By Nidhi Arora

It was predicted to be the hottest spell Singapore had ever seen. We cranked up the air con to 16 degrees, the lowest it would go. Still, the heat from outside creeped in through the slats and hung all over the office, thick and heavy, like a passive-aggressive client.

Normally, we worked out of the client's office, but they were going through an internal restructuring and had flown in heads from all global offices to huddle and strategise, so external consultants like us were requested to work out of our own office. If it could be called that. A shophouse tucked away in the one-way alleys of CBD – with a capacity of 12, no lift, no fancy De'Longhi, just a Nespresso, the free kind, no central air con, no floor-to-ceiling refrigerator lined with smoothies; only a mini bar that the cleaning auntie stocked with fresh milk and fruit.

We got in early, before the sun was on our heads, and stayed well after dinner, working on the pilot launch of a new accounting software, one of the client's many cost-cutting initiatives. We were on track to deliver, even though after doing the heavy lifting on the base code, Patty checked out. The rest was duplication and customisation for each cost centre, it didn't need much thinking. Once we did one, we could do the rest with our eyes closed, all of us that is, except Patty.

He couldn't handle repetitive work. He blasted music, read aloud Insta feeds and took lunch orders. When we told him to pipe down and let us do our work, and his, he said sorry and said he'll go clean the bathroom. He spent an hour scrubbing it. Then he asked if he had permission to do the ladies'. We were a small team and anyone who needed to go urgently could use the men's if that meant Patty being out of our hair for another hour. We said sure, by all means. Turned out we escaped Patty's irritating restlessness only to face Auntie's grumbling wrath.

"Who touched the cleaning cloths?" she asked, standing in the middle of the pod, holding a used wash cloth by the corner, waving it in our face.

No one said anything. Only Coldplay crooned from Patty's Alexa. He lowered the volume.

"Who emptied the bottle of bleach into the toilets?"

Patty gingerly raised his hand.

"You think you can do my job, do it. Pay so little anyway."

"Then why you still do it, Auntie?" Patty asked. A bored Patty was a dangerous Patty.

"Because no one will pay me to listen to songs," she said and went back to do her tasks.

She came in every afternoon at 1pm and left at 4. She cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed the carpet, emptied dustbins, dusted all our workstations. Once a week she cleaned the windows. Every day she brought fresh fruit, washed, peeled, cut and put it in a bowl. Sometimes we ate it, sometimes we didn't, sometimes we remembered to put it back in the fridge, sometimes we didn't, in which case she threw it away the next day, grumbling that we had no respect. We pegged her age to be in the mid-60s. Short hair, hunched shoulders and slightly bow-legged, she came to work with a shopping trolley trailing behind her. But her small frame was deceptive. She did one office before us and one after, before going to her husband's stall in the hawker centre in the evening.

Not that we just sat glued to our chairs, stared into our screens and listened to music all day. We were creating automated dashboards to replace the current reports that were manually updated every month for reviews. They had four reporting lines spread across six ports, making it 24 dashboards, plus five for corporate, and we had just about two weeks for the pilot launch. While we split this mountain up among us, Patty announced that he would go clean the windows. From the outside. Because they had never been cleaned from the outside, he claimed, but we suspected it was because he did not dare touch them from the inside for fear of Auntie.

One foot on the desk, one on the ledge, his cycling vest tied to the window frame like a harness, he ventured into the blinding heat with a pail of soapy water and a sponge.

"It's too hot," cautioned Nur.

"Someone will report us to MOM," Audrey joked.

"Unsafe working conditions," Cynthia added.

"Fall or heat stroke?" Tony collected bets.

Patty started from the printer corner and worked his way through Audrey's, Tony's and Nur's but had to stop, ironically, just before his own window because there, at the ledge, right next to the compressor, sat two pigeons. A look of horror came upon Patty's face. He abandoned his project and came inside, closing the window behind him, his shirt dripping with sweat, clinging to his chiselled body.

"Auntie, can you make the pigeons go away?" he asked when Auntie came that afternoon.

"What did the birds do to you?" she asked.

"The ledge is covered with shit," he said.

"Where you want them to shit, in the men's or what?" she said, waving her feather brush over his desk.

"Just shoo them away," he begged.

"You got your desk, your chair, your air con, not enough ah? You want the ledge also?"

She filled a plastic container from one of our takeaways with water, tied it with a string, opened the window and lowered it on the ledge.

"Already so hot, your air con making it hotter," she said. "Don't worry, they will die soon."

The client had given us a template with their logos and colour schemes. While the rest of us slogged away showing the slow creep of bottom line in a time series and mapped productivity of ports in spider charts, Patty had a flash of inspiration. Not content with automating reports, he now wanted to automate the entire accounting process. It was not part of the contract, but he was being such a pain in the ass that we were happy he had found something to occupy himself with. It was easier to do his share of the work than to listen him moan about how brainless and soul-sucking the dashboards were.

But not only was he not doing his part, when we took on his, he tried to stall us. There was this one report which would be used by both the cost-centre and corporate and we were debating whether to use the corporate or regional colours for it.

"Let's ask Auntie," Patty said.

He called her over and showed her the two versions projected side by side on the wall. They were identical, save for the colour schemes.

"Which one is better, the orange one or the blue one?" he asked her.

"What are these lines?" she asked, squinting at the charts.

"The bottom one is the cost, the top one is sales," he explained simplistically. "The gap is the profit, you see. Six million dollars," he added for effect.

"Profit, ah?" she said, swiping the dust at the base of the projector with her finger. "Pay employees decent money where got six million profit?"

"Why you want more money, auntie?" Patty said. "It's not good to be greedy, you know."

"Correct. Give me your this month salary, can?"

She went away, muttering "six million dollars," her chin bobbing.

We couldn't tell if her comebacks were said in jest, or if she meant them seriously. Sure, the office shone after her. But it was like when she vacuumed the carpet, she sucked away the air too. The lights became brighter, they hurt the eye, the air became thinner, the air con became colder, which would have been a good thing given the oven it was outside, except it became so cold, it bit the skin.

We asked Nur how much we paid her, but she didn't entertain us, said it was confidential. She never indulged in gossip, always spoke like the person in question was in the room, her speech as clean as the books she kept.

One day, while Nur was away from her desk, Audrey hacked her password, unlocked her screen and found the invoice from Auntie's agent. It was 600 SGD per month. We did a quick check online, it was more or less the going rate, if slightly on the lower side, but then if she made a similar amount from her other offices, that would be 1,800, less the agent's commission plus whatever they made from the hawker centre.

"Why does she need the money anyway?" Audrey asked. "Her children are loaded."

There were rumours that the owner of the building was actually Auntie's daughter.

"She's not short of money," said Cynthia. She had seen Auntie at the bus stop next to the MRT, buying tissues from the uncle who sat there in his wheelchair at lunch time. She had a whole stash under the sink, rows upon rows of pink and blue and yellow and green packets of Beautex, those pink tulips and their neon green leaves, way more than we would ever need.

"I've seen her take packets from the stash and give them back to the uncle also," said Cynthia, shrugging her shoulders.

Patty read aloud reports from a resident in Punggol saying birds were dropping from the sky.

'Scorching with a chance of bird-fall,' said the post. The water level at Linggiu reservoir dropped to 30  per cent, its lowest ever. The water fountain next to office was down to a pathetic trickle too, the koi in the pond sluggish. Climate change protestors huddled under the lone tree in Hong Lim Park, fanning themselves with their placards saying 'Planet over profit' and 'Capitalism is killing the earth'.

One of the protestors fainted, and the comments section in social media posts went ablaze saying 'having a heatstroke in the Speaker's Corner so lame', 'come up with something better', 'get some inspiration from the homeless man who snuck into the fresh fruit stall and spent the night inside the refrigerator', 'who asked them to protest in the middle of the day hor'.

We barely managed to make the 11-minute walk from the MRT to office and thought twice about going out for lunch and ordered whatever trash we found on Grab. The NEA issued warnings saying where possible, people should work from home. But Auntie still came, every afternoon, 1pm on the dot, with fresh fruit for us.

"No need to go to the fruit shop in this sun, Auntie," Audrey said.

"Change your timing, come in the morning instead," Peter said.  

"No need to clean every day, Auntie," Patty said. "Rest for a while."

"You all worry so much?" Auntie replied. "But cannot increase salary ah," she said shaking her head.   We were going cross-eyed duplicating charts and checking and re-checking the mapping. The 24 dashboards were all the same, that was the whole point of automation, yet all of them had their kinks. The German cost-centre paid a cess every quarter, which was reported separately, below the Income Statement. The India office was receiving ad hoc claims from a 12-year-old case, and there was no way out but to update those manually. Australia was the worst, with three sub-cost-centres, to be consolidated into one reporting line.

We slogged on, while Patty was conveniently MIA. He was working on an app that would scan each invoice and tag it to all the relevant financial reports. Basically, as he put it, once all invoices in the Accounts Payable were tagged, they would flow through to the Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow statement on its own, automating pretty much the entire costing department. It could even link to their ERP system. If the idea worked, it could potentially wipe out 60 per cent of the costing teams across offices. We quickly pulled up an ad-hoc report from one of our snazzy new corporate dashboards. The saving for one year alone was 50,000 dollars. Perpetuity value 300,000 dollars, adjusted for implementation costs, staggered launch, severance costs, et cetera.

We'd be set for the next few months, travelling to all the cost centres to review, map, train, pilot. Audrey called dibs on Australia, Tony on Germany. Even if we pitched the product at half the amount, the client would save hundreds of thousands of dollars and we would meet one of our trickiest KPIs, that a project delivery was only as successful as the size of the roll-on project it generated. That would be enough revenue to get decent bonuses and even upgrade ourselves out of this shithole into a nice office with functional air conditioning. Because this one was sputtering.

And one afternoon it gave up completely. We switched it off and on, switched the main fuse off and on. Ten minutes without it and the office became an oven. We opened the window but that was only a bigger oven. Patty stuck his neck out to have a look at the compressor, but retreated back into the room, his face white. We all craned our necks, and saw the pigeons. They sat motionless. Sticks and leaves lay strewn around them.

"Are they dead?" Patty asked.

He was so scared, it was funny.

"Barbecued," Audrey said.

"Evenly roasted in the compressor exhaust for that perfect golden brown finish," Cynthia added. None of us knew what to do.

"Auntie, can you poke them and check?" Patty asked when she came.

"Can," she said. "I put it on a skewer, then you eat with satay sauce," she said.

She poured water in the container she had placed there earlier. She sprinkled some on the birds too. They blinked, ruffled their feathers, moved closer the compressor and closed their eyes again. She patted the air con remote a couple of times and it came back on.

Was it the heat, or was Auntie grumpier than usual, or was it the brain-numbing dashboards, the more we did, the more remained to be done.

"The sun is having a fit outside, inside Auntie's face so black," said Tony.

"She's not the only cleaning auntie around you know," said Audrey.

"We could even do it ourselves, Patty is here what," said Tony.

"We could probably get someone else who will be happy for the job," said Cynthia.

"Why you want to take away work from an old person," Nur protested.

"It's not nice for her to work at this age, she should rest, enjoy her children," said Patty.

He had done up his specs. He had even lined up a couple of app developers, ready to start coding. All that separated him from the implementation of his idea was the client's go-ahead. And funding of course. He worked on the client pitch, with mock-ups of the process and the cost-benefits. The benefits were doing away with manual entries, thereby mitigating the risk of fraud, releasing the team's time in days, not hours, better relationships with key business partners, not to mention significant cost savings. Also, instant and global access to data. Under costs, he put down investment in development, standardisation of invoices, implementation and training.

It was a no-brainer. We said the product needed a name, and agreed on CostScan, although it looked and sounded too close to CostScam.

When there was absolutely nothing more he could do on the pitch, and perhaps sensing our stress at the remaining nine dashboards to be pulled off in three days, he valiantly offered to do one. We gave him the smallest one. Even so, he took 10 hours to do it when the rest of us were averaging seven, he huffed and puffed the whole time, put his AirPods on then off, his eyes turned red, he had three cups of coffee, went to the bathroom twice, his hair looked like the pigeons' nest and still, when he finally finished, it was all messed up.

He had used the corporate template and mapped the data to the current year. Of course, as he was updating it he wrote an algorithm that would auto-map the remaining dashboards, save for the manual customisations. But by then we were down to the last five and had neither stamina nor any desire to experiment. We told him to please leave it, and us, alone, we would clean up his mess and he should probably go clean a bathroom or something.

It was expected to hit 40 degrees. NEA issued fresh warnings to stay indoors. We could if we would, but we were on the home stretch and didn't want to take chances. Auntie came in at 1pm. She looked smaller than usual. She was out of breath. When she saw an empty bottle of Harpic courtesy of Patty, she didn't shout at him, just mumbled that she would go and get a new one from FairPrice. It was two blocks away.

"It's fine if you don't put bleach one day, Auntie," Patty said. "Don't go out in this heat."

She went. An hour later, Nur received a call. Auntie was in hospital. She had fainted on the street. Her next of kin would come to the office to fetch her bag and trolley.

"We told her," said Audrey.

"She doesn't listen," said Tony. 

"It's my fault," said Patty.

"At least we'll get a look at her next of kin," said Cynthia.

"Grow up," said Nur.  

We took turns going from one side of the main door office to the other, so as not to miss the visitor. Nur shook her head. When the bell rang, she ran to the door with Auntie's bag. We gathered near the entrance, but she had taken the visitor, whoever it was, towards the staircase, away from the door, out of our sight. She came back and gave us an admonishing look. We trained our eyes towards the road. We couldn't see who left our building, but we did see a Beamer drive away.

"Which hospital is she in?" asked Audrey.

"We're only asking so we can send her flowers," said Cynthia.

"She'll only get angry and ask why we cannot increase her salary instead of wasting money on dead flowers," said Tony.  

But Nur wouldn't tell us anything. She didn't even offer to arrange for a replacement cleaner. We were scared to ask her, and also the last few dashboards were such a gruel that cleaning the office was a more interesting proposition. We made a roster of all the tasks so everyone got a turn at each task over the course of the week. Audrey replenished the tea selection, Tony brought fresh lilies and the whole place filled with their sweet fragrance. Cynthia even brought cut fruits from Fresh n Tasty.

It wasn't all that hard, and if we could squeeze it into our work day, for no pay, surely 600 dollars was not all that bad. Maybe it was all her own constant grumbling that had made Auntie sick.  

The air con stuttered again. Patty looked for handymen to clean up the compressor. Only one agreed, that too after negotiating a 30 percent 'peak-summer-hardship premium' with us. He was at it a whole morning and when he finished, he showed us the amount of pigeon shit he had retrieved. There was at least a kilo there. He said this was going to be recurring problem unless we bird-proofed it.

There were two options, we could cover it with a mesh net, that would keep the compressor aired and the ledge clear of pigeons. But he had seen cases where the mesh got covered in pigeon shit and got heavy and saggy and full of holes and had to be changed every three months or so, depending on how bad our pigeon problem was. The other option was to put a spiked fence all over the ledge and compressor, so the birds wouldn't be able to sit there at all. It was 300 dollars more expensive than the mesh, but it was one-time, so we went ahead with that.

Our presentation was on Friday. On Thursday, we ordered dinner in and pulled an all-nighter aligning the charts, standardising fonts and colours, exporting reports and checking against the raw data, polishing our slides, arguing about the split of time between jazzy slides telling them what we had done versus giving them a demo of the actual platform. Patty would focus on his CostScan pitch.

We went home at 3 in the morning and met again at 9 at the client's office. The presentation went swimmingly. The client spent more time discussing Patty's idea than the pilot launch itself. They discussed how the scanning would work, how could they standardise invoicing across locations, would the initial time spent in mapping the flow of the invoices offset the savings and such.

Patty had thought through most of these things and in the rare case that he hadn't, he laid down the requirements and discussed the process and challenges with them openly, in their jargon, like he was part of their team and not an external consultant. He showed them prototypes his developer friend had already started making. His eyes shone as he spoke. He was spinning left field ideas even during the meeting, saying the next step would be to incorporate AI to start writing the headlines for the reports. It was hard to tell who was more excited, Patty or the client.

The pilot launch went well too, we had anticipated all their questions and had answers ready. They would probably need only 20 of our dashboards, they were likely to sell off their Australia operations, it wasn't performing well. They would still pay for it since it had been part of our contract and we had worked on it. Corporate would be the first to implement, starting next week. Audrey and Tony would be on-site to oversee the launch and troubleshoot. They didn't bother hiding their joy to be back onsite.

As we got back to the office after a two-hour lunch and three days, still riding the high of a successful delivery, we were assaulted by a sick smell. Nur was on the phone with pest control. There was a dead rat in the office. We had left the food out on Thursday, no one had come in on Friday, except rats, who had feasted on the food and then died in the heat. The lilies had rotted and the milk had gone bad.

It was Audrey's turn to clean the bathrooms, but she couldn't do it in her pencil skirt. It was Tony's turn to vacuum, but he had eaten too much. Nur borrowed a robot vacuum cleaner from the office upstairs. The whole day it roamed the office noisily, getting under our feet, giving us a headache. We made do with black coffee. Patty was the only one who put on his AirPods and gave every desk a good dusting.  

The big presentation done, we spent the next day tinkering aimlessly with the dashboards, like marathoners who keep running even after they've crossed the finish line. There were invoices to be sent, decks to be emailed, training sessions to be scheduled.

A temp cleaner came in, did her work and left. The bathroom was clean but the floor was wet and Cynthia slipped and nearly fell. Some of the bins were cleared, some were not. The carpet didn't look dirty, but not clean either. None of us said anything to the cleaner and she didn't say anything to us. Of course, there was no fresh fruit.

Patty was on the phone with the developer, debriefing him about the client's questions when an e-mail came from the client. It was a new brief inviting innovation ideas for their costing department, demonstrating a deep understanding of their current process as well as out of box thinking, including but not limited to a complete overhaul of the current manual entry of invoices replaced by an automated scanning system, eliminating non-value added, manual, error-prone methods with digital, faster, more accurate ones.

Proposals were due in a week. The budget was 75,000 dollars. They would shortlist the top three consultants to present their ideas to the Heads team. Demonstrating with a prototype would go a long way in arriving at a decision.

The air con gave up. Completely. No amount of tapping or patting the remote worked. We opened the window. A tsunami of heat flooded in and knocked the air out of our lungs. We shielded our eyes from the sun and looked over to the compressor. Brown spots covered the spikes on the ledge. The plastic container Auntie had placed there was warped out of shape and caked with dried pigeon shit.

It didn't make us look good that the client had opened a competitive bid. But at least we were in the running. And surely, we had the incumbency advantage. We would find out in a week. There was no way we could include any fancy AI within this budget. One of us would have to have a chat with the developer to stick to the bare minimum features that would get the job done, no room to get creative.

Patty was no good for this kind of talk. Already, he looked like he had seen a ghost. He stared unseeingly outside the window. On top of the compressor, perched on the spiked fence, sat both pigeons, trickles of fresh blood dripping from under them.

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