I came to the office today. The team had a scheduled physical meeting in the evening. Sadly, the meeting got cancelled midday. 

"The meeting's cancelled?", he asked when a message from my boss came in while we were having a discussion. "So I came today for nothing haha", he said followed by a nervous laugh. 

Same, I told him. I also came only for this physical meeting. 

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 "Are you staying in office?", he messaged me, which I replied yes to. We just came back from lunch. He was contemplating whether he should go home or stay. 

He is known as someone who wouldn't come to office just to avoid the rush hour traffic. I decided to stay in the office instead since I was busy for our final testing and project launch that day. 

--- 

At 5pm, I was doing a major deployment on a project I handled. A process which require a lot of attention within a crucial period of time. During which I couldn't even afford to make even the slightest mistake, given the short time we had. 

However, amidst all the stress I was having, the office suddenly got lively. I turned around to see what was the chaos all about and saw a colleague walking in with a birthday cake. 

It was to celebrate 3 of my colleagues' birthdays and so happen that 🌙 was one of them. I only found out about it right then and there. 

Among the chatters and surprised laughters, I heard him shyly said "Eh, my birthday is tomorrow". 

Not long after, everyone left the office space to take a group photo, except for me. When everyone came back, I wished I was invisible at that moment just to avoid getting questioned to why I didn't join them. 

After the mood in the office got quieter, he suddenly appeared holding a piece of cake on a tissue. He cupped it with his two hands and softly said that it was for me. I forced up a smile with eyes filled with worries as I thanked him. I hope he didn't see right through me. 

I wished him an advance happy birthday and continued with the rest of the deployment. 

--- 

Finally, everything went well and all our testing showed that the latest updates were successfully deployed to the live server. 

At 7pm as he was about to leave the office, he came up to me one last time. He asked if I was still not done. Lucky for us, I'm only an email away from calling it a day. I felt a sense of relieved for being able to say that it was finally done. 

A month full of stress and worry and delayed promises, finally came to an end. I believed I delivered my best and although I despised his unhelpful self in the beginning, the 3am episode really changed it for us.

Dropping by,