So I miss my car, that heap of rusted teenager car. The car shop sent me photos of my very rusty back bumper that they will replace with a new one.

After the ironworks comes the paint. Hopefully the rains will stop so the humidity will not affect the painting and drying process.

Keeping my fingers crossed that I can hail a taxi tomorrow for my second Covid vax booster and hopefully they can enter my data soon in VaxCertPh so I can generate the ID before I leave for Singapore. Traveling these days is so much of a hassle that I wonder if it’s still worth coming to Seoul in September or October.

I just had a stressful couple of weeks because I had some kind of battle of wills with the parent firm’s HR dept in London. And there’s this guy from legal (also in London) whom I want to punch in the face. He wants to change our contracts in SEAsia to freelancer mode to be paid on a per article basis due to “legal risks” in the old contracts our old company had prior to being acquired by this parent that does not have any idea how to run a media company.

That made me fume.

I told my boss in Shanghai via MS Teams that I will quit and the rest of the team will follow if they touch any of our contracts. It was a risky move but I stood my ground. I asked them to talk to our global editor and even the chief of correspondents (who unfortunately is on holiday) to talk some sense into this asshole.

So I spent the next 24 hours on tenterhooks. My stomach acids went on overdrive and I was in and out of the bathroom this morning while waiting for the verdict.

Finally, the asshole grudgingly relented after calls and calls and some more calls from bosses.

And I searched for him on LinkedIn, the asshole turned out to be this KID who just graduated from law school and is just a legal analyst and yet to be a solicitor. The kind of language he used and the tone of his email sounded like he’s the fucking boss.

I wanted to punch him on the nose. I wanted to kill him.

So now I understand why they’re not announcing my promotion. Doing so would force them to overhaul my contract and that could lead to another battle of wills with London and this d*ckhead.

I knew from the get-go that my transfer to Singapore would have been very complicated had I requested it.

I showed a friend in Edinburgh the LinkedIn profile of that KID and said just give me one chance to make his nose bleed when I get to London. Just one punch would make me so happy.

You know, I was just cheerful last night that I was dancing in my room to my playlist. Then that “ping” from my Outlook and that email thread from that KID who was throwing his weight around eroded the rare happy mode I was in.

No. No one is allowed to ruin my happy mode. Ok?