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Epi said that it is a symptom of blood hypertension. I don’t know if it’s true but it certainly didn’t feel good. So starting this week, I’ve been trying to reduce my coffee consumption, from three cups to just one cup a day. I still remember the day I started to do this on Monday, I was so sleepy at work. Plus, I had to go to the campus. Seriously, it was painful. I barely can open my eyes to listen to the lecture. I think I went to the bathroom like 5-6 times in 3 hours, just to wash my face.

Anywho.

A couple days ago, one of my closest friends suggested me to drink tea instead of coffee. She told me that tea also has this chemical substance, called “Tein” that can prevent you from being a sleepy head. Cafein is still stronger though, she added. But at least, I kind of believe that tea is still healthier than coffee. Oh, she also told me to read this article from Sunday edition of Kompas about a some kind of tea house, or you can just read it here. It’s a very interesting article.

I know, perhaps the reason why I’m always rather sleepy at the office is just because I lack of sleep. Well, it’s just I don’t to waste my ‘life’ by being a “living robot” if you know what I mean. I don’t want to be like “you wake up in the morning, go to the office, go to the campus, sleep, wake up, go to the office, and so on.” I consider that as a waste of my precious living time. So rather than go to sleep earlier, I prefer to do my own things first. Something like this for example. Blogging. It relaxes me when I’m able to write down what I’ve been through this day or when I’m able to write down what’s inside my head. Not to mention about the extra benefit. My English skill gets sharpen with every single post I write.

I have a plan that someday (perhaps when I’m 35++), I’ll open my own coffee shop. I just love coffee. I love the smell. I love the bitter taste of it. Though I’m not a coffee expert (yet). Oh, not to mention that it is indeed the perfect drink to accompany me when I smoke. Cafein plus Nicotine equals?  Hahaha. Anyways, I think it doesn’t hurt to try to live healthier. Guess I’ll start from reducing my coffee consumption first.

Lastly, a bit of review of the day before I go to sleep.

Today I went to my office (not my client’s). I got a bit irritated this morning because a junior asked me whether I didn’t have anything to do this day. My reply? Simple.

“It’s a very big difference between one who just works so damn efficient (like me) and one who just can’t get anything done.”

A bitch slap straight on the face, I’d say.

(Don’t blame me. I just love being sarcastic to these kind of people.)

Next. My Boss made another update about Encryption Key which I have to apply to all of the applications. Then I got news that my client’s developer team haven’t did any updates I’ve given them from May 26. I got annoyed, because that means another delay for quality control team to check the updates. And for users, they wouldn’t give a damn whose fault is it. All they know that the IT team wasn’t able to work appropriately in terms of schedule.

Anyways, next. I went to the campus right on five o’clock. In case you’re wondering about my resignation post, which in one part I wrote that I have to go to the campus at 4 or 4.30, it’s just because the campus is not very far from my office. And today, I have a Managerial Accounting class and we learned about the Activity Based Costing system. After that, my study group wanted to discuss about our papers first. So we discussed about it until 11 p.m and then I went home.

That’s all for today. Sorry I still haven’t continue my post about my resignation or my proposal to Epi. I just don’t have the mood yet. So until the next post. Cheers.

Me: What is it, Mom?

Mom: Ko, tell Epi to tell her mother that we are going to visit her family this 12th of December. (By the way, “Ko” is a short for “Koko”. It’s an Indonesian to call the oldest son in the family.)

Me: What?

Mom: Well, I see that you both are matched to each other, so I want to make a proposal with her family. Of course, you will not get married soon. But after you graduated later.

Me: If this is a joke, it isn’t funny at all.

Mom: Of course it’s no joke, you stupid. She’s the only daughter and she’s 4 years older than you. I will feel bad to her family if I don’t do this proposal thing as soon as possible, you understand? Besides, you know that you need her. She completes you, am I not correct? Not to mention that she’s a very nice girl too. I like her.

Me: *nods* (thinking of what happened for the last few months before)

Mom: So yeah, it’s already been settled. I have bought the gold necklace with your saving, so everything’s already prepared.

Me: Wow, you’re fast.

Mom: Heh, it’s me that you’re talking to, remember? (Now I know the source of my narcissism)

Me: Okay then, December 12 it is. Oh, can I see the necklace first? I hope it’s a white gold one.

Mom: Nah, it’s the yellow one. Its price is more stable than white gold. Here it is.

Me: Uh oh… It’s real nice. But Mom.. it adds like 15 years for the user.

Mom:

Me: Hm.. Doesn’t matter anyways. It’s not like she’s going to use it everytime. Anyways, it’s very nice, Mom. Thank you. *kissed her cheek*

Mom: Mmmhmm.

Me: Okay then, I’m gonna take a shower first, then I’ll let Epi know.

***

So I told Epi about it, and at first, she was surprised too just like me. I mean, she already knew that this was coming (and so did I), but we never imagined that it would be this early. But well, it wasn’t really a big deal, so she told her parents that me and my Mom will be going there in a week.

Truth to be told, it was one of my longest week of my entire life. I spent almost the whole time thinking and thinking about whether I was ready for this. Whether I was ready to get to the next level of commitment.

It’s a shame for me to remember a stupidity that I once made before, but I can’t deny that I’ve made a mistake. A very big one. There was a doubt in my head, afraid that I would do such thing again. Or I can simply say: at first, I wasn’t really ready for it.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

December 12, 2009.

We got to the airport by 9 in the morning and the flight itself took only like around 15 minutes to depart and land. But the flight was too bumpy, I mean, like shaky or something like that. Perhaps I was just not used to take a small aeroplane to travel.

Anywho, by the time we landed, Epi’s family, along with her relatives picked us up. Then we went to this restaurant, which I forgot the name (you can ask Epi later) and had a lunch together. That time, Epi’s Mom or Dad, still didn’t know that I smoke cigarettes. I didn’t have any plan to let them know yet, because Epi thought it was a bad idea.

It’s just a common thing for a smoker to smoke, especially after eating right? That’s exactly what I tried to do. I excused myself and told them that I want to go to the bathroom. And what happened next was “this-is-exactly-why-i-never-get-used-to-travel-with-mom” thing.

Epi’s Mom: Didn’t you just go to the bathroom before we eat?

Me: I pee a lot.

My Mom: (out of nowhere) He’s probably going to smoke.

Epi’s Dad, Mom, Uncle and Aunt: He smokes?

My Mom: Ever since junior high school.

Me (at approximately 7-8 metres distance): OMG!?@#

***

Okay so, now I was so busted. Totally.

The good thing is, I don’t have to play hide and smoke anymore. The bad thing is, this made me worried a bit because I didn’t have any idea how this would affect her parents.

But anyways, after a couple of chit chat, we continued our journey, destination: Epi’s home. It was my first time seeing her home so I had no idea at all about her childhood environment conditions. We arrived there.. probably like 30-40 minutes later. So yeah, it was quite far, considering that Lampung is not too crowded like Jakarta.

We sat down at her guest room and got served with a lot of sweets and cakes. With the addition of chinese tea, of course. What will a chinese ceremony be without a chinese tea, right?

And so My Mom began the conversation. She asked Epi’s parent permission to have me, Nathan The Great, to marry her daughter in 2 years, after I graduated. At that point, it never occured once in my head, that I would have a slightest thinking that I would get rejected by her parents. But all of the sudden, it came to me.

For fuck sake, I was shaking! I was afraid that her Mom will say: “I’m not gonna marry my daughter with a smoker.” or something like… “Your son is just too young for my daughter.”, etc.

But thank God my wildest imagination didn’t happen. Epi’s Mom agreed and we continued the next phase of the ceremony. It was time for me to put the necklace on Epi. I was still shaking at this moment, and God! both of my hands were sweating like crazy! I remember Epi chuckled a bit seeing me that nervous.

I’m quite sure you can imagine how hard it is to put a necklace on someone’s neck with your hand sweating like that. Finally, after 3-4 minutes, I managed to put the necklace on Epi.

That’s it. It’s all done.

(Seriously, I felt like I was a joke and made everybody laughed.)

Anywho, we chatted a bit more after that and then Epi’s uncle took me to the hotel.

It was exactly when I reached the hotel, unpacked my stuffs, I got this sudden and unpleasant feeling. I felt like I wanted to meet and spend my time with Epi so much, even with the fact that I was just with her a couple minutes ago. All of sudden, those 3 hours of waiting for dinner had successfully became the longest 3 hours in my entire life.I immediately called her, asked her if she wanted to come to the hotel now… and I had this urge feeling of wanting her to be beside me forever..

End of Part 1

To be continued..

Notes:

Sorry, but I just had 4 e-mails from my Boss and those are updates for bugs fixing. It’s already 1 a.m now, but I want to get it done before I update it tommorow morning. So I’ll continue this post most likely tomorrow.

Before I get to the main story about how we spend our time together last Friday, I would like to introduce you first to the team members first.

CGISS Enteprise 1st Generation (CE1G)

From left to right: Harry, Hendry, Nathan, Yuli, Juju, Chandra, Shianty, Fitry

Actually there’s one more person that should be in that picture. But unfortunately, he wasn’t able to join us that day. He is one of the most senior employees in the company and we all claimed him as a “person who knows almost everything” a.k.a Ricky H. Sinaga.

Anywho.

This dinner event took place at Dermaga One seafood restaurant, Ancol. Oh besides the CE1G, came also my Boss with his family, the Central Operation manager and the office boy who have always been our good companion when we’re having overtimes at the office. So yeah, it was pretty crowded.

And since we have Harry in this event, we have to be extra-prepared especially for the foods and drinks. You can see from the picture above there were quite a lot of foods for us there. My table, along with Hendry and Harry, is the one at the bottom side of the picture. There were 2 portions of sweet and sour prawns, 1 portion of black pepper crab, 1 portion of grilled cake fish and 2 portions of deep fried squids on our table.

Believe it or not. Those foods got cleaned in just ten minutes.

Well, that day I haven’t had either breakfast or lunch, so I was pretty hungry that time. The foods were great too. So.. combine me being hungry, Harry and good foods, you’ll get chaos on the dinner table. The picture below was what happened approximately 15 minutes after we started eating. The only thing left on the table, was the fish. And I didn’t like the fish that much, because its taste just not that good.

We were still hungry even after we emptied our table so we had to wait for the other two to pass the foods to us. There’s this funny thing, when there was only 1 deep fried squid left on our table. Hendry already took it from the plate, dipped it into the mayo sauce and ready to eat it. But all of sudden, Harry saw it, snatched the squid from Hendry’s hand and put it into his mouth. I and Hendry were speechless.

We were amazed not just because Harry snatched the food from Hendry’s hand, but Harry just acted like nothing happen. He just ate, ate and ate all the foods that visible from his eyes. Simply amazing, eh?

Anywho.

We finished eating at 8.30 p.m. After a couple of photo shots and a brief speech from the Boss and me for the team, me and the CE1G were ready to go to our next event, which is Karaoke!

We chose NAV Family karaoke at Sunter Mall, which is not very far from Ancol. And since we still had around 700,000 IDR remaining for our budget, we chose the Super Suite Room, which is originally a room with the capacity for 20 people. So yeah, we had a lot of fun. Not to mention that we ordered a couple of overpriced drinks too.

At first, not all of us would want to sing with the mic, which mostly perhaps it was just a matter of confidence. So I had to try something. I chose a song from R. Kelly, “I Believe I Can Fly”, which I believe empathizes our conditions at that moment. And voila! We were all singing this song.  Anyhow.. We sang for two hours, and after me and Harry sang a closing song “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”, I barely had any voices left and my throat ached like hell. So we decided that it’s time to wrap up and go home.

Personally I had a good time. I really believe that this would boost my team’s morale especially knowing that we are going to have a phase two for AAD project very soon. This second phase will include Customer Relationship Management system, WorkFlow system, Data Warehouse and perhaps Executive Information System. Those systems has never been done before (at least by our company), so it will be tougher than before. But for me, who live from challenges, this would be a great chance to prove and push myself even higher to the next level.

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Friday evening, he gave me an assignment to polish the application I’ve made. I worked on it until 11 P.M that day and continued to work again at home until 3 A.M in the morning. I promised Epi that I would go out with her instead of going to the office so I just knew I had to finish the assignment the Boss gave me that day.

And so I thought I’ve done my part.

It was 10.30 A.M when I woke up with a start, seeing there were already 5 text-messages appeared in my mobile phone. One of them was from the Boss.
It says : “Nathan, are you at the office already? I’m on my way there.”

Immediately after I read that message, I replied :
“I’m sorry, Sir. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to go to the office today. And don’t worry because I’ve already done what you told me yesterday.”

He replied me again after that and somehow I can feel the dissapointment from his message. I called Epi to discuss about it, if she thought the same way as I did. And I was right, she can feel it too. So I told her that I’d only go to the office if she let me. Otherwise, I’d just gonna be stubborn and ignore the message.

Once again, Epi proved to me that she’s a worthy girl to be together with. She understood completely of what condition I was in and told me to go and get my work done. I was happy but on the other side, I was completely upset too. Not just because I’ve worked all night already but also, I didn’t get any message or anyone to tell me that I have to go to work on Saturday. I’m not exaggerating about this, because Hendry, he was told to come but I wasn’t. When I found out about it, I felt myself rejected. Unwanted.

I tried my best to stay positive about it. I thought, it’s okay if noone wanted me to come as long as my Boss still wants me to. He showed how upset he was when I told him I won’t be able to come. In other words, he wants me to come. He needs me.

Just at the moment I thought everything is fine (as in I wasn’t upset anymore), I was wrong. Apparently, when my Boss checked the result of my work, I’ve carelessly left some parts undone and for the very first time, he talked to me with such an angry tone.

I clenched my fist and jaw so tight because I was trying so hard to suppress my anger and dissapointment. I’ve never thought of such treatment after I’ve very much showed my efforts. But at the same time, I knew that I was wrong and he was right.

I remember one time I talked to one of my juniors.

“In this company, it doesn’t matter if you come on 11 in the morning and go home on time as long as you got your works done. And of course, it also doesn’t matter if you come on time but go home late at night if you can’t get your works done. You got what I’m sayin’ ?”

That is one point. The second one, too, I told to the same person.

“You want to know why I am being so hard on you? Telling you to debug all the time? Not telling you the exact answers, but the clues to the solution instead?”

He nodded.

“Because I have a high expectation of you and I know that you have the ability to solve the problems by yourself. If I don’t care about you, I’d just give you the answers you need and I won’t be so much caring about the results of your work. I’m doing all this so you’d become better.”

And so I realized this is what exactly my Boss did to me. Obviously, if he doesn’t care much about me, he wouldn’t be that upset, would he? If he doesn’t believe I have the abilities to get the job done, he wouldn’t be speaking with such an angry tone, would he? Not to mention he had all rights to be upset at me because I didn’t get the job done.

Just when I talked to Hendry about this, he made me flattered by saying he was impressed by the improvement since he’d known me.

“Seriously, compared to the first time I met you in this company, you’ve improved way better. You have become more mature now and could control your emotion better.”

With a big smile on my face, I continued to happily finish my work and went home at 6.30 P.M that day. Then I went to pick Epi up, rent a DVD and watched the movie Coraline together with Epi.

(Currently) 953 Lines of VB .NET Code.

..and finally, 1499 lines of ASP/HTML Code.

I am so ready for my next project – full conversion of CGISS core applications from desktop version to web version. But before that, I think I could use these two days to rest a bit, especially when he is currently away on his holiday.