The first thing you notice -- as a fly -- is the speed of movement around the room. In certain environments you see fast movements, lots of people going about their businesses doing lots of things at the same time.
In others it's like a "slo-mo" video where, from the opening act to the end, all you see is a few people very slowly turning the pages of what looks like a newspaper over and over again.
Now, we might be excused for believing the first scene is one of a very successful enterprise where the executives are expediently making things happen whereas the second one must be a government office where things happen when they "have to" happen.
However, on closer scrutiny it transpires that the first instance is the Gambir railway station during rush hour and the other one is the office of a law firm where the senior partners are preparing for a critical case.
The beauty of being a fly is that you are not capable of making verbal remarks of what you see and hear -- you can only watch in silence.
But to actually understand what's going on we need to delve deeper, a no brainer of a statement here, and this is where things get to be funny when one tries to delve without really knowing the context of the environment.
Let's take speed. A practical reason for differences in speed was brought up in a conversation with a certain chief editor of a certain local English daily. Upon hearing the comment that Indonesians walk slow he pragmatically answered "walk fast then you will perspire".
A former boss of mine, a British citizen working in an American corporation, once made a statement that they should hire more people like me because "you walk faster than the average Indonesian". Because I was being flattered, I hesitated to state back: "Wait till you ask me about a critical decision, I might then look turtle-like to you".
Does slow mean lazy? Sometimes yes, but often no. A fly wouldn't know any better because of its limited capabilities, but thank God we humans have been given more endowments than them flies. A foreign diplomat once confided that in his first few days living in Indonesia he had developed a discomfort about the local Indonesians assigned to work in his house and who kept smilingly say "I am sorry".
What have they done, he wondered. Why can't they be more explicit about their mistakes? Why are they smiling making mistakes?
A discomfort that turned into a great laugh when upon an earnest enquiry to his "jaga" (guard) man he obtained an elementary lesson in bahasa Indonesia that unveiled the wonderful meaning of selamat sore. Similarly, an expat acquaintance once asked: Why do Indonesians sometimes say masih untung (it's still lucky) when mentioning a disaster?
"Masih untung we only lost so much rupiahs in that transaction", "masih untung we were only thirty minutes late", etc.
Is this an act of being sarcastic or a habit of weakly accepting a failure? Usually it's not quite either, as most of the time this is made as a statement of relief that things could have been so much worse. Surely a needed mechanism to express hope that things can get better. After the rupiah tumbled to around Rp 15,000 to the dollar in 1998, an economist was heard to say "masih untung it didn't stay at that level for too long" -- a great way to stop looking back and building self confidence for the future.
Masih untung is actually not spoken as often as it used to be, but it always comes in handy in times of trouble or doubt. So if you think you are having a tough week at work, masih untung you are reading this article.
The writer works for Dunamis Organization Services, an Indonesian professional services firm, and can be reached at nugroho@dunamis.co.id. The views expressed are the author's own.
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