The Perfect Way of Placing Your Foot in Your Mouth, Chewing It Up to Bits and Spitting it Out

I have a cool boss. I seriously do. He smokes a pipe (susah okay, nak tengok orang muda smoke pipe ni) and I really do learn something new from him everytime I have a proper conversation with him.

He also opted not to tell anyone when, one day, after a particularly grueling and hectic day at work which left my brain in shambles, I walked out of my room with my bags and files in my arms, all ready to go home, totally barefoot. Obviously, he pointed it out just as I was pressing the switch for the door and in shock and embarrassment, I ran back to my office and grabbed my shoes. For those of you who don't know, when I'm really busy with work, I tend to take off my shoes and sit with both legs on the chair because it's more comfortable that way. But I digress. Let's move on.


Anyway, my boss decided that he wants to revamp the company's newsletter cum brochure cum booklet and asked me to go through the whole thing while he was outstation. Upon his return, we would discuss any changes I had to suggest. That was last week.

The point of the story is coming up, I swear.

So on Monday, he comes to work, and instead of summoning me to his office, he comes to mine (echeheh, macam ada office sendiri. Padahalll, kena share 2 orang) and asks me, "So, what should we change about the booklet?"

Without missing a beat, I answered "The grammar" and laughed. (Ok, ok, in my defence, I did TESL and grammatical mistakes make me grit me teeth and I am aware I've got mistakes in my blog, but it's a blog, tqvm, not a formal document)

He blinked, said "Ahh.. yeah.. ok. What else, d'you think?", pulls out a chair and sits at the corner of my desk.

And so we started discussing the booklet and ways to improve it.

Halfway through, he flips through the booklet and says nonchalantly, "so, anyway, back then, I had to come up with all these articles myself" and I immediately felt my face burn with embarrassment.

Let's rewind. The first thing he asked me was what we should change about the booklet. I replied grammar. And it turned out that he wrote the whole thing. In short, I told my boss that his grammar is flawed TO HIS FACE.

Foot in mouth? Yes, I would certainly say so.

Luckily, I also remember that during my interview, he did say that he needed someone with good english because his wasn't that good.

I hope he wasn't offended (cross fingers)