The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, home of lazy aquarium fish, hyper little kids, and ever-changing landscaping jobs. Just go up to the third floor and head straight to the Foreign Assisted Special Projects Office (you can’t miss it, its thee only office there) and you’ll find unlimited internet, computer games, and a sari-sari store that doesn’t need payment – everything a kid needs to be kept busy until the old people have to go home.
Here’s why I used to live in the office everyday: I studied in Quezon City, while my mom worked at the DENR. Being the typical citizens allergic to oil-price hikes, my parents decided it would be cheaper to have the office car pick me and my sister up from school and take us to the office. There, we would wait until it was time for my parents to go home to Cainta, which would be around five in the afternoon. In effect, I spent more of my waking hours in the office than at home.
Upon entering the lobby, I would immediately run up to the fish tank (which, at the time seemed so big) and tap at the glass to attract the fish to my little tapping fingers. Unfortunately, the fish were never attracted by tapping fingers – or little kids with tapping fingers - so we never got to see them cluster around near the glass. Maybe they were just used to people looking in on them and tapping the glass despite the huge “Please do not tap the glass” sign taped to the fish tank.
Being the kid that I was, I was pretty much immune from the rules. I got away with a lot of things back then. I remember what I did when Final Fantasy 7 came out. I had a hard time beating a certain part of the game, so I went online to get help from Gamefaqs and printed a walkthrough of around three hundred pages long. This led to a long delay in the printer line because I ran out of paper four times and ran out of ink once. Work came to a crashing halt that day and multiple deadlines got pushed back. All this because one bored kid couldn’t sit still and tough it out with an imaginary foe.
Of course I needed more than things to do to stop me from complaining. I needed food. So whenever I was hungry, I’d go to ate Lenny’s cubicle to get some instant noodles, chocolates, juice, potato chips and whatever she had on hand for what I thought of as “free” at the time. Then she’d take out her small pocket notebook and list down what I had taken for the day on my mother’s account and collect the total amount at the end of the month. I, for some reason, always found myself busy during these accountings. What mattered was that I’d always walk out of her cubicle with my pockets full of sweet cavity-causing delights to fuel me during my stay in the office.
The office itself was made up of three separate departments separated by portable walls. My mother’s department was to the left of the stairs near the windows. Every cubicle has a yellowing personal computer, one of those adjustable office chairs, and a ton of paperwork. Most of the time, the people in them were just reading some papers and highlighting a sentence or two – which I thought at the time was not a lot of work. Adults were unusually tolerant of our presence since kids were a common sight in the office at the time, to the point that we felt at home in the office. Sometimes we fought each other. Sometimes we banded together to amuse ourselves by running around and playing games. We didn’t care if your dad was the boss or the copy boy; you were just a kid like the rest of us.
One time, I found a secret tunnel behind a wooden panel inside the conference room. I used this as a hiding place when we were playing hide and seek. I’d sit in the dusty hallway behind a pile of old boxes and nervously wait until I felt it was safe to go out. When I did, I ran my with little legs clomp-clomp-clomping or squeaking (depending on which shoes I wore) until I reached the base in time. This tactic worked well until the other kids found the hallway and looking in there too. I’ve seen the secret tunnel a few times over the last few years and it did not look as large as it used to. The last time I went there, it was already gone.
While running around and playing with other kids in the office is fun, they’re not always there. Computer games installed by bored office staff provided me with a source of amusement. Games like Pacman, Tetris, Wolfenstein, Doom, Hexen and asteroid were staples in most of the office PCs, but it was the point-and-click RPG Dare to Dream which captured my interest. It had crocodiles paddling canoes in sewers while giving out cryptic clues to lead you towards your next task, a demon speaking in the voice of your lost friend and portals to another dimension, all in 16-bit glory. I sat motionless in my seat, eyes never leaving the screen and sometimes shivering as something new came up. I found myself stumped by the puzzles in the game until I found that ridiculously unrelated item needed. I never actually finished the game, so I never knew where the portal led and what happened to the lost friend.
When I entered high school, my mother took a new job with a higher pay somewhere else. Children weren’t allowed there and I wasn’t inclined to go because I was too busy with high school obligations. We went back to DENR once, and I learned that the whole third floor was demolished so they could place the supports for the never-to-be finished fourth and fifth floors.
Now that we’re all grown up, all that’s left is never-ending work to be done. The past no longer has a place in the present.
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Something I wrote at the beginning of the semester for my Creative Writing class. A bit too dramatic for my tastes. I want to write more poems this semester break, but I can't find the inspiration nor the words.
Labels: CW 10, short story
