if today was your last day

wow i almost forgot my password for this site. i entered my facebook password instead, or was it my twitter password?

it's hard nowadays to remember each and every password i have. of course it would be easier to use the same password for all, but some websites tried to be more intelligent than the others by giving so much password-making restrictions.

i mean, duh.. it's not like i have any earth-shattering secrets that hackers feel the need to hack my passwords.

but i guess, being paranoid is a way of life nowadays. we look at unattended bags and think it belongs to some terrorists. people sneeze and we thought he has H1N1. i got a page from an unknown number in the office and i thought it was from HR.

you'd think what's so scary about getting a page from HR, right? it normally not, but that time i received it in a brink of the company implementing the RIF, or reduction-in-force. by the way,this must be the work of some think-tanks that thought replacing the word 'retrenchment' with some abbreviated unknown word will make the impact less devastating to the common ears.

''company XXX will implement RIF' certainly sounds better than 'company XXX will implement retrenchment' in the news. but for us that potentially affected, who are they kidding?

ok so i got that unknown page, asking me if i'm inside the plant, and if i do, i need to call a certain certain numbers. you know, at that moment, with every heartbeat, i was wondering, oh gosh oh gosh this could be from the HR telling me that i'm RIF-ed.

it turned out a page from another department about some work stuff. what a momentary relief. even when my boss put my fellow colleagues in the mail cc list when he replied me making me think that he was laying some groundworks for people to take over me. paranoid? i do think so.

so you see, that was why i was away for a while from the blogsphere. do you think i will blog when my rice bowl is in jeopardy? it's so much easier to just put vague status updates in facebook that only relevant people that know what's going on can relate too. at least you'd get some replies and know it wasn't totally all inside your head.

in the end, i survived the RIF.

or did i? define survive anyway. because when i think about it, i would get quite a huge payout if i were to (ok i still need to touch wood here) be affected. think about what i could do with all the money that could easily last me for a year. i could travel the world and reflect the reasons of my existance among other things. because let's be honest, when god created mankind, it's not purposely so they could work their asses off in some multi-national company, right? plus, what's good staying in the company that needs to do RIF anyway? maybe survive means the ability to get out sooner with a huge payouts.

instead, now the people who made it through are spoilt. how could they ever tender resignation anymore after this? there will be no payouts whatsoever. you leave empty-handed to a new place. doesn't sound attractive, huh?

but that's life. we go through it in phases. one time you're an active blogger, then you converted to a full-time facebooker and even forgot your blogger password. one time you're living a life that felt so stable, but then things happened and now you're not even sure if you could take another storm unscathed.

i guess, that's what makes us survivors. the dinasours probably couldn't handle all this changes when they were alive, so that's why they got extinct. you know, except those in the museums at night and land of the lost.

tonight, we are going to the KTV in town as a farewell gesture to this friend of us who got affected by the RIF. now that we all live in the world phase which is the aftermath of michael jackson's sudden death this morning, we are probably ended up doing an MJ tribute because truly, as recent events higlighted, nothing ever remains the same.


...ed