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Personal | Food, Work & The Week

zord189Posted for Everyone to comment on, 5 years ago7 min read



The Unexpected News


This week came really fast and as a shock to me and many of my colleagues and I thought I'd share it with you guys. And definitely, there is 'food' in the title to end the 'shocking week'. Well, it isn't that much of a shock beforehand for me when the news came about because I was being told about it by the branch director but during the time I got the news and when it was announced, I had to keep a straight face for a whole morning. Boy, did that whole morning went by slowly.
What was I feeling when I heard of the news before others?

Well, imagine you knew the exact date and time your friend was going to die. Or maybe something not so drastic. Maybe your friend failed a very important exam and he/she doesn't know it yet but you do. So you spent the day talking to him/her and he/she doesn't know what's going to hit him/her. Yea, it was that kind of situation.



So what happened was, I made it a point to get up early enough to go for breakfast this week. Usually I would skip breakfast because I would always reached the office right on time. Being an animator, our time are mostly messed up by the overtimes and stresses. Also because I've been getting up at 5am every day automatically, for some reason, I thought I would spend the next few hours preparing myself for work and breakfast.

I reached my workplace at about 8.45am and head down to a nice little cafe for my breakfast, The Nasi Lemak. Food was great, had a nice cup of ice coffee and beef rendang. As I was nom-ing down my delicious breakfast and was actually enjoying the 'me time' I was having, my branch director came walking towards me and he joined me for breakfast.

Now, it wasn't weird that he joined me since my company is a startup company and there were only like 10 of us in the company. We tend to have breakfast or meals together sometimes. It's not like the bigger companies where your boss is super distant and you need to 'set up' an appointment just to talk to him. We both ordered the same food and got to talking. A few minutes later, he asked me whether I was doing any 'freelance' on the side. Now before I continue, you have to understand that the animators in Malaysia have side income most of the time by doing freelance jobs. Just cause the animation industry here pays us peanuts. It isn't an uncommon thing for the animator to have other jobs outside of the workplace. But I knew what was going down.

You see, just two weeks ago when our workload finally decreased to 'free and nothing to do', all my colleagues started taking up freelance job and worked on them during work hours. It was a HUGE NO NO because it is a conflict of interest for the company especially when the freelance job they took was a Korean project and my company was a Korean company. Apparently, my boss had heard rumours of a bunch of Malaysians doing the freelance Korean Job and they were my colleagues. My boss in Korea even knew that particular CEO for that project because they're all well connected.

So I was sitting there knowing where the conversation was headed to, I answered with much honesty and I chose my words wisely as not to throw my colleagues under the bus as well as get myself in trouble. I told the director that I wasn't doing any freelance because you know... I had Steemit. Haha, but of course I didn't mention Steemit, I said I had other things to do at home. Then began the interrogation of what has my colleagues been doing over the past two weeks and all. But I needn't say anything because apparently he already knew that everyone in the office was involved in that freelance project and were using the company's resources to do their own side job. He then went on to tell me he would fire the one who brought all the projects in and that was it. There you have it, I knew this news wayyyy before any of my colleagues knew about it.

And speak of the devil, that colleague walked by and saw us having breakfast and all I could do was smile.

Long story short, we had a brief 5 minutes meeting, and my boss fired 2 colleagues who were caught and had evidence using the company's PC for their personal work. One brought the project in, the other left the work files on the company's hard drive.... smart....


Easing up the tension


Well, yesterday night, the boss decided to treat all of us to some Korean fried chicken, Nandas. Koreans are very famous for their fried chicken and I especially love Kyochon. As you can see in the group photo above, There were only 5 of us left excluding the director and the boss. The food was delicious enough to ease the tension of what had happened all week. Anyways, most of us were kind of used to this because this isn't the first time my boss fired people on the spot. So far, he fired 5 people in one year. Gosh, I hope I won't be the next.



Ordered salad, toppokki, fries, spicy hot wings, garlic soy wings. The fries was my favourite, it had some really good and salty seasoning on it. The salad was.... normal and the toppokki was as good as any toppokki can get. I'll let the photos do the talking.


Snow cheese fried chicken


Mountain of garlic soy sauce fried chicken


This almost killed me, hot spicy chicken


Ending the week

I'm glad that I wasn't part of the freelance job but I had mixed feelings about my two colleagues getting fired. Firstly, they were good animators in a way that they finish their work most of the time and were one of the better quality and faster ones in the office. They were 'nice guys'. But on the other hand, my discipline and more rigid side of me said the things they did was wrong and was a criminal act and had to not be taken lightly.

Overall, my week was great, this drama hadn't really affect me much, it was just sad that it had to come to this. But then again, I learned one thing in life. The two sides of things.

After my colleagues got fired within a 24 hours notice, one of them posted up a photo on facebook saying 'There is no appreciation for when you work late for a company, but when you've done one thing wrong, you're a goner' following with his caption, 'it happened to me last night'. Followed suit with a lot of friend's commenting that you shouldn't OT, you should just go home and all. But then there is another side of the story which was never told to the friends.

What I'm trying to say is that 'once you're out of the loop and things didn't work out for you, you would most likely say it's bad'. Doesn't means it's true though.

This post is also posted on Steemit

Thank You

If you like what I do, check out my other posts on meetups, animation, and designs.

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