Everybody bitch about their boss (and a fair amount of their colleagues)

I was having lunch with a couple of friends - whom I love to refer to Popo and Ah Beng - just now, and we got talking about our bosses. You see, Popo and I share the same male boss, while Ah Beng is tied to another team headed by a woman boss.

(Let me first share with you why I call Popo - Popo, and why Ah Beng is Ah Beng.

Popo is a lady in her 40s - she would not say out loud her age, typical isn't it. But what's not typical about her is that she tries very very hard to hide it. Still typical you say? Maybe but check this out - she listens to Linkin' Park and Atomic Kitten and loves to hang out with the younger crowd in the office.

So there's many like her, you may say, and you know a couple more people - young at heart as they're commonly termed - who are doing the same thing. Sure, but how many of them even go as far as introducing her own grown-up daughter as a friend?

So for going that far to hide her age, I grant her the nickname of Popo.

As for Ah Beng - well, he's all that really - coloured hair, two pairs of spectacles (one for work, one for partying - and that party pair has a lemon green frame, beat that!), dressed like Ah Beng, talk like Ah Beng, hear all the Ah Beng techno music etcetera metcetera.

So for conforming to the typical Ah Beng archetype, he's Ah Beng to me.)

As the lunch time story goes, Ah Beng was thanking us for tapauing his lunch as he had to rush and submit some work to his lady boss. This lady boss of his is infamous for being inapproprieately prissy, fussy, and nak-cepat-sy so when Ah Beng starts bitching about her, that's hardly new.

He said my boss seems cool, and that he thinks most lady bosses sux. In the context of our office, this statement is a fallacy, I said. Firstly my boss ain't cool. Secondly, there is a lady boss heading another department in our office and because I had been doing some jobs under her, I knew for a fact that she's cool.

I related to Ah Beng about my experience - there was this one time when my so-called cool male boss was trying to correct my spelling. You see, we were supposed to conform to the British English instead of the US English that I am so used to.

I did try my best to check my spellings and even do double checking on my own the moment I found out that the company's spellchecker software is US-based. But I'm not perfect either, thus sometimes the "z"s fell through instead of the "s" (hence organization instead of organisation).

I supposed my boss must have had enough of "z"s instead of "s"s when he finally said "If you have not been to US, lived in US or studied in US, I supposed by now you should be able to get used to British English ya."

For a person like me - as in victimised during the 1998 recession when the government pulled out education funds for overseas studies (and what a bad decision that was, though I don't really fancy going to US but the education system there suits me) - that particular statement is very very painful to swallow. Mentang-mentang la dia pernah duduk kat UK, bila cakap terkeluar je "Oh gosh! dengan "Golly me!" dia...

But I did push that fucking comment out of the way and ever since that I minded my "z"s as how a teenager would treat his pimples (sometimes he let it be and rub some oxy on it, sometimes he'll just forget about it, sometimes he'll squash it).

Bottomline is, as I had related to Ah Beng just now, it is how you take it. Your boss ain't perfect, so aren't you. But there is always room for compromise, and you always have the choice to be the bigger person and improve (though switching to British English from US English is not what I would call improvement - both of them are still the same weird language after all).

Ah Beng was nodding away and he recalled his own spelling incident. His lad boss told him to "Do your job la! Don't copy!" when he kept spelling everything in US English (as how he was thought during his student days in Taiwan). "As if I'd copy!" he protested in defence. Now that's just as bad, I thought.

While Ah Beng and I were happily bitching about our bosses, Popo was keeping quiet in her seat. This goody-two-shoes squirmed everytime I mention my boss's anal comments - I could see it but I went on talking anyway.

You see, Popo adores our boss - probably cause she was made as part of the team when he took over, instead of keeping to her old less-glamourous secretarial job - and she can't stand it when he's being made into a bitch-topic. And on top of that, Popo is also a good friend to Ah Beng's boss (she's pretty much close to every one in the senior level for she has been with our company for eons).

And way too bad for her, cause Ah Beng and I had no qualms about bad-mouthing our bosses. If they deserved it, they deserve it, if they don't, we deserve the right to bitch still - it is a free country.

The truth is, we were just bitching so that the toxic will clear out of our system and we can move on, try to do our job as good as we can.

But loyal old Popo can't handle the bitch-trip, so she quit the lunch session and excused herself. Two more colleagues joined us after Popo left, bringing the day's installation of Malay Mail to accompany their chapatis.

There was an article about a magician being attacked by its pet for show tiger. The incident happened during a show - the magician flip his whip to get the tiger's attention, which was supposedly quite routine. But instead of complying, the tiger snapped and sank his teeth into the magician's neck.

We were contemplating the reason behind the tiger's unanticipated attack. Probably the tiger was too hungry, said one of lunchtable member. Another said the magician might have released a wrong command using his whip - accidental thing, maybe. Yeah? The truth is, like I said, "See, everybody bitch about their boss!"