“Send her to make keys.”

The chubby bald man obeyed. I remember that he wore the queerest glasses I have ever seen; they were exceptionally thick, very rectangular, and somewhat dimmed out by the black frame. His belly extended at least one and a half feet below his belt, but it didn’t look like jell-O. It looked firm in a strange way. Max himself looked like he has just popped out of a cartoon.

When I first set foot in that dungeon, Max introduced himself as “Maher, but everyone calls me Max.” He didn’t look like a Max to me, maybe a Boobah at best. I made sure my face did not reveal what I was thinking. To be honest, I was thinking “You looked so much better on the phone, Boobah!”

And he did. I had imagined him to be a tall, athletic, blond guy with a perfect smile and a taste in fine art, or at least nice hands. You see, he had a deep quality to his voice and it’s easy to drift away with that type of tone. Reality, on the other hand, was a totally different thing.

Max reached into his pocket and fished out some keys attached to a round key chain. He handed them to me and asked me to go make my own copies. An office virgin as I was, I didn’t mind. Besides, I thought I would get out of the dungeon and enjoy the sun outside. After all, the weather that day was great and the dungeon was full of strangers and suspicious cartoon characters.

I returned at around 10, triumphant. I felt proud that now I had keys to an important office, and on my first day, too! I figured they must have seen my potential, the sparkle of success in my eyes, my professionalism. They trusted me in a blink.

“We’re ordering breakfast now, want anything?”

I passed. Max ordered something and our German boss passed. Klaus had made his breakfast at home and brought it with him to the office. He gave me a task to do and sat to his desk reading e-mails from Berlin and mumbling under his breath what seemed like nasty curses in German. Then the unthinkable happened…

Klaus and I shared the same office. Not for lack of space mind you, but because our work was both crucial and intertwined and consequently we could not be separated physically. To add insult to injury, the window of our office was right next to Klaus’ desk so he was in complete control of it. At this point, it was closed shut.

I was absorbed in my task when I heard the sound of a plastic bag being pulled out from a cupboard. I looked at Klaus and there he was, extracting a tomato from a blue plastic bag. His bulldog cheeks were filling with saliva as his big wrinkly hands searched harder in the bag for something else. That something else was a boiled egg, and a salt shaker.

No way he is going to eat that in a closed space with a closed window with a newbie in the house? Think again! I watched as Klaus’ email reading was replaced with boiled egg biting, tomato consuming, and salt adding. Rinse and repeat, over, and over, and over again.

The room smelled horrible. The old man himself definitely came from a remote hole where they had no table manners or common courtesy. His food was not only offensively smelly, but it also sounded like ten little men and a pig were fighting over poop in a pigsty. Yeah, that twisted.

Chew. Chew. Drool. Add salt. Chew. Spit. Drool. Chew. Spill something. Chew.

I was not so sure about how I felt towards my new job anymore. The words “boiled eggs” and “professional” did not seem to go so well together. Said episode lasted for about ten minutes, but I was scarred for life.

TO BE CONTINUED…