Mr Lee

Mr Lee works in the printing room at the office. He zaps and binds our papers, documents, etc, whatever that needed his expertise in operating those strange machines that we're not familiar with.

He is the king of the room and oh, he swaggers around so in his domain.

He is perceived to be a grouchy old man. We've heard him yell at colleagues for dumping last minute work on him. He can get really loud. And sometimes really crude. He can go on and on for hours complaining about something that happened the week before. I doubt anyone likes him very much. Should they need to cross their path, they'd whisper his name with some measure of fear and mostly distaste.

Mr Lee gets along okay with 2 or 3 of the colleagues. He goes out for lunch with 1 and chats with the other 2 sometimes. The rest of the day, he stomps around with this sullen look.

I too, have to use the printing room and needed his help. That, he grudgingly gave at the beginning. That's part of his job, so he has to fulfil my printing requests. So I never care about his mood. To me, it's just work.

Initially, when I breezily went "Good morning Mr Lee!", he just grunted at me. I would just ask him questions like "Have you eaten?", "So much work ah? 12 o'clock already, go for lunch first then do lah!" , and hung around to wait for his answers which were still given in grunts and growls.

But I noticed he did my printing jobs really fast and he knew exactly how I wanted my papers to be bound. Frankly, I found him helpful and efficient. So I made it a point to hop by the printing room just to say hi to him. I also passed him small Christmas gifts and Chinese New Year cookies.

By and by, he stopped the grunting and graduated to talking with me. Nowadays, he'll go "Morning, <insert Imp's name> ." He would also gripe about unreasonable demands from the colleagues. He would tell me about how early he wakes up and what he did when he took leave.

He knew that I'd be shifting down to the Level 2 office. (Just like how the cleaners and the tea lady knew. You gotta give credit to the office grapevine man.) So today, he asked me when I would be shifting.

I gave him a cheeky reply. "April! I'll still come up and disturb you though!"

The perpetual scowl on his face broke into a smile. "No no. No disturb. Come visit me." He said.

I grinned.

Mr Lee is not so fierce after all.