Skip to main content

Manager's Birthday

Last Friday was my manager’s birthday. The team decided to surprise her. We started collecting money. On that day, we bought 5 stalks of sunflowers and decorated her workstation with balloons. I brought camera to capture the event.

She was struck speechless when she came into the office to see all the decorations. Later we went for Italian lunch and at 3pm we sang birthday song and had two birthday cakes. Someone bought a really special candle. Upon lighting up, the candle blossom like a flower into 6 little candles and it played the “Happy Birthday” tune. It’s really cute.

On our birthdays, boss will always get a cake. It’s almost like a culture. What people do not know is that these expenses come from her own pocket. She can’t claim from the company. So, when it is her turn, we wanted to do something special for her. Unfortunately, not everyone was cooperative. My manager used to manage two teams. This year, she manages our team. For her birthday, we asked for rm20 contribution from people from both teams. Unfortunately, her previous team mates refused to contribute so much. They rather buy their own gifts. Cheaper they said. That made buying present, flowers and cake difficult. A few of us have to top up. Sometimes, I really wonder.. how come people don’t return the favour that other people do for them? Is it really the manager’s responsibilities to buy cakes for your birthday or is it really out of her own kindness? Sometimes, our manager will have party and barbeque in her house. Again these are expenses from her own pocket. I don’t know why but there are colleagues who just like to take things for granted. What a bunch of cheapskate.

Oh well.. there are different kind of people in the world eh?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to