Hazia’s Reflections

Now, the second part of the story, Mr Clingy. Mann!! At first, he was pleasant, came to my office and discussed nicely. We were working on a project together. Then, he started to come to my room every morning, even before 9am, sat down in front of my desk and talked, mostly about the project but in a very draggy manner. Sure, he was only handling one thing, whereelse I was juggling several tasks at the same time. His office is located on another floor, wouldn’t a phone call be enough?

One day last week, I had a press conference at 9.30am and was still typing my emcee script at 8.30am. He walked in then and was about to start the draggy tone, I blew my top. After that, I became curt and brief. I also managed to shake him off during our outstation trip. Eeeeeeee….Finally!

Mr Defensive (DEF) is valuable as an alliance but Mr Clingy is totally worthless. Anyway, IS seemed fond of him. Well, that is another thing. That guy is an idiot. DEF warned me of the problems a senior ex-staff in my department faced. Initially, I wasn’t paying attention because nobody liked that guy. However, I noticed that DEF warning on what happened to him was starting to happen to me.

IS lacked knowledge in my field and didn’t bother to upgrade himself. He has been playing ‘loose hands’ all along, pushing everything down, even the ones specifically attentioned to him. It came to a point that I told him I simply couldn’t attend a ministry meeting that day because I had 3 speeches and 2 press releases to write. The idiot couldn’t even highlight to no 1 that I was all alone. I had to tell him myself, fight my own battle. No 1 quickly hunted for potential staff for me.

Lack of manpower affected quality, everything was done last minute. No 1 spoke to IS - looks like he was trying to make the fellow takes accountability. However, IS tried to imply that no 1 questioned my background i.e. irrelevant Degree, etc. Hello! In actual fact, it was he who didn’t understand my CV. He also asked me a bunch of insulting questions like whether I could write press releases or… as a consultant, did I just instruct people to do it? Shouldn’t the question be asked pre-recruitment? Now, I think I have a pretty good idea why he wasn’t involved in my recruitment at all, despite me being under his section.

I had a long talk on the phone with DEF yesterday. I closed my office’s door and poured out everything to him. He had come to a stage where he simply by-passed his superior and goes straight to no 1. One good advice from him, the best time to catch no 1 is around 5pm - this is when he’s not so tied up and can talk.

Well, I solved one problem only to discover another one. You can’t have it all, can you?