End of the Affair

Scrum master could be quite a braggart. Maybe she was an egoist, or maybe she just had a healthy ego. But she bragged about wholesome stuff: about staying up late, or being scolded by bosses. 

Maybe she was just like Jay Gatsby – easily impressed by the big glamorous stuff. Bit by bit, I was getting withdrawn from her. First, there was a reorg where our team was broken up: she was still nominally in charge of the project, but now she was the outward facing manager, and somebody else with more technical competency would be managing the software development. Then I would be posted out of the department. I had the choice to join the IT department, but ultimately I decided against it. I wasn't going to be the data analyst in the IT department. I wasn't going to continue in the same department if I wasn't going to be alongside her. I wasn't going to see her every day 

There was this thing where she got promoted and moved cubicles, from one in the middle of the aisle to one at the side of the office. I think getting the corner seats is always a symbol of seniority. She was graduating, and she was going to join the ranks of the junior managers. I don't know if she's being overestimated because she's pretty. She's a good listener but I don't know if she's really brainy. Because some people are just good at being mirrors, reflecting the other guy back at him, and then it's easy to fall in love with yourself. 

Then there was this time when I got her to talk about her new cubicle. It turned out that later on, she hit up another one of our team mates – basically the kid sister of Tech Lead. I looked at her a little, and started realising that I'm not very high up in the pecking order when it came to her. It's true that she has every reason in the world to want to win over somebody who's on neutral ground between her and Tech Lead. And she might not be bothered with me because she's already won me over, and I already have one foot out the door. She's always wanted to be part of that gang, and she wasn't. Whereas there would be some stuff that I wouldn't really want to confess to members of the opposite sex, regardless of how much I like them. 

Tech lead wasn't promoted this year. She was promoted last year, and she did make a push for it, but not this year. I didn't think she deserved 2 promotions in a row, but it's just a matter of time before she moves a bit forward. Scrum master was promoted, and tech lead probably thought that she didn't deserve it. I clinched a permanent position, which is something like a promotion. And it turned out that 2 of the people who worked hardest on this project didn't get the promotions they deserved. 

When I look at her, if nothing else, she will teach me one lesson. And that lesson is what “normal” people are like. On one hand, she is not “normal” and probably will never be. She has OCD. And yet she's like a few other people who are known to have OCD – extremely meticulate about caring about their appearance, almost some kind of a genius at being good looking. (Think David Beckham, Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake). And they're generally nice. (But I know one OCD person who isn't really nice.) 

I saw her whatsapp avatar. It's an anime image of somebody gazing into the distance. And somehow there was another friend of mine who also had a similar avatar, a status of Jesus looking out into the distance. There is this soothing calmness about both of these people, like they're drawing you in. They just seem spiritually aware. They're remarkably unneurotic. 

Sometimes I think back on that magical one or two months when I first started having a crush on her, that flighty, woozy feeling of limerance, what I thought falling in love was like as a teenager. I thought about how gratified I was in that moment, and how, for a while, I thought that I would never feel that way ever again. And maybe I'm older, wiser and calmer this time around, I didn't try to make it last. You know that it will come and it will go and one fine day it will go out of the window and never come back. Everything looks different. Everywhere you go, the ground seems to be covered in this magical dust-like substance. Even the most desolate parts of the town seem to be imbued with magic. And she came from a relatively remote part of Singapore. I was all at sea, compared with her: my employment situation wasn't stabilised. Maybe I also looked at her that way, that my gaze was one that was imbued with a bit of desperation. Maybe we had gotten through a rough patch of not delivering the project. 

But a few more stilted attempts at conversation would finally put it to bed: we clicked when it came to work, but there are vast, vast cultural differences which are just impossible to negotiate and overcome. That scrum master is going to be such a mainstay of the cultural scenery of the department in the future is basically a given. She used to be surrounded by girls, and it wasn't hard to hang out with her at her desk: but now she's surrounded by boys. If she was an ENFJ like Obama, she would remind me of some of the “presidential playlists” that he would send out. And they would look like hallmark greeting cards. They would sound sensible. They would be masters of the slogan. They would talk about vague and uplifting sentiments and a lot of people would surround them and repeat, “yes we can” but they would also gloss over the specific details or points of contention. She was a master of the UX. She was good at being the master of ceremonies. 

She made an impression on the IT vice president: she could project herself. Did she play the game? People who make it to managers project an aura of confidence and reassurance that everything was going to be alright. Would I even be capable of this? 

When I started having a crush on her, I saw her as some kind of angel, a guiding light, whose counsel would be driving me forward. But I had to reconcile that to her being some kind of figure of authority whose word would be respected, in spite of all her flaws as a manager. She would paint a picture that would be nice and appealing to the managers, but it would conceal a lot of flaws and defects that are underneath the surface. This was the side of her that would be harder to love. There was the side that it would be frustrating for me to communicate with, and it was probably what drove tech lead up the wall. She probably didn't do a lot of stuff to get plucked out as a manager by the higher ups. But she had one big advantage: she looked the part. She was well groomed and dressed well. That gives you a surprisingly big advantage in our society. She was good at listening, even though she wasn't that great at understanding. I was the other way around, which probably explains why we gelled. 

I had aimed to have some kind of a friendship with her. I don't know about her personal life. I don't know if I succeeded, and I wouldn't know what kind of friendship that would be. I do detect that her interest in me would wane once we were no longer involved in the same project. She doesn't have personal relationship with guys, I noticed: just two of them. And those two would be what I consider to be members of her tribe. I get this feeling that I'm not part of it. As much as I'm generally happy to be solving her problems and she's generally happy to be solving my problems, we don't have a social relationship, and it's hard for me to suss out what that social relationship would be like. She was the most open to me when she was complaining about tech lead, but I didn't like that conversation. You should not talk about another person's bad points because it could make yourself look bad. But it did signal to me – she was more keen on being tech lead's friend than mine. But that's the deal – I've allowed myself to receive so much help from her that I really don't have locus standi to complain about her writing me out of her social life. And there isn't really a lot of room in her social life: she's the kind of person who has sorda good relations with so many people out there that you're not going to have that special relationship with her unless you're really thrown together. 

There was this time I might have called her out to lunch with her to celebrate me obtaining the confirmation of a permanent position. But she requested to ask the boss along, and that was quite the bit of a cold shower. And she somehow had an easier rapport with the boss (whom she had known for longer) than with me. 

I would really have to figure out what it means to be a friend to someone – anyone – before I even think about being someone's boyfriend. 

As for myself, I can remember times in my life when I've managed to exude confidence and charisma. There have been people who have considered me funny and quirky. But I seem to find it hard to be a nice person these days and I got to figure out how I can get that back. I seem to have lost some kind of a hard won balance that I used to have in the past. 

I've been grouchy of late. I know that on some level, she had been some source of emotional support. She would just decide that something had to be done, and I would just light up at the thought of doing it for her. And it would just fulfill some kind of need or something, because more often than not she would make it fit into something. But I no longer have that, I'm in some kind of wilderness now, and I have to pick up the pieces and move on. 

I joined the project, and worked on it for 6 months, and had minimal involvement with scrum master. Then scrum master took over the project, and another six months passed, with her nagging at me here and there before I realised that this was a woman I could fall in love with. And after that I only have six months of working with her before it becomes decreed that we would have to part. I would have to decide whether to join her department, which was IT, or my own department, which was data science. And I opted against joining her IT department. The IT department was a Chinese speaking place, even though all the meetings were conducted in English. That would be a handicap if I couldn't communicate to the developers in Chinese. The data science department would speak English, be more acquainted with the latest technologies. 

Socially, if I were to be in the IT department, I would probably not be working on the same projects as she was. I would be on the data science team, but supervised by IT people who might not understand some of the nuances of my job. I would have to work under conditions that I didn't like - for example, having an IT environment which for security reasons would not allow me to do a lot of things I might have wanted to do. But one of the biggest perks was that I would be working in the same office as her. That wouldn't be a perk at all: I'd have to be yearning to be nearer to her, and we might not be assigned to the same work. And she would be surrounded by a lot of other thirsty guys who may or may not have crushes on her. It would be a situation that I would find quite unsavoury. It would be some kind of suffering. And that's why I have to walk away from her, and leave only my memories behind. In the end, it's that old cliché: 不在乎天长地久,只在乎曾经拥有.