Lovely Surprises

This morning when I got to the office, a lovely surprise sat on my desk.

I’m a sucker for surprises, so this really made my day! Someday, I’ll own the real thing, but this gem-studded miniature version makes me genuinely happy for now. Suddenly month-end madness seemed to be more tolerable. Sure enough, all my month-end funds for today were a breeze (don’t ask about yesterday’s though).

My second surprise was when our boss told us that since we have a light load on Friday, they were encouraging us to take a leave since they need only 5 people to come in. Actually Friday is a holiday in Singapore but we have work on those days since we’re a shared service center and we have to follow the schedule of the countries we support. But in exchange for every holiday we work, we get an extra vacation leave, so it’s really not so bad.

Anyway I happily volunteered to take a leave so that I could spend that day saying goodbye to Ngangi. Before said announcement, I had been planning to head to their place after work. It’s bad enough that I can’t attend Chi’s wedding shower because I have to attend a teambuilding dinner. I cannot forgive myself if I let Ngangi leave Singapore without saying goodbye properly. She’s heading back to Manila to work there for good. She never really intended to stay here long.

Come dinner time, our bosses ordered food for us from a place in Plaza 8. I took some beef curry. I usually don’t like curry so I was wary of the meal, but it turned out to be delicious – yet another welcome surprise. It was, however, extremely spicy! So much so that Jemma and I kept yelping “Anghang!!” (Hot) after eating. Four hours later, as I write this blog, I can still feel my tummy burning. @.@

The pickled side dish was really good too. But then again I’ve always been a fan of pickled food. Or anything sour, for that matter.

I could have gone home right after eating since I was already done, but I couldn’t very well in good conscience leave our “bunso” (youngest sister) Jennifer grappling with a fund, so I sat beside her to help her out and when she was done, I sat beside Jemma as she did some revisions on her own fund.

Though I didn’t really help all that much, I of all people know how comforting it is even just to have “moral support” by your side at times like these.

And by “times like these” I actually meant yesterday for me. I was in a frenzied panic over my fund that I couldn’t even eat dinner. I only grabbed a slice of pizza after the nth person passed by to tell me to eat just so they would stop bugging me about it. Haha.

Tomorrow I have only one relatively simple fund assigned to me, and so does everyone else on our team, I believe. So hopefully we’ll all have a smooth day tomorrow. Looking forward to Thursday’s teambuilding dinner and Friday’s farewell session!