Inspired by this article, I’m gonna write about a few things that demand me to have certain degree of stress management. Who knows? This might be good way to vent out my frustration.
So here comes my tulan-list and those who are top in the ranking are:-
1) Apple-polishers
Let’s use thesaurus: curry favor, suck up to, brown-nose, flattering, butter up are all synonyms for apple polish, but they are all too mild to manifest just how disgusting and annoying those apple-polishers are.
Cantonese’s “擦鞋仔” (shoe-polisher) sounds not bad, but I like hokkien’s “hu lan pa” (carry someone’s balls) the best! I do not know how to explain the kind of psychological logic, but whenever I get tulan over someone who brownnose too much and never really work hard or to perform, I’ll definitely feel better if I regard him as “the擦鞋仔” or “hu lan pa人”!
I have a story about a “hu lan pa人” who ruffled my feathers recently:-
Ah Kao (pseudonym) is a supervisor for the manufacturing department (analogy) of one factory. He has become the bottleneck of his organization as he’s always too slow to iron out issues that crop up and the excuse he gives is that he’s OVERLOADED!
BUT, he was caught following the head of marketing department (HMD) (analogy: 2 different departments!!!) for outstation trips for which he had no defined objectives to tag along. He’s just the mere driver who was trying to be subservient!
This week, Ah Kao managed to sweet-talk his very own management (manufacturing department it is!) that he needed to visit another factory, ostensibly, to witness some acceptance tests for the newly bought machinery. BUT, from my point of view, this is just another incident of him trying so hard to please the HMD! Out of the 8 hours that he was supposed to work, he spent 3 hours to reach the factory, while waiting for the HMD to come out from his meeting, he spent 2 hours witnessing just 2 out of necessary 10 tests and the rest of the time asking someone to bring him around and cari makan!
He riled 1 of the staffs of the factory by the following conversation:-
Ah Kao: Come, come, come! Bring me go visit the famous char kuey tiaw stall!
Staff: It’s 2.30pm only, and I’m still engagaed with work, shall we go later?
Ah Kao: Wa! Ask you bring me there you have so many excuses! It’s ok, I ask someone else to bring me!