I'm an uncaring bastard these days. I see the tissue auntie at Amoy Street food centre where I eat every other day. She tries to sell me three packets of tissue for $1 even when I already have three packets of tissue on the table from the ghosts of aunties past. I tell her to fly a kite, in an "Auntie, here got this kite, would you like to go fly it?" kind of way.
And I do it again. And again. And again. You don't even want to know what I say to the uncles.
The stress of work has made me all crummed up inside like a festering cesspool of venomous spittle. When you work in an office, you find that you have several mortal foes. The first one would be forgetting to set your page margins right in Office/Excel or some other damned document so it prints wrong and you have to reprint it. And the damned printer is always an inconvenient walk away where you have to wait for ten other people who have 20 page documents queued before you before you can get the document only to find out its printed wrongly. So you repeat the whole process, and hand it off to your boss. In the rush, you get a stupid paper cut. Fucking paper cuts. Small as hell but they hurt like a bitch.
Then your boss asks one simple question. "Eh, why you never print it double-sided? Waste paper."
I hate to say this, but every day in offices, many trees die in vain. I will be born as a tree in my next life.
All this shit makes you ask yourself, "I studied so hard for this?" And then the answer dawns upon you, in a Monty Python sky opens and God speaks to you kind of way. It is a resounding yes, that most people are overqualified and underappreciated in their jobs. Oh happy joy. Today, a coworker told me I had a degree in photocopying and scanning documents. I gave him my best impression of a withering smile.
The second mortal opponent would be running out of a certain office supply. By the laws of the office, when you run out of staple bullets, the office will be overstocked with everything else but staple bullets.
You will find a ridiculous number of pen refills, office organisers, ring binder files, hole punchers, a pair of scissors that has been lost since time immemorial that you have now rediscovered and christened a family heirloom, the remnants of somebody's breakfast (yuck), your coworkers' secret (or maybe not so secret) stash of alcohol, and that 10-page document you lost somewhere in that mountain of paper on your desk that finally reappeared when you don't need it anymore.
But you still cannot fucking find any staple bullets.
Mortal enemy number three - the Himalayan range of paper on your desk. The range works like this. When you need something, you can never find it. Any attempt to find it is always accompanied by a frantic reshuffling which only ends up making it look the same. And every day, you can only add to the range.
Any attempt to springclean said range will be an exercise in futility, an illusion of cleanliness and order that will be dispelled as quickly as the mirage of an oasis in a desert. The paper range does not just grow, it spreads like a cancer and soon it will infest every corner of your desk, even the area behind your computer monitor that does not usually see light. In fact, in time it even begins to develop stratified layers. If you work long enough, you can tell how long a worker has been around by digging a hole in that range and plucking out the document right at the bottom of that hole. If you don't recognise it, you've worked too long.