Here’s to men talking about things they know nothing about
Afriend recently posted on Facebook something like: “Imagine it’s the year 409 BC in Athens. You’re a Greek construction worker and you’re late for work. And then run past Socrates and his cohorts sitting by the town square in their long robes, twirling their whiskers, sipping on wine and philosophising about whether employment is a worthwhile endeavour or not.”
I’m paraphrasing. The post reminded me of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law, Pat, back in 2007. To paraphrase Pat: “I think employment is overrated, mostly because I’m pathologically lazy. My dream job would be to sit in a room, have people come in and out, asking me questions and then paying me money for my opinions.” I remember thinking to myself, “That’s exactly the job I want!”
And boy, I have opinions about everything, including matters I know dangerously little about, such as whether the economic rescue plan of that Twitter addict who dabbles as our minister of finance is realistic or not.
But this is not about the Lucky Star pilchards minister. It’s about men in robes, twirling their whiskers and talking about things they know nothing about. One of the uncles in my extended family has an unhealthy disdain for men
who do not have “real jobs”. And by “real job”, he means a job that involves some kind of tool; a hammer, a sickle, a set of spanners or a drill.
If you are unfortunate enough to walk into his yard while he’s busy fixing something, toolbox open, spanners and pliers strewn on the floor, you groan internally. “Pass me the number 13!” Woe unto you if you grab the wrong one and squint to read the number on the spanner. “So you call yourself a man but you can’t tell your number 13 from your number 10? Your generation has gone soft. Soft, I tell you!”
Until I worked as a technologist in a margarine processing factory, I never really understood my uncle. You’d be in your greasy jeans, safety boots, goggles and lab coat, climbing to the summit of 60-ton oil tanks, fixing real problems when you got summoned to the boardroom. Those perpetually cheerful girls from the marketing department would be waiting for you with pointless PowerPoint presentations, detailing their next innovations that you had to implement. “So, you want margarine that doesn’t melt in the blazing Limpopo sun but also doesn’t go rock-hard in the freezer, huh? Well, I also want Bafana Bafana to beat Brazil five-nil in the Fifa World Cup final, for Beyoncé to leave Jay-Z for me and a six-pack without joining Planet Fitness.” And this is how you’d
My dream job would be to sit in a room ... [and] have people paying me money for my opinions
get a reputation as a grumpy, negative person without a “Can Do” attitude.
And then there are ostensibly grown-up people who perform mind-boggling tasks in their spare time without expecting remuneration. Take the thousands of church service ushers across the land. This is typically a middle-aged man whose job it is to tell other adults where to sit.
In townships and villages they have the added responsibility of ejecting unsuspecting women from the Lord’s house because, apparently, the Almighty is gravely offended by women’s bare heads, exposed shoulders and upper legs.
Before I go off the deep end, I need to remind myself that my job is to talk and write about the same pious men of God with exposed-shoulder obsessions. However, whenever I start getting depressed about my pointless existence, I remember who’s got it worse than me.
When I was a 10-year-old urchin I spent many Saturday afternoons playing football against a team that went by the name, “Control Ltd”. Don’t ask. One of their teammates was a rotund butterball we called Gwebu (Bubble). He never made the starting line-up, so he became their unofficial team mascot. An acidtongued mascot who ran up and down the touchline like a possessed demon, insulting and demoralising Control Ltd’s opponents. If you got nutmegged by one of their players, Gwebu would lose his goddamned mind and roll around the floor like tumbleweed in ecstasy.
After Bafana’s recent Afcon campaign I heard this paper’s sports editor, BB Kortjaas, on the wireless, seething about ex-gaffer Stuart Baxter’s arrogance. I remember thinking that if I tried to explain to my uncle what BBK does for a living, he’d probably go, “You mean that he doesn’t actually play football? He gets paid just to be Gwebu?”