Insight

I got into the office smiling, totally unaware of what lay in store for me. First it started with the tea lady who missed a step and poured a hot cup of black coffee on my trousers. I had yelped in pain, jumping up from my seat and had hit a colleague’s laptop right off the desk onto the floor and none of us needed a diviner to know the screen had cracked.

The problem was that it was that system that had the financials that my colleague had been working on for the presentation to be held that morning to the board at 9.45am. The time was 8.30am and there was no way in hell we could put it together on time on another system, considering it had taken 4 days to put the numbers together. Of course, the presentation went pear-shaped. My boss, Keith, tried the best he could to improvise after explaining to the board the unfortunate incidence. While a very tiny part of me was happy that he was under fire, since it’s not like he’s a nice guy, I felt really bad for him at the moment. The board had shredded him. Somehow, these old men in horn-rimmed glasses and pot-bellies appeared to expect him to have every detail of the financial reports, which was about 15 slides, all in his head.

They shredded him…and he shredded us – but I had had enough for one day…

So after going from an understanding smile to a straight face, to trying to explain that there was not much I could do about the episode, I finally lost my cool and we had a shouting match, and then out of nowhere, he had slapped me…

The room fell silent, colleagues turned from their work, eyes had widened in shock – and we ALL knew that finally, I had gained an amazing opportunity. The nicer but nastier way to sort this out was to walk straight to the Human Resource office. There would be a summoning, and my boss would become a job seeker because his actions fell under gross misconduct – and that had only one outcome; Instant dismissal. The other way was just as bad – and twice as satisfying! I would slap him, HARD, and then people would wade in. Though it was gross misconduct, since BOTH parties had defaulted, it would be easier to let the matter die out in the office. It would just be some sizzling buzz in the grapevine for a long long time that I was one who was finally able to slap the boss – and get away with it.

This was my moment and as I drew my hand back to retaliate and our eyes locked, I knew he comprehended what was about to happen and then I thought I saw for a split second the look of sadness as…

The hand trailed an arc and connected firmly, hitting hard and somewhere, I saw a rivulet of blood trace an arc in an obscenely slow dance before coming to rest in spattered droplets on the floor next to the quivering feet of the little kid who stood shaking in the corner. My eyes widened with shock and locked with a kid whose eyes had widened in fear. On the floor, the woman lay in a heap and I could see that her nose and mouth were bleeding from the slap. This had happened more than once and I could see that her arms had been drawn to shield her head and her knees were drawn up around her body. I did not understand the reason for the position she had assumed – till he started kicking her, the big brute who she called husband and who was the father of the quivering kid in the corner. The kid who was crying, hurting

Learning...

Then he had lunged at his father, tugging at him and trying to pull him away and get him to do less damage to a mother whose soul was as broken as her body. Without hesitation, the brute of a father had turned round and smashed the back of his hand against the head of the kid who looked like he was about 7 years old. The neck snapped back so hard that I thought it would break, the legs let go of the ground as the little child was carried about 2 feet across the room before slamming into a stool with a half-drunk glass of water. The glass had exploded into a thousand pieces, and then everything slowed, allowing me to see the kid rolling quickly to his feet, facing his dad like an enraged beast, as though something had snapped and transformed the baby-faced child into a monster – and the kid had screamed.

It was frustration. It was anger. It was defiance.

It was a deep kind of pain.

And I saw the kid slap his first girlfriend, and saw him walk away from his dad as his father lay breathing his last with cancer ravaging what was left of him, and as he died in the hospital room that stank of that debilitating disease, alone, now that he had left a trail of bitterness and hate in a son who never forgave him for the death of a mother who had died of depression, a broken heart – and a cocaine overdose. I saw the kids struggle to control an uncontrollable temper that he had gotten from his abusive father, saw him hate himself, cut himself to have an outlet for the constant pain that he could not explain, the pain that would not go away. I saw the kid work hard to be a better person as he strove to muffle the pain inside with success, women, wine and a higher rung on the career ladder.

And I saw the kid as he stood in front of me with sadness in his eyes because, despite his best efforts, the dam had broken again and that torrent of bile and bitterness that lay underneath the surface had come through.

Again.

And my hand fell limply to my side because I saw the kid stand before me, in the best of suits, with a good perfume, with a career record that had made the kid my boss.

And as the tears fell from my face, before he said he was sorry again, and again, and again, I understood, because for once in my life, I had been allowed to walk in the other man’s shoes, to know  as I am known.

And to understand....