Today I received my first appraisal letter at office. This was after slogging eighteen months in a place I had hated and yet worked more than I imagined myself to be ever capable of doing so. If someone would ask me how it was, I would say that in a world where a handful of petty things cost a fortune, it was a broke reward. I cursed top management for being a butcher and eating away all money of nameless hard workers and counted myself as one. I don’t have mixed feelings for it because the taste of it was clearly sour. It was news of failure but unlike a result webpage which clearly screams in your face that you could not make it, this one was more polished, like some honorable rejection to a proposal; it started with a thanks and had congratulatory tone to it. I realized being shown door to a glasshouse with a can of trash in it. The letter was also cryptic since it had figures of watermelon and gizmo lights to hide the obvious realities it talked of and when I had sought help of a distant co worker who had more experience than me in reading alien sounding boxes of package structure, he gently told me it’s almost same as what you were already getting. I can say that money is not an important part of my life but since I have lost much more than what I have gained in last one and a half year here at the job, both personally and professionally, I felt being slapped. Hard! As a kid at home when I was low and depressed, I used to hide under the bed or behind an Almirah and search for places to cry where there was isolation. On the contrary now that I feel it brings me lower to my already low state of mind, and the fact that I am supposedly a grown up, I try to take refuge under disco lights, sitting next to strangers and with loud music cacophony in the background in a lounge or bar on the other side of town. I asked the bartender for offering list who was as miserable as all those people on the couch next to me celebrating a birthday, singing the kind of sad birthday jingle that fades awkwardly and people look at each other wondering whether to sing it completely or not. He handed me a menu without looking into my eyes, I know it was because he was not paying attention to me, the most humble dressed man on the place, but I would like to believe that it was because he was ashamed of the overpriced content that rested in it, waiting to come out like a joke on the reader.
To be continued…