it, that institution sure didn’t teach her manners and communication skills. She calls new acquaintances "day" if they’re female and "dong" if they’re male. Sometimes, she remembers to call me "ma’am" but she has a special way of saying it that makes the skin crawl.

I wonder if some old people are rude because they’ve always been that way or because they think age gives them special license to act like their undies are on fire 24/7.