Archive for August, 2008

Posted on August 18, 2008 - by Abner

Knock Knock No One’s There

Chattering and laughters boomed from the customer service department as I walked in. That is the only area buzzing with activities on a Monday morning. A handful of racketeers has already huddled together trading stories and opinions. Ignored them. My smart ass remarks will come later, after I get some breakfast, and it was Cantonese-style Yee Mee and Deep Fried Spring Roll today. Never laid a finger on the Tapioca Pudding/Cake. Never tried. It just don’t look friendly enough to be introduced to my system.

Planted myself with a loud bang against the partition and eyes darted in my direction. A weak smile and started poking at my food. The yee mee is a bit on the salty side and I had successfully managed to throw on my plate a compact mess of noodles, it lies there in dead calmness. Just like how a dead talapia would look, baking itself in a puddle of murky water, in this case my carrot and spring onion littered gravy. Fished for loose noodle ends from that pool and swallowed. Chewed on the thick mess but gave up soon after. I always kept food wastage at a minimal but today was not that day. So I headed for the bin, picking up the momentum whilst hoping that no one would notice me slamming a plate of noodles down. Two meters away from dump site and my boss appeared. I smiled. Looked happily at my food and poked it once. He went pass soon after a word of morning. Glanced left and right… coast is clear. Slam dunk!

The Score
Abner – 1
Cantonese Yee Mee – 0

New plate. 4 pieces of spring rolls. Re-enact the sit, bang on partition scene and munched. This time my ears cocked up on certain keywords and try piecing the stories they are exchanging. It seems my colleagues are tuned into some mild Tales from the Crypt and are quite excited about it. Well, for the guys that is. Apparently 3 of my colleagues was at work yesterday, a Sunday, from 11am – 3pm… 2 girls (i am being kind here) and a guy. They claimed to have heard noises and one of it being the sound of typing on a keyboard originating from my place or near my place. I sit in the far end of the office corner. It freaked them. The fact that the elevator was going up and down dinging and donging on a Sunday afternoon was not comforting. The last straw came when presence was felt sweeping across the small room. She felt as if someone was leaning inches from her cheek. They decided that they rather get screwed by the boss today.

I noticed that the two girls had puffy eyes today. Wonder if they were kept awake by the incident or …

Anyway, where their story ends is where we began. We add spices. Or one might prefer the word comforting them. Relayed to them that how lucky they were that they do not have printer or photocopy machine in there with them. What in the world would happen if the machines went about working on their own. About ‘them’ crawling out of 15″ monitors and getting stuck when they could choose the new 19″ Dell LCD Flat screens.  Or how your colleague turned out to not be your colleague when they answer your calling by twisting their heads 180 degrees back to talk to you in deep hoarse voices.

It seems that sounds of tapping on the Customer Service glass door with no one in sight is common. Oh and several of us flipped our punch cards to blue which is for the latter part of the month but only to come to work to find it in red. The girls are sure they left it in blue and they were the last to leave the office. I was puzzled today too, to find my card showing the red part. I remembered flipping it to the blue when I left on Friday night. And I was the last few to leave too. I am sure I won’t be the last few to leave today though. It’s still the Hungry Ghost month.

Posted on August 1, 2008 - by Abner

Good to be back

It’s good to be back online. My bandwidth usage exceeded it’s limit last month. One of the blogs hosted on my server generated too much traffic that it brought the curtains down on the rest of the blogs. It’s amazing that only one single post was able to do that, but of course it was through the tagging on StumbleUpon that made it all happen overnight. Abnerd.com has not even come close to have 500 First Time Visitors but on Week 29 itself, the Tuzki Icon on BunnyFairy.com managed to get 82,664 First Time Visitors. Bloody hell… what is a freaking crazy figure. And one post alone. The madness eventually delivered coup de grace on my normal hosting package.

Nothing prepared me for it although I kept getting emails informing me of my domain is about to exceed it’s bandwidth limit. Final straw came on July 28th with the title… The domain has reached it’s bandwidth limit. Dang.

So may I ask any of you how should I keep it in check. Hopefully the craze will not last and the figure has dwindled to about 3k plus before we went offline.

On the other hand, it’s Hungry Ghost month and I am tempted to share some encounters here. Just did so with my colleagues.