Hazia’s Reflections

Mr Designer dropped by at my office the afternoon after our date. He was 4 hours late. The printer gave his slot to someone else and he was delayed..

We met up for a drink at the cafe downstairs. Under normal circumstances, I would have been mad. But I had to consider the fact that he took the trouble to create several high quality mock-ups of his card designs and personally brought them over to me. He took great pride in his creations, full conceptualisation. I mean who would have thought of using naif painting images for local festive greeting cards?

Other agencies simply emailed their design to me. I had to colour-print them myself, I even had trouble opening their attachments - that caused a lot of my time. Not too mention, their designs were so dated & common, and the cost wasn’t exactly lower either. So, you see the advantages that Mr Designer has above other Bumiputera suppliers. He later highlighted the areas of services that he specialised in, I was surprised by the wide range of his expertise.

Alas, I was damn curious about the after-effects of our date, would the magic disappear the afternoon after? Interestingly, after we were done talking business, he just picked up where we left off.

He was more open this time, he shared quite a bit of personal stuff without me even asking. He said when they first got married, his ex-wife was a lot of fun. They would party together, even after the first child was born. A few years later, she changed, mellowed and also became close to the religion. She started wearing the tudung. At first, he tried being more observant to the religion too, but it didn’t last.

Sadly, they got hit pretty badly in 1998 - they lost their money in his the stock market - RM300k. They had to sell their house and their car. He hadn’t gone overseas for holiday or anything since 2000. That long!

They used to have a lot of money. They won’t hesitate to just fly to Singapore for the day to catch a movie. He said that’s why he needs to work hard. Age is catching up and he also wants to provide for his kids. Right now, his ex-wife takes care of them quite well and she wasn’t expecting any nafkah from him. But he thinks that he should still contribute to their upbringing.

And yeah, his ex-wife treats him more like a younger brother than anything else. She prefers that he visits their children at her house, rather than take them out. He would spend time playing Playstation and other computer games with them while their mother goes out and run errands, etc. I couldn’t imagine, sometimes he is like a kid himself:)

Actually, I was starting to get tired from lack of sleep when he arrived. But somehow, conversation with him always does one thing - I became less & less tired and more & more refreshed. I even went back to work that night after chatting with him for 3 hours:)