Today is the last working day of the month. I was just mulling over this during lunch. I don’t know why. It never was a significant thing. Maybe it still isn’t. It may have been just an insignificant fact which popped into my head. But then again lately, I have started marking off insignificant dates and incidents. Maybe there is a subliminal urge to seek out a milestone. I need to know perhaps, where I stand now and what lies ahead. I get nervous when I feel the urge to seek out the next path, the next objective. I feel agitated when I cant see “what’s next”. I’m the sort who keeps peeking over to see what’s around the corner, what’s in the next page, or the next chapter. Somehow I have not managed to live and revel in the here and now. I think that accounts for a large part of my unhappiness. Am I odd?

The Australian labour laws recently went through some tectonic changes. The newest beast in town is a piece of legislation called Work Choices and it changed the face of labour laws in this country. It swung the pendulum firmly in the employer’s favour and it has been on PM Howard’s agenda for a long time. So what has this got to do with me?

I was asked to draft an employment contract for a client a few weeks ago. This was before the new legislation was gazetted but it was “anytime now” sort of scenario. So, that piece of contract evolved. And evolved. And evolved. Fast forward 5-6 weeks later I suddenly have become the firm’s de facto expert on Work choices issues. I now have 5 employment contracts on my table and the boss wants to generate a template for further contracts.

There is a little problem in all of this. I was hitherto, a complete novice on industrial relations matters. I know jack-crap about labour laws. Never practiced it, never had anything to do with it. The closest I have come to working on employment contracts was working on our in-house engagement letters while doing in-house work for a banking group. Those contracts however, never required complete grounds-up drafting. I only had to tweak certain clauses to cater to specific employees. The CEO would scribble specific terms for this or that employee and I would pull out our standard one and only work on those terms. I was usually too busy to re-hash the whole document. More importantly, there was always the HRD to make sure these contracts are consistent with what the organization required.

I guess being in a smallish suburban practice means you get your finger into every pie. I’ve been asked to draw up cause papers in Magistrates and County Court proceedings, dealt with family law matters, did debt recoveries, wrote letters to quasi government bodies and professional bodies and generally did stuff I had never done in my past professional life. I don’t like them. Like I said, I prefer not learning a new language. But that is my lot for now. I have to get used to it. One way or the other. Employment Contracts? Bring them on! For now.

There has been a spate of maladies at home recently. First I had my bouts of hypotension. For almost two weeks, I couldn’t do my runs because I was feeling faint. I only resumed running about week and a half ago. Then Theresa was affected by a mysterious form of allergy which caused itchy rashes to break out all over her body. Thankfully that disappeared after a couple of days and this morning, kiddo woke up with a nose bleed. It turned out she probably picked her nose too hard…

            I guess some in my church would term these “spiritual attacks” and would seek some form of deliverance. Maybe. To me it was just, well… “tough titties”?. Anyway, I did pray and they did go away.

A malady which wont go away is my work malaise. I am increasingly unhappy at work. The reasons are multiple but I guess the overriding one must be the uneasy relationship I have always had with the principal. From the very first week we have not seen eye to eye and it has truly been a wonder I am still with him, after more than 13 months. I prayed of course, but this one has so far refused to go away. Never mind, I will just plug away and see what gives, if anything.         

I just had a conversation with someone, which has triggered a series of memories, none of which is good. I don’t know if I can blog these events now, even if it is important for posterity.

I have chosen not to blog these events to date for 2 reasons: First, I am still shell-shocked. I don’t know if I have fully recovered from the psychological scars these events created. I don’t know if passage of time has meant I can now safely talk about these things in a relatively public domain such as this blog, or should I still remain vigilant and keep these things hidden away. I am after all, still a Malaysian citizen and subject to its laws and more pertinently, its enforcers, especially if and when I am in Malaysia. I still cannot be completely sure I would not be penalized or victimized in any way if I started talking about these things.

Secondly, I no longer have full details of everything that happened. These were incidents I have tried to erase out of my memories and to a large extent, I have succeeded. I’m not sure I can now accurately recall the details to render my accounts more legitimate than they would otherwise appear to be. If I don’t recall dates, names, places and actual exchanges in sufficient details, can I still be credible?

Like I said however, I think they are important events. Like all recorders of history, especially “bad” events, I often feel everyone affected – and I am sure many more like me were affected – should step forward and give a written account of what happened to them, in order to take a stab at correcting the wrong and preventing recurrences.

I write of the events in Malaysia towards the end of 1998, which precipitated a period of fear and anxieties amongst a small group of corporate players and their executives. These events escalated in 1999 and did not abate, for me, till as late as 2004. The bulk of these events happened in 1999 and 2000 however, and I remain haunted by them.

My running intensified, as did my drinking. They were both instrumental in seeing me through this patch. I was by that stage, doing 65-70km per week and drinking more and more scotch. Often I would be in a gym pounding the treadmill at 6.00 o’clock in the morning doing 12-15km before starting “work”, and knock off “work” by around 5.00 o’clock in the evening, proceeding straight to a pub or coffee shop for beers. It is then to some other place, often at home, for sessions with Mr J Walker. It wasn’t until maybe 2003/2004 when I resumed having regular dinners instead of drinks.

I have to try and recall these events. And then I will see if I can write about them…

Kiddo left early this morning with Theresa. She is away for a school camp and will only be back on Friday. She was supposed to be in school at 7.30am this morning, so she woke up pretty early. She was visibly excited and though we are both a wee apprehensive, this is as good a time to “let her go” as any. Letting her go, as in being away for a few days, and not with family or relatives.

This is the first time she would be away for an extended period. When we said that to her she said she had been away before. But that was away in my sister’s house in Penang. She was with her auntie and cousins then. This time, she would be with “strangers” and she would have to be independent.

We prayed for her last night but for various reasons, I wasn’t my usual self last night. I was thinking about various issues at work, issues which have been brewing all along but in the past 3 weeks or so, came to the fore again.

So, what I thought was a week I would look forward to is turning out to be quite different. I feel strange, almost like being in rather new territories. Something is cooking, I hope.

It is almost 5.30pm, on the eve of the Easter holiday. It is a weekend I have been looking forward to all week. I think this is the first time I get to spend a few days with the family, over a “holiday” period.  Don’t know yet what we are going to do (actually I do, but will blog it later) but I know I will try and have a good break. I really feel like I need this one. At the end of our weekly “management” meeting this afternoon, the boss reminded us to think of the true meaning of Easter. That was good – I never had this coming from a boss, or even a colleague, before. If you are reading this, I hope you have a great Easter and that at some point over the next 3-4 days, you too, would get a chance to think about what Easter means to you.

Kiddo had an excursion into the city yesterday. Two classes – hers and another known as 7B – took a train into the city to visit the Immigration Museum and watch an Imax movie. The Imax bit didn’t happen as one of the students climbed onto a hand rail, sat on it and fell backwards, hurting her head. She was apparently quite dazed and the teachers must have panicked to an extent where they cancelled the rest of the program for the day and packed everyone off, back to the school way before. Anyway that isn’t the story for this entry.

On the way back from the city, kiddo took out her a few things from her backpack, including her school diary. The other stuff made their way back into her backpack, but not her diary. The diary, which contains loads of important information, including details of the appointments with her teachers for tonight’s parent-teacher meetings, was left on the train. We had our usual pow-wows about responsibilities, taking care, blah blah blah and all has been forgotten. We had braced ourselves for her to get a new school diary.

A few hours ago, I took a call from an elderly lady. She said she was from Poland, and had settled in Melbourne a number of years ago. She apologised for her accent but said she called because she had found kiddo’s diary, in the train! She had seen another kid take it but insisted that kid gave it to her, as she thought (she is probably right) that the kid would have binned it.

So tonight, we have to take a drive to a suburb known as East Malvern, to retrieve kiddo’s diary. It’s a lucky break for her, to be able to retrieve it.

There are still fair dinkum folks in Melbourne. People who have absolutely nothing to gain from actions like Mrs F’s but did them anyway simply because they are the right things to do. Doing the right thing. If more did the right thing, this world would be a much better place to live in.

Sure there would always be the moral or philosophical argument as to what constitutes the “right thing”. Hang it, I think. I believe in most instances, there is a gut feel to it all, as to what is the right thing to do in any given situation. Most don’t do it in spite of such conviction, because they weighed up the cost and decided it wasn’t worth it. I mean, what if I turned out to be a granny rapist and unimaginably harmed her, when I dropped into her house tonight? Many would have thought of such caution and binned kiddo’s diary, because in many people’s books, doing this “right thing” would not have been worth it.