short fuse

the wall they hammered through, original entrance on the right

the garage after cleaning and packing
i blew my top yesterday, and I'm wandering if this happens to most people,..

under pressure from work and dealing with office renovations, i had to get this place cleaned up,...it has taken three full days, what with most of the office having being dumped into the garage,..i arrived home from a relaxed couple of days on the coast, spent Sunday getting the folks organised for their trip to hong kong and china,on Monday morning,...once they were safely off to the airport the office required attention, clients were calling non-stop and the mess confronting me needed immediate attention.

just getting the garage cleaned, as in the pic above,took a full day...i have this thing, if a thing is what you can call it,..more like a cleaning fetish, the furniture dumped in their had to be washed, then polished.the files had to be dusted and cleaned up, the garage itself got a good top to toe clean up, before the goods could be placed to one side.all this fully well knowing, that we are residing in a construction site, and this will all have to be re-done.
day two was the main office itself, notice the brick work and boarded up wall, well the original door to the boardroom moved to the centre of the wall, construction people being what they are, simply won't inform you, they are banging down the door with a hammer, common sense i believe, would be to unlock the door, screw it off from the hinges, that way no dust , no damage,and a door that can be re-used.since we have a foreman, who is never on site,these guys banged their way through,..

to cut a long story short, here i am at 5pm, with around 20 minutes more clean up work,...being helped by our house help,..abrahm is his name,...at 5pm he looks at his watch and says, "i gotta go", to which i reply,"just a couple more minutes, as i don't want to be doing this tomorrow",...grumpily looking at the watch in his pocket, he says "I'm going" dumps his mop and proceeds out the door.i had asked him to be at work on time this morning, as i new the 5pm scenario, he came in an hour and a half late, which i sincerely felt needed to be pointed out to him at this juncture, he was not interested.

the scene, that followed resembled the lid bursting off a pressure cooker, i screamed loud enough for the pigeons, to fly off the roof in fear,..used language that a sailor would blush at, and fired him right then and there. he was not better than me, if i was down there working my ass off to get things right,and he was employed to do just this job, why the hell, couldn't he get on with it.

surprise, surprise,...this morning i hear a feint tapping on my office door, thinking the builders, were once again requiring something, i turn around to see a meekly smiling abrahm, in work overalls, my first reaction,"i thought i told you not to come back here, ever again". his reply,"so sorry, i wanna work". so here we are, abrahm is back on the job, we have reverted back to our love hate relationship.i give him instructions, he ignores them, and does his own thing,...mostly sleeping in the back yard,..unless it's a day, when I'm supervising some or other clean up operation, than he is forced to work. i seem to remember a study i read during my post grad year, about people employed in menial labour jobs, they hate it, but need the money,cannot officially strike or voice their protest, so the only way to do it, is by deliberately slacking on the job, spitting in the madam's tea,general instances of misbehaviour, usually clandestine, but none the less this small protest gives the person a sense of control,of action,of being the person calling the shots,not the person being controlled .i cannot help but feel sympathy for abrahm, and all those like him,he is doing the job's..that i cannot,being otherwise occupied in my own labours, it's hard work,nevertheless, he agreed to be employed, and here, i feel, that regardless of the job, or the pay,or the conditions,once you have signed a contract, or made the deal, you have an obligation to fulfill that deal.

i sound like the middle class madam, am i so wrong,don't we have expectations of those we employ,..like expecting them to do the job, they are employed to do,...or like the madam and eve cartoon,we employ them,so they can sleep on the ironing board, covered by the daily paper,..pretend to work,and collect their pay at month end....attend loads of funerals, sometimes the grandmother gets killed off every Friday,then there's the taxi strikes,and the sick leave,etc,etc.i am usually able, to accept this, just not yesterday...i wanted the job finished, to my satisfaction,...when this was not forthcoming,i threw the baby out with the bath water, in a manner of speaking.and this morning it was as if yesterday never happened, a figment of my imagination.