My Old Self and Najla’s Filing Pile (Part 1)

Who I Used to Be

The winding down of this month doesn’t come without its stark truths and remarks. The revealing conversation I had with Lyssa last night had me thinking about what I had turned into and who I am now. Each second alone to my thought was spent with reminiscence upon the shadow of my former self and firm comparisons were made between my undue self now and that of what was a rugged reality. I’d like to think that like Lyssa said, the unpredictable and playful me was eroded when I started going out with Lyssa and it had completely undermined itself to what you see now.

The turn itself came some months into my going out with Lyssa and you could say that it was my going soft that created what was once without confidence some months ago. Gradually, I’m building myself back up but sadly, not to my former self but to a comparative confidence, just a new image and representation. I’d like to think that Jewell hadn’t scathed the purity of my adolescence and the cheeky person I was back then. Rather, fifty days wasn’t enough to tame the attitude that just wanted to bust out of the seams with unpredictability.

Today, the truth hit me some time during my working hours. Combined with the conversation last night with Lyssa and my thoughts of the past, I realized that I had changed concurrently with what my former self yielded. Back in the day, I used to travel out with my friends, wearing my Adidas pants, my T-Rip hat and that mischievous jacket. Back then I had an identity and as Lyssa said, I was the kind of eccentric person where Lyssa just wanted to learn from me.

There was so much unpredictability within me that she got excited by me and how our whole group was always out for some sort of prankish deed. Back in the day I had the quiet attitude but looked hard and mischievous enough for people to stop and look at me, wondering what I was up to. Back in those days I had the attitude, that’s what led me to Lyssa and that’s why I was so popular in both gender ambiguities.

Dressing for Attention

Like a concurrent train line heading towards the direction of my future, the transition from my former self began when I changed tracks whence I started going out with Lyssa. The transition was slow as opposed to jumping the rails but now that I look at myself, I see an obvious difference. Today I have a whole new approach to life, appearance, approach and personality. These days I go out to get noticed as in the old days but back then, I didn’t need to dress in bright and eccentric clothes to get noticed.

Nowadays, to try and substitute for the attitude that I used to portray back in the day, I need to don these clothes so that I can at least masquerade in the face of popularity. You could say that this change had to come because now I’m trying to get the same girls as three years ago but the only difference is that they along with me have changed.

Times have changed and if I want to attract the same women, I have to head to the places they go to but as I thought competition was hard, my confidence slackened. Therefore, these clothes is a way to cover the lack of confidence, so I can be someone I’m not in hopes that this new person will attract attention with personality. These days I have a lack of personality where back then, I had enough personality and confidence to go around for everyone, what’s happened…

An Alarm Clock Off Whack

Let me now get to the benefit of chronology before the benefit of philosophy on life takes a firm grip. Not knowing that we were already up to Tuesday at work, let me just note the earliest blast from the past and then a pick from the post of today’s surprise. For each day in this new week, I’ve woken up late due to my alarm clock being off whack and never waking me up. This Tuesday morning, I was woken up by mum at 6:30 a.m. and waking up immediately, I realized that my clock was a couple of hours of whack.

Cussing at my bad luck, I was grateful for that extra half an hour of sleep as I headed for the bathroom, had a shower and then quickly readied myself for work. The most recent news is that because my alarm clock hasn’t been working these past few days, dad decided to buy me another one. Now I have two ticking clocks in my room and one of them is bound to wake me up tomorrow morning, I’m sure of it.

Anyway, catching the normal bus in the morning, I jumped onto the train which had someone almost on each seat. Sitting myself just off the middle seats, I found myself behind a window that wouldn’t close properly. Having sat at this very seat a couple of days ago where I had to lightly lean on the pane, I couldn’t sleep properly because the wind would freeze my face and keep me uncomfortable.

Therefore, for the whole trip to the City I slept lightly and was uncomfortable in the need to stay awake. In addition, my seat had two other people forcing me to feel more cramped than needed. What I ended up doing for most of the trip to the City was to sleep sitting up, anxious that my head would fall backwards when I started to doze off and sure enough, once or twice, it did.

Behind on Briefs

Briefs this month haven’t been going out thick and fast because at the start of the month, we were suckered into believing that it would be a slow month. However, as I had taken a day off and then took my lazed time with the briefs as I still felt sick, I’ve lagged behind considerably.

Nevertheless, I can’t feel the stress on my shoulders as I know I still have next week in which to finish off a further eight briefs which will be plenty before the new hearing list comes through. The reason I speak of the briefs is that I only accomplished one for the whole of Tuesday and whenever persistent Najla would utter something about sending her files to get photocopied, I would neglect sending out mine.

Najla and the Mail

Najla can be great at times and she appears to churn through her briefs as that seems to be the only things she’s doing but seriously, she has to get to the other articles of her job description. I must admit, Najla is very eager to represent the better portion of work for the incoming mail but that’s not a hard or laborious task as it only takes the two of us half an hour to complete.

We’ve worked into a routine also for the outgoing mail where she types up the big letters for the A4 envelopes and I sit there folding the smaller letters into envelopes. Both of us seem to like our little area of expertise as Najla was turned off the small letters because she always got paper cuts and I hate constantly hand writing on the envelopes. Najla seems to love her part of doing the mail because she gets to use the typewriter.

Najla loves procrastinating on other tasks and typewriting so much that she spent the last lazy hour of Wednesday typing from our HIH manual. When the mail was complete, instead of Najla getting to some filing or some other task in regards to work, she decided to waste her own time, making herself think there was nothing to do.

Sitting there for half an hour, the racket of the typing probably pissed more people off than me but for different reasons. Thalia came over for a while, masquerading herself with a question about the weekend but as she looked at Najla over my shoulder and lip-whispered to me “What’s she doing”, I just shrugged my shoulders as if she was in her own little world and kept chatting.

The Filing Nobody Does

So there you have it, Najla is good at wasting time and if she doesn’t have a brief in front of her to churn away at or some mail to get stuck into, you’ll find it hard going to get her to do some other task. Demeaning or not, filing has to be done and Najla seems to think that she can just dump David’s filing onto me. In addition, I seem to be the go-to guy for errands because Najla never raises her anxious hand.

This however I don’t mind as I love getting out of the office on occasion but when I come back to a horde of filing after I kindly asked her to start somehow on it, I get frustrated. Like Anneliese said today at our meeting, you can only ask someone to do something and from then on, it’s up to these people to do it, you can’t force them. I’ve developed too much of a friendship with Najla for her to take advantage of the situation.

Maybe it’s about time I became stern to loitering and stepped up in the front of asking Najla to meet the demands of our work station. Sure enough Najla looks like she’s on top of her briefs but when I had her check how much she had left to complete, it was just two off my agenda. Therefore, in reality, if I hadn’t taken my day off then we would be on par with the briefs so really, what is she achieving.

If Najla spent half the time on filing in the day instead of churning away on those briefs, she’ll still get the same amount of briefs done, just with more efficiency in keeping down the filing. Thalia remarked to me today that she’s starting to get frustrated in the big pile of files still in folders under the proper folder. To Thalia, that meant she had to sift through two different sections to find the files she was looking for. It seems that everyone knows the faults to be amended but no one’s sticking out there and laying down the word and if so, the other people aren’t listening.

Talk of Another Administrator

Najla told me that she was starting some legal night course soon in which she’s already completed a year and just wants to finish it off. I know that when Najla starts this course, things will only get worse for her at work. Najla just won’t have the drive to do anything else but briefs through the day and guess who’s going to get everything else… What keeps me content and makes me worry for my own sanity at work is how Thalia today noted that no one ever gets fired from legal.

This does relieve me to some point but as I know Najla isn’t doing her fair share, I get disillusioned by Najla’s insistence for another administrator. To Najla, another person for administration will be her way of easing her procrastinating pressures onto someone else, the diminutive tasks if you may. However, with my being able to handle the workload and everything else Najla dishes out to me with her loitering, I still believe that I can handle the workload without getting too stressed and without the need of another admin. However, if we do ever agree on a new admin, it will only be to satisfy Najla’s needs.

A Flickering Light in Legal

When the mail was complete, I started on my first brief, bearing the new problem in our workplace that could only happen to us. Not sure exactly when it happened but I think last Friday, the light started flickering at work. Being those long double lights in a Perspex thing lining the whole of the workplace, ours seemed to be the only one flickering. Hoping to god that it would soon just die, we had to put up with what would normally give people in Japan an epileptic seizure after watching those cartoons with flickering characters.

Like Anneliese also pointed out today at the meeting, the legal department is treated like second citizens as opposed to the claims department. Anneliese explained how there was a tense rivalry between the two over the years and I have certainly sensed it upon starting at HIH. As Anneliese complained about our chairs and how back in the other office they used to have proper typing chairs, she made the point that if it was claims asking for new chairs, it wouldn’t have been in a slow and faltering process for the last year and a half.

From this, I drew the point of thought that like the chairs, anything to be fixed in our department was laggardly slow. Take this light for example. All we need is some guy to come in with a little ladder and fix a bulb but as Jana has sent out an email to the right department, nothing has been done yet. When we have a problem with the computers some guy usually comes around straight away but as with the hole puncher I broke more than a month ago, it still hasn’t come back to us fixed.

The Printer Breaks Down

Speaking of things getting broken and claims getting class treatment, the printer for Legal broke down during my stint of printing covers for the briefs. This caused me to send out some of them late in the afternoon or not at all and as I had Blythe help me out with the situation, we called some people to get it fixed. Blythe seems to be very good with problem solving when it comes to our work environment and if a computer is broken, you can be sure she’ll be on that query in no time.

Anyway, I received a call twice in regards to the printer not printing anything out and after half an hour, the problem was solved. This was all at the end of the day and as to make a note of progress to my leisure, I picked up the pace with briefs. Taking on a huge manhunt, I tracked down seven to nine of my files to get photocopied and ringing up Diskovery near the end of the day, I was ready for them to take them off my hands and rip through them so I could have aplenty for the next working day.

Ten minutes from the end of the day Najla received a call from Diskovery noting that they would be five minutes late but they would pick up the documents granting that someone was staying back after hours in the building. Knowing that Jana or someone would have stayed back, it would have been a great idea but Najla prolonged the pickup until Wednesday because she thought she’d have to wait around for the files.