When horrible bosses are arrested

Nobody likes bosses. Good or bad, they are the object of ridicule among employees. It is how people survive the pressures of modern working life.

We make fun of them behind their backs, we impersonate them during lunch, we curse them every once in a while.

In fact, office politics is incomplete without anecdotes of horrible bosses, whether true or dramatised. Working life is meaningless and empty without these ingredients.

If you like your bosses, something is wrong, or you must be sleeping with them.

Of course, in extreme cases, some secretly plot to kill them, like the group of friends in the comedy movie “Horrible Bosses”.

The less cruel among us fantasise our bosses walking together in chains, dressed in purple jail clothes, locked up for the night, without slippers, unshaven, paraded like criminals.

But that was exactly what happened to our bosses at The Malaysian Insider last week.

On March 30, three of them were picked up from the office and locked up.

Hours later, their tired faces were beamed through social media, the youngest one among them always grinning like a Cheshire cat in a purple shirt, the oldest one quietly spewing a mantra of four-letter words while holding a small bag of essential medicine to stay alive.

Later, two more senior bosses were seen in long, thick chains, which would have been better used to tie a bank teller machine to the back of a heavy truck ready to sprint.

Any journalist working in a large media organisation will tell you that newsroom bosses are the most horrible.

They shout, swear and often throw insults at reporters, and sometimes at their junior editors and sub-editors, without a care for harassment suits.

It is much like the scene in Spider-Man and Superman movies, in which the off-duty superheroes who work as crime reporters are excoriated (to use a new word used by one boss) by their editors in the quest for better stories.

In Internet media parlance, and more specifically at The Malaysian Insider, we get nasty emails questioning our news sense, grammar, sentence structures and headlines. They spare no one, including those who have been in the news industry for decades.

But last week, far from gasps of satisfaction from staff, the sight of editors being chained evoked anger and sympathy among us, and our conversations soon sounded like we had just been given a fat raise.

There was an explosion of sympathy and anger not only among all involved in the industry, but also among the ordinary public, bewildered and outraged, stumped and stupefied over the kinds of things that could land one in trouble with the keepers of peace in this country.

After their release, we were swarmed by activists, journalists, diplomats, politicians, but most of all, ordinary members of the public, sending us flowers of all shapes and colours, with messages of support and solidarity.

Not to mention the amount of food sent to the office – boxes of pizzas and doughnuts, and one wonders what other goodies will come our way on a day I hope to be on duty.

Suffice to say that the office, which is normally as peaceful and silent as a graveyard (or a library if you are not a pessimist), was soon transformed into a funeral parlour (or a florist shop if you are not a pessimist), alive with people and filled with visitors delivering kind words and taking selfies while punching their fists.

A couple of days earlier, the email scene was quiet, as the big boss’s mobile phone was taken away so that he could spend the night peacefully in a smelly, pungent space in the safe vicinity of what is referred to by the fragrant name of Dang Wangi.

For hours on March 31, officers from the police criminal investigation and the multimedia commission spent precious time jotting down answers from at least 10 people from The Malaysian Insider, including me, who was also summoned because I happened to have checked and uploaded the article which sparked such a major police operation in The Malaysian Insider.

That day at Dang Wangi, the dung of meaningless paperwork and wastage of public money stank to high heaven.

More pitiful than the social media pictures of editors being paraded in their lock-up clothes was to watch a dozen civil servants working for hours on their laptops and printing our answers in full inkjet colour, as if convinced they had nailed a major criminal syndicate reigning terror in Malaysian neighbourhoods.

The atmosphere there was one of time warp, and one wonders if politicians were deliberately dragged to this same floor in the past to show that all their calls for reforms were nothing but a joke.

At the end of this long and draggy exercise of bureaucracy is a welcome party outside the police station.

But why are suspects who underwent hours of questioning cheered and feted? Why are journalists on the wrong side of the camera?

The arrests have emboldened every single member of The Malaysian Insider and united the journalist fraternity.

I don’t even consider the police crackdown on us as a silver lining. Indeed, it is a godsend, a morale booster.

Being arrested in the stinking state of Malaysian nationhood is now a badge of honour which every journalist worth his salt should be proud to wear.

Some years ago, lawyers marched to protest against the state of judiciary, after a video of a prominent lawyer brokering the appointment of judges was leaked. That led Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan, then the Bar Council president, to remark that “when lawyers walk, something is wrong”.

In this case, something is wrong when journalists are on the other side of the camera. Something is wrong when prison mugshots are preserved and framed. Something is wrong when criminal suspects are showered with flowers, pizzas and doughnuts.

And something is wrong when, at least for the past few days, people stop cursing their horrible bosses and instead speak of them with respect and pride. – April 4, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.