‘Whoever said that working in a male dominated world is easy, lied through their teeth!’

There I was, the newbie working at a construction company and on top of it, the only female.

I had a tough time settling in. It felt as if I were dumped into the deepest end of the ocean, and just left there to find the safest and quickest way back to shore, whilst evading blue bottles, bamboos, sharks and catfish.

Everyone wanted to be the boss.

What they didn’t know was that I silently scrutinized every one of them, their body language, character and most importantly, their productivity.

There were the ‘so-called seniors’.
‘We, we, we’.
We say, and everyone else does and listens, because ‘we’ are in charge.
Or so they thought.

I classified them as ‘wannabe boss’s’ who rode on the company’s gravy train.

Then came the boss’s ‘blue eyed boy’,
Who could not set a foot wrong in his eyes according to the seniors.

Followed by the manipulators,
Who caused havoc, then sat back and laughed at their own stupidity.

Last but not the least, the slow one who worked at a snail’s pace,
Typed two words every hour and spent the rest of the time talking on the phone.

And then there was yours truly. Me
The ‘nobody’ who escaped at 4:30pm every afternoon before the boss decided there was something he needed to discuss, and I end up missing my bus. (It became the office joke) 😀

Nevertheless, as time went by, I became ‘the listener’ and my actual boss, ‘the mentor.’
He taught me,
How to run a business
How to deal with difficult clients
How to remain levelheaded and calm when everything seems upside down, and many more.

Whether he did this knowingly or unknowingly, will always remain a mystery.

Notwithstanding, as I look back now many years later, I realize that the whole happy lot from ‘the seniors’ to the ‘two-word typist’ was and is none the wiser, and the dish ran away with the spoon.