Nantoy’s Last Day

Kids, this is the story of Nantoy’s last day in our office, the day we made him feel abandoned and friendless.

It was a Singapore holiday yesterday, but we still had work because that’s how shared service centers roll, but we get free lunch on these days, so it’s all good in the hood. The moment lunch was announced via email, Nantoy called us and made a bee line for the pantry. Because he was there first, he saved a couple of tables for us, pulling chairs for everyone as well.

Lunch has always been the best part of our days because this is when we get to take a breather from work and chat and laugh with each other, so he was looking forward to making his last one with us a special one.

As he saw his friends join the queue to take food, he happily waved them over to the table, but as each one of them apologized that she couldn’t join him because she was so busy and had to eat at her own workstation, his megawatt smile started to falter.

By the time it was my turn, he had such a lost puppy dog look in his eyes as he sat on a huge but mostly empty table that I couldn’t bear to break his heart even though I had to be somewhere else, so I found myself saying, “I’ll come back after I bring this food to Dred.”

Moments after I left, our friend Tinay burst in through the pantry doors and approached him, stress etched upon her face. “I am so sorry, but we have an issue with our client. I need your help.” The client was a new one, and a big one, and one of Nantoy’s best traits is that he never says no to a friend in dire straits. So he stood up and followed her.

“I set up a laptop in the conference room over there,” she explained, leading him to said room.

“Why are there people in the room?” he asked nervously when he noticed the silhouettes. What kind of big issue was this that there were plenty of people involved? He wondered in trepidation.

She opened the door to the conference room and ushered him into this:

Well not that, exactly, because when he first saw the room he wasn’t at the front of the room yet and everybody was seated at their own chairs and eating their meals.

Yes, the same friends who had all made excuses about being too busy to eat with him, they were all inside the conference room.

“Surprise!’ we yelled. (Or at least I think we did. Did we?)

We led Nantoy to the front as he said, “Did you know that I was feeling so bad that none of my friends wanted to have lunch with me, on my last day at work? And now you’re telling me that you had purposely planned to make me think that I had no friends, just to surprise me?” He asked us.

Everyone looked nervously back at him.

“That’s awesome!” He yelped.

“Haha! We Barneyed you! Yes!” I whooped, pumping a fist in the air.

By “Barney” I refer to Barney Stinson from the show How I Met Your Mother, in that episode when they threw him a surprise bachelor party that turned out to be the worst night of Barney’s life.

Nantoy, like me, is a huge fan of the HIMYM show, and he had used Barney’s line in that episode. He is the Barney in our group because he has Barney’s highly contagious enthusiasm, the one who makes our “show” funnier and more watchable, he with his billion-dollar-idea alerts and signature catchphrases like “That is what I call a good – wait for it – job. A good job!” (Kidding on the “wait for it” part, he only says “good job” actually.)

So for his farewell, I made a HIMYM-themed video, which you can see below. It was fun to get to do the “Kids, in the summer of 2013, your Uncle Nantoy tendered his resignation” voiceover a la Ted Mosby.

Watch the first minute of the video, I patterned it after the real show’s intro which you can view here if you’ve never seen it.

Sorry all the messages are in tagalog so some may not understand it, but what I said to Nantoy in the video is that he is the Barney in our sitcom, detailing why by saying pretty much what I said 2 paragraphs ago. Then I said that our sitcom is gonna be boring now that he’s leaving and moving to a different channel, but I’m really glad that he became a part of it, even if only for a while, and that we would definitely miss him.

Then right after my message, a voiceover (mine, actually, LOL) in the end goes: “Would the bons always work together in the same company? No. That’s life, kids. But here’s what I discovered: our “sitcom” was wherever all the bons were together.”

I also stole this line from the show and modified it a bit, in case you thought that was really poetic of me or something. The original line was about a booth. ;P

Bons, as you have probably figured out by now, is what we call each other. It’s actually a short form for “bonsai” which is a long story which deserves a separate blog. That is why the message on the board is “BON VOYAGE.”

We let Nantoy view the video on Tinay’s ipad as he ate his lunch. Everyone couldn’t resist watching along with him.

I had stayed up till 3am the night before that because I’m a crammer like that, so I was exhausted from lack of sleep, but seeing everyone’s reactions to the video made it all worth it. 🙂

After he was done watching, we presented him with a Starbucks tumbler decorated with a collage of our pictures, done by Tinay. I forgot to take a closeup picture of it but here’s a picture of Nantoy holding it with his cake (bought by Joc), the video on the ipad, the plastic pumpkin which we used for the game, and the white board with his farewell message. The yellow umbrella is also a trademark of HIMYM. 😛

Joc made a game for him. He let us write descriptions of ourselves on pieces of paper and he had to guess who we were. He didn’t get my entry correctly! Haha. And I thought I was being obvious.

Then he got Tinay’s wrong, just as I had predicted. She had written, “I’m V for Voluptuous” and I had told her, “He is not going to get that, he is going to guess me.” Sure enough, he did. He finally got her correctly on the third try. Hahaha! XD

Before everyone had to go back to their workstations, Ivy “ambushed” a stranger outside to take a picture of everyone together. He took more than one pic, but this was the funniest one, with us doing the Nantoy pose.

We will definitely miss this kid, but like I said, it doesn’t mean he’s no longer part of our “sitcom.” He’s still in Singapore after all. I’ll still see him around, even if it’s not as often.