Local Woman Accidentally Proves To Employer That Any 16-Year Old Can Do Her Job

So we have 2 16-year old interns with us this week, and to prove that they are really that young, I can confirm that their underwear band is higher than their pants. I simply cannot understand what it is with all the underwear bands peeking above the pants. My son does that because we like to pull his diaper up to his armpits to prevent leakage but I don't think these 2 have the same reasoning.

Anyway. They got in on Monday which was a crazy, crazy day and I decided to find out what happens if you simply give them the work with some vague guidelines and a very very tight deadline. Someone was retrenching and they helped me to prepare the retrenchment letters.

Aside from the fact that they got the employer and employee mixed up, and the letters effectively had the employee firing the employer, the rest of it was pretty much what we needed. Surprise surprise! Any 2 16-year olds can do my work!

In other news, I've discovered that the sound of typing and my voice giving legal advice on the telephone will put The Son to sleep in 15 minutes. He came over to the office last Friday afternoon for a brief visit, which became a longer visit when he unexpectedly fell asleep on the floor after I turned away for a few minutes to take a call. So it turns out that my advice does not only have a somnambulistic effect on my clients after all. It also works on babies and young children. Interesting! (no pun intended).

The Husband thinks it's because the sounds of typing on a keyboard and my voice rambling on and on brings The Son back to his gestation period, when he was forced to listen to it for 8.5 months before he finally escaped. I guess that could also be why I tend to pass out when I hear older women speaking in rapid Cantonese. My mother and her sisters can talk A LOT and loudly too.

I think somebody has made a mistake here. Yep, they have.

So I got an email from my secondary school alumnus asking for volunteers to "mentor" some of the "Normal Stream" students during the Nov/ Dec school holidays. I called up the person in charge of the "Mentoring" programme to find out what exactly the "mentor" is required to do.

Apparantly we are supposed to be giving these young 15-year olds advice about life in general, because according to the person in charge ("PIC") of the programme, these girls are going astray.

How are they going astray, I asked the PIC.

Well, said the PIC, taking a deep breath, I don't know if I should be telling you all this because it will shock you.

Try me, said I, steeling myself for the unspeakable.

Ok. Here goes. Do you know that some of these 15-year olds are already dating? And they're not going out with boys their own age, THEY ARE DATING MEN WHO ARE IN THEIR TWENTIES AND THIRTIES.

Oh, I said, for all the wrong reasons. That's it?

No, do you know that some of them are also shoplifting?

Oh, I said. Erm... any more?

Well, they are also experimenting with SEX. Some of them are starting TO HAVE SEX.

I think at this point, I just waited. If this was a comic strip, there would be a thought bubble above my head that read "So how are they going astray???"

.... "Do they take drugs", I asked, hopefully.

Ownself Interview Ownself

Otherwise known as an interview with someone who has been wearing a bear suit for 3 months now.

So, Bear Bear, what do you like the most about your Bear Suit?

I guess it would be the reactions of the toddlers and younger children when they see me. They always smile, hug the Bear, and I just love the warmth and affection in their eyes when they are holding the Bear's hand. They are just too sweet.

And what do you like the least about your Bear Suit?

I hope you have no other people waiting to be interviewed, as this might take some time.

First, I must comment on how the inside of the bear head smells like someone sicked up in it, after drinking about a keg of beer. I can't get it out of my hair and skin after that. People passing by probably think I work in the restroom of a pub. Or a morgue.

Then there are the older children (and some adults) who derive inordinate amounts of joy when they gobsmack the Bear. Some of them rap the Bear's head with their knuckles like they're banging down the door in an emergency room. Clearly they are not aware of how loud banging sounds get amplified in the Bear head and make the Bear slightly psychotic.

Finally, there are the people who make rather odd comments around the Bear which make me wonder what kind of porn we would find in their computer hard drives. Like the person who called me a furvert (!!!) or the guy who said "Mmmm.. Where's the zipper.."

What was your greatest moment in the Bear Suit?

Well someone came up to The Husband and myself just last weekend and said she recognised us from THIS BLOG !!!!!!!!! It made my day, it made The Husband's day, and it made the Bear's day. Happy happy happy. I have no visitor counter, so it's always extremely gratifying to know that it's not just friends and furverts reading.

How long more in the Bear Suit?

Don't know. Until I start to like the smell, I guess. I just want to see how long I can make myself stick with a job that is so demanding of my time, energy and physical coordination. In other news, I really need to get more moooves. Sonville did an imitation of some of the Bear moves the other day and I was horrified and embarrassed. I thought the Bear was Smoov. But if Sonville's rather awkward lurching and shuffling is anything to go by, Bear Bear is clearly the Anti-Smoov.

How Lawyers Get Porn Into Their Computers - TRUE STORY!

So I seem to be the one always getting in trouble with my computer in the office because it keeps snagging viruses off the Internet.

Of late, and having just survived my second computer virus attack (with everyone else in the office completely unaffected), my colleagues have started passing snide remarks about how my heavy porn usage must be the culprit behind all of this.

I find all of these remarks less than helpful, since the commentators are all male lawyers and it could well be attempts to deflect their own heavy porn usage, or it could be their secret wish to download such massive levels of free porn that they attract a porn virus. But anyway.

So I was having lunch with another lawyer yesterday (after we were both stood up by RICHARD - YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, YOU), and this is a guy I'm working with in connection with an ongoing civil litigation matter. Halfway through our entrees, he mentioned casually that one of the document CD-ROMS that I had sent on to him had contained a sub-directory labelled "Autorecover", which, once he had opened it, revealed its contents to be .... gay porn. I swear, the CD-ROM was sent to me by a client and I never opened it.

Being a family man, he declined to go through all of the photographs available for review once he had managed to ascertain the general nature of the material, but as I pointed out to him, his computer hard drive is now officially tainted with photographs of naked men.

So much so that if he ever left his current place of employment and his firm decided to check his computer for anything, they would find these photographs and could possibly come to the conclusion that they were for his private viewing pleasure.

True story!

Local Woman Reminds Self To Read Note To Self

Actually this is just the unhappy sequel to the rather unfortunate incident at the Dentist.

So immediately after Dr Hottie McFlirty-Flirt is done with the dentist-chair-water-torture treatment, he tells me to avoid hot foods, all other foods and hot liquids for at least the next 5 hours.

"Whay", I ask, through a now (only now!!!) freshly numbed face and mouth.

"You will spray" was the slightly ambiguous response.

So being just the kind of woman that lets people tell her what to do, I headed down to the Food Court and ordered myself a steaming bowl of sliced fish noodle soup and et it. All was well and fine until the anaesthetic wore off at approximately 3am the next morning, then I realised to my horror that sometimes advice given to you by a qualified professional could be worth listening to.

Given that half of my face was numb throughout that meal, I was not able to distinguish between fish, noodles, the inside of my cheek and my tongue. So I chewed everything.

A thin smooty veil of legitimacy was provided

So yesterday, after I WAS ROYALLY STOOD UP FOR LUNCH BY SOME PEOPLE, I decided to eat a quick lunch by myself. It's easy to make these decisions when, um, it's 15 minutes into the lunch hour, and everyone else has already left for their respective lunch appointments. Allow me to define ROYALLY STOOD UP for those of us who have yet to experience this:

Just plain "STOOD UP" is when the lunch appointment gets cancelled before it starts. Like if we are supposed to meet at 1pm, then you get the news before 1pm.

"ROYALLY STOOD UP" is when the time for meeting has already come and gone, you're standing around in the heat wave of a tropical concrete jungle afternoon wearing a fully lined full suit and then you get a call on the mobile phone.

But I digress. So after grabbing a quick lunch at the Kah Soh, where even the aunties seemed to be embarrassed that I was eating by my lonesome, I wandered around Telok Ayer Street looking for a cheap back massage. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are tonnes of cheap generic sounding back massages ("China Massage", "Traditional Chinese Massage", "Traditional Massage") available up and down the length and breadth of Telok Ayer Street. I picked "Traditional Chinese Massage", S$30 for 45 minutes, and walked into the second floor of an old skool shophouse unit.

Is it just me, or would anyone else have been vaguely suspicious if:

1. the whole shop is really, really dark;
2. the women are all young Chinese women, fully made up, wearing skimpy clothes;
3. you get your massage in a private room, where the door can shut and lock; and
4. male customers get a relatively much louder, more joyous greeting and not just from the receptionist.

Anyway, 30 dollars and 45 minutes later, I left feeling really really pain free, but really really odd. What does it mean if the woman who gave me a really great massage was wearing a skimpy white tank top, denim shorts and thick makeup? Does that make me a homophobe to even wonder?

And no, I was not offered a happy ending, thank you.

Dental Fear - now 50% less amusing

I managed to put it off as long as possible, but today we bit the bullet and actually showed up for our dental appointment. I only managed to postpone it twice.

It helps that the dentist is young, male and slightly flirtatious (even during the throes of a root canal) but I can't imagine how he keeps it up even when he is rooting around in my mouth for the remains of my cavity and fishing out tiny little strands of dead nerves from my back teeth. In another life, he would be a porn star, capable of remaining in character regardless of everything that is happening around him. I suspect he would behave exactly the same way even if he was being chased through the forest by a rabid tiger. But anyway.

So we discovered today (in possibly the worst possible way imaginable) that some of us are really quite resistant to local anaesthetics. One hour into the treatment, I had been the undelighted recipient of 3 rounds of anaesthetic injections and still I could feel pain in my tooth. And by pain, I mean the pain that comes from drilling without an anaesthetic. Nothing is more depressing than being terrified of injections, making yourself sit through 3 rounds of injections because you are even more terrified of pain, and then having to endure the pain anyway. All this in the midst of the sound of non-stop cheering from the plasma TV embedded in the ceiling (some black guy was given the world's worst job and everyone else was happy and relieved).

In summary, we spent 1 hour getting injected like some kind of science experiment and then only 20 minutes on the treatment. Sigh. At some point, another dentist was called in to provide a second opinion. In the words of my dentist to the other dentist (and this is VERBATIM), "I have given her enough anaesthetic to numb an elephant and she still feels pain." I suspect I received less anaesthetic than this when I delivered The Son. The delivery also took less time. WHY WHY WHY!! *waves fists ineffectually at the ceiling*

I WANT MY PEE BACK and other sad tales

They say that 3-year olds are at the stage where they want to control more of the world around them, but I think we are just about reaching the pinnacle of the wanting to control.

Yesterday, Sonville and I were having a polite discussion on Grandma's couch about jigsaw puzzles when I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. In a continuing effort to teach him to be polite, I informed him that I would be heading to the bathroom to pee and thereafter to wash my hands and feet.

As I was bopping to the head, I heard the pitter patter of feet behind me and a little voice said "I also need to pee, Mama. I'm coming too".

Realising that I would have to let him go first if he caught up with me, I broke into a run and shut and locked the bathroom door just as he reached it. I think my maternal instincts did slow me down for a second, but they were quickly pushed aside for the greater good. I heard little hands pounding on the door, and then a little whiny shrieky voice asking to be let in because "I HAVE TO PEE I HAVE TO PEE"

Fortunately for all of us and the bathroom mat, my mother intervened to suggest an alternative venue for Sonville to pass urine. By the time I emerged from the bathroom, he had already peed on the porch and was hopping mad. Talk about a tirade, here's an extract of his rather long complaint and our responses:

I don't want to pee there! (Well, it's too late now, right?)
But I didn't want to pee there! (So what are we going to do about it)
I want to pee in the bathroom!! (Okay, you can pee there later)
I WANT MY PEE BACK!! I WANT MY PEE BACK!! (*no response*)

In other news, researchers have discovered that 45 minutes outdoors in a bear suit leads to mild heatstroke.

Finally, following on from all the mispronunciations of The Son of new and interesting English words, I have asked the Husband to come up with The Son's version of the Singapore map, featuring such landmarks as:

1. Booger Timah;
2. The Centripetal Forest; and
3. Chunky Village.