Bad News

A couple of weeks ago, Sharyn gave Amanda a DVD box-set of ‘Breaking Bad’.

            “DVDs?” Saffy said. She picked up the box and turned it around. “What is this, 2002? Do we even have a DVD player?”

            Three pairs of eyes swiveled around to look at the hulking 24-inch screen hanging on our wall.

            “That’s what I said, but Sharyn says we can just stream it from my laptop,” Amanda murmured.

            “What does that even mean?” Saffy complained. “Honestly, that woman is like some kind of freaky tech genius!”

            More to the point, I said, the show was notoriously addictive. Did we really want to embark on another mega show again, so soon after ‘24’, I asked.

            “Oh my God, ‘24’!” Saffy moaned. “How many years of my life did I lose watching all eight seasons in three weeks?”

            A brief silence descended on the room as the question struggled with embarrassment.

            “What’s it about anyway?” Amanda asked finally. “For years, it was all anyone in the office could talk about but I was never really interested.”

            “It’s about a high school chemistry teacher who gets cancer and becomes a crystal meth dealer!” Saffy said.

            Amanda lifted a perfectly drawn eyebrow. “How do you get from one to the other? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Saffy shrugged, the action causing her meloned bosom to rise several inches in a way that would’ve caused accidents if she had been standing on the side of the PIE. “Apparently, it’s riveting. I know because every time I caught up with Sharyn, it was all she could talk about.”

            The idea that Sharyn, a working mother of three (or four, I can never remember) and wife, might find time in her busy schedule to be addicted to a television show is beyond me. I consider it a triumph of time management if I manage to get out of bed and into a cab for a lunch appointment.

            “Aiyoh, it’s so good, I tell you!” Sharyn said later that evening when she came over to hook up Amanda’s laptop to our TV. Her fingers flew across the keyboard as she prattled on. “They got one character call Jesse Pinkman. Wah, he, hor, so han-sum, cannot tahan! I tell my husband, why you not got such beautiful blue eyes as him? OK, your HDML is hook up or-redi and your CD player all set up. Ay, pass me the TV remote, please, Jason.”

            “You are so wasted working in HR, Sharyn,” I told her.

            “Yah, lor, but what other job I can be kay-poh into udder people business and shake leg half the time?”

            Saffy later said it was lazy employees like Sharyn who give hardworking HR staff like herself a bad name.

            “I should fire her,” she mused, “but then who would I talk to all day?”

            “OK, I have now pushed the CD into the CD player,” Amanda muttered as she peered at the detailed list of instructions she’d gotten Sharyn to write down on how to operate the TV from her laptop. “I press HDML 2…OK…press play…and…oh my God, it works!”

            “I really hope this is a lousy show,” Saffy said as she settled down on the sofa next to me with a big bowl of popcorn. “But just in case it’s not, I’ve put Bradley on notice that he may not see me for a while.”

            That was a week ago. In that time, both Saffy and Amanda have taken, between them, five MCs just so they can stay home and watch ‘Breaking Bad’.

            “Oh God,” Saffy moaned at one stage, “how many more seasons are there to go? This show is so good!”

            “I’m going to brew some more coffee,” Amanda said as she struggled off the couch.

            “What time is it?” Saffy asked.

            “Two-fifteen.”

            “In the morning?” Saffy’s voice cracked. “Wait, we’ve been watching since ten this morning? Yesterday, I mean! What? Really? How did…”

            “We’re almost done with season three!” Amanda called out from the kitchen. “We have two more seasons to go! We’re more than halfway through!”

            Of course, Sharyn is triumphant. “You see, lah, I tell you, you don’t listen. Very good, right?”

            When she finally showed up in the office, Saffy cornered Sharyn in the ladies’ loo. “I seriously want to have Jesse Pinkman’s baby!”

            Sharyn looked smug. “I know right? So han-sum for an ang-moh!”

            “You’re such a racist, Sharyn,” Saffy said automatically.

            “Where got! There are ten ang-moh in this office, which one is good looking, you tell me?”

            Amanda is convinced some kind of HR law is being broken in Saffy’s office.