I sat down with him Monday evening to have a "heart-to-heart" (yeeeh... my flesh creeping already) talk with him. Basically I told him I wasn't comfortable with his terms of endearment.

He tried to explain saying ever since he became a Christian, he treated everybody like a sister or a brother and that he was trying to be friendly. That may be true but I'm a Christian too, my boss is a Christian too, we don't go around calling our employees "girl-girl" or "boy-boy". And I didn't see him being "friendly" with the rest of the fellow colleagues too. wtf. I asked him to try calling our big boss "boy-boy" and see what would happen.

Anyway I was quite blunt and firm with him. I told him his actions were making me very uneasy and if he wouldn't stop... I wouldn't be able to keep him any longer, it would be termination on the spot. Mr. CoW got my drift and said he knew what to do and where to draw the line. ok that settled one problem.

Now the next problem. I have an engineer (Mr. Z) from China. He came to Singapore in 2002~2003 to do a PhD at a local uni (name withheld to protect the guilty). He joined us in 2005 as a part-time staff and became full-time in 2007. Mr. Z's actually quite a nice guy... very hardworking, easy to get along.. not a clock-watcher nor calculative type. But my boss & him had some communication problems.. well.. the short of it... I was asked to let him go.

Why me? How on earth am I going to do that?!! With the silly Mr. CoW, it's easy. Just give me a reason & I'll fire him immediately. But not with this engineer!

And I felt so bad for Mr Z. especially when he somehow had suffered a string of unfortunate events. He was doing his Engineering Masters in China and during his last year of the course he was offered a chance to come to Singapore to do a PhD. He took it up and left China without completing his Masters.

After 3 yrs of research & labour-intensive lab testings, Mr Z was ready to start his thesis. That was when he joined us as a part-time engineer. But 1/2 way through his thesis, Mr Z's supervisor claimed Mr Z had made some errors in the setup and the results were not usable.

So Mr Z had to re-do most of the tests and was ready to start on his thesis again when his supervisor suddenly resigned without arranging for another professor to take over. The poor guy was left dangling, not knowing what to do. The faculty department didn't try to help either. Finally a professor agreed to take Mr. Z on but the new supervisor found that Mr. Z's findings were in total disagreement with published literatures.

By then 4.5 yrs have gone. The poor chap had no choice but to submit his thesis and hoped for the best. The last time I checked, Mr Z said his thesis was returned with a "major correction required" comment. He didn't seem very optimistic about getting his PhD. If that's the case then the last 5 years was a total waste of time. Poor guy.

My boss wasn't as sympathetic. He thinks if a guy can spend 5 years on a subject and still not know what went wrong then he's hopeless.

Mr Z was actually planning to get married soon too. His fiancée is in Singapore. She just flew in recently from China.

*sigh* not sure how to approach the poor Mr Z.....