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Slogans, Spur and Ritual Humiliation

This week I happened to walk into a furniture store with a friend of mine and overheard the sales-person answer the phone. “Hi Sam here. How can I make living easier?” he said, and I was immediately thrust back nearly twenty years to when I worked in a Spur, and the managers wanted me rap along to an insipid birthday song and throw secret tribe hand-signs at the kids. (It turns out, by the way, that when a kid is chewing, shredding, and dumping their colouring-in paper on the carpet, and you know it will take 11 hours to pick it out after he has gone, giving him the middle-finger can’t be explained away as being the sign of the extra secret tribe).

Why do companies make their employees do these things? I can’t name a single person above the age of three who thinks having a birthday song sung to them by a group of minimum wage employees, who are fully aware that they aren’t singing “Happy Birthday” simply because the company is afraid of copyright infringements, is fun. Historically the only people who enjoyed watching the poor undergo ritual humiliation for their amusement while they are eating are billionaire slave-plantation owners and, if you factor in the old-timey American racism of the Spur restaurant theme, we know exactly what they are doing in the modern era.

The thing is these birthday songs, slogans, and phone answering techniques, aren’t the way to make a genuine connection with your customer. Shortly after I heard Sam answer the phone in that contrived fashion I realised the look of mixed disgust and shame that I had shot him was the same one I would get from parents whenever I fired off the secret tribe sign. They are so awful and humiliating that my friends, and I use this word lightly, would regularly come into the Spur when I was on shift, tell the manager it was their birthday, and try to see me singing the birthday song. The joke was on them however as during the birthday songs I was always hidden in the kitchen supplementing my crappy wage by devouring uneaten food. It wasn’t my proudest four months.

Do you really want to learn “how to make living easier”? Stop making your employees belt out fatuous rubbish at your customers. We all know they aren’t happy saying, and doing them, so their being forced to pretend otherwise is just dishonest. I for one would much rather be served my bad steak by a normal person who doesn’t caper like a goat on Redbull at Disneyworld than become an unwilling participant in your charade of lies.

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Predicting This World Cup

Shortly before the beginning of the World Cup former wife of John Lennon and renowned football pundit Yoko Ono unashamedly put forward her opinion as to who the eventual winner would be.

Even though I had “A child who believes in a peaceful world” in our football pool, I was delighted to see tears on his little optimistic face as he was knocked out on penalties in the second round. I am not sure what Yoko Ono was thinking trying to predict football, she is clearly no octopus.

In 2010 an octopus named Paul correctly predicted all of Germany’s results and that Spain would win the tournament. He died of natural causes with a prediction record stained by only a few bad decisions. This time a giant Pacific octopus in Japan named Rabio accurately predicted all three of Japan’s group stage matches, before being chopped up and eaten prior to Japan’s second-round clash. It’s a sad reflection of the times that we don’t even have enough respect for a magical octopus to wait until after the tournament to eat him.

Apart from showing that had Pikachu actually been discovered in Japan Ash Ketchum would probably have been unimpressed and, eaten him with lashes of soy sauce, this story of the Japanese Octopus is also something of a conundrum. For one thing, because he was an octopus, and therefore incapable of human speech, we will never know if he could predict his own grisly demise.

Was he a hapless, unknowing victim of his captor’s meat-cleaver? Or, was he, as I like to think, fully aware of what was to happen to him the whole time? Perhaps he knew that like Paul, psychic abilities only last so long, wrong answers were around the corner, and, true to his Japanese culture, unable to face the shame of his own inevitable failures, he orchestrated his own demise by peeing on his captor’s rug? It is a noble end, and, now that she too has been proven wrong, one another Japanese football pundit, Yoko Ono should consider. You broke up the Beatles Yoko! It’s time to go.

 

 

 

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I’m Too Good For This

As a newly single person, I have naturally tried out Tinder – if by “tried out” I really mean, “swiped silently left for hours on end while descending into deeper and deeper pits of existential despair”. Wave after wave of potentially wonderful people pass beneath my grubby Nik-Nak stained fingers, swiped forever into some nameless void, from where they will inevitably only return a few weeks later, this time with a new profile picture of themselves stroking a lion cub.

“Don’t worry about the man next to me whose head I have cropped out of the picture in which I am wearing a wedding dress. He is nothing. A mere step towards the happiness we will inevitably be forced to endure,” the profiles all seem to say – their blank-faced yoghurt commercial faces covered in so many photo filters the rabbit ears are the most realistic part.  Some of them aren’t that subtle – “swipe left if …” they state openly before delivering a grocery list of previous grievances. “No married men, cheaters, poor people, fuck bois, liberals, conservatives, short men, posers, anarchist revolutionaries….”. I don’t even read them, I just swipe left assuming I inevitably fall into at least one of the categories on the list.

Why are any of us there? I doubt anyone downloads Tinder dreaming of the day they hear their best-man say, “I remember the day he told me they had met on Tinder”.  Why do we do it? Who are these people who, like me, have signed up to be swiped so far left they get berets in the post from the EFF?

Perhaps we all have too much self-esteem for Tinder? Maybe we really think that four-year-old photo of us holding aloft a fish on the one happy day of our lives will open up a world of soulful romantic connections? If we do, we are undoubtedly wrong. “I love wine and laughing,” says every single bio written by people either too boring to have any real interests, or prepared to cast the net out wide enough to snare absolutely every single person in the world.

Turning on the Tinder app should activate the front camera on your phone thereby forcing you to engage with the mess you have made of your life while you are busy judging others, or maybe, just maybe, we should abandon it entirely and start going on the dates our friends and family recommend?

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Missed Opportunities

Paarl resident Tamaryn Green was this weekend named Miss SA, and while friends, family, Western Cape locals and most of the country was lauding the medical student for her achievements, a small minority were wondering how in this day and age we could still be celebrating something as archaic, and fundamentally wrong as Paarl. Apparently, Tamaryn took home Miss SA, and Miss Universe South Africa, while the runner-up Thulisa Keyi won the Miss World SA title, which makes about as much sense as the fact that these things exist in the first place. Doesn’t being the best in the universe also necessitate being the best in the world? Tamaryn is the best in the universe from South Africa.

Being the best in the universe from South Africa must feel like a special achievement, even to someone who is going to become a doctor one day, and whose old boyfriends are currently clamouring to be recognised on Twitter. That’s the kind of respect I crave, and as such, I started investigating whether or not 2019 could be my year to become Miss SA. It seems not. While at first, I was excited, “You must have no visible tattoos or criminal record”, my hopes were quickly dashed by the fact that you can be no older than 27 and must have never been married.  So I started looking at the requirements for the notoriously low budget, old people’s version of the competition “Mrs South Africa”. Again I am afraid I struck out. While I am between the ages of 24 and 49, and like to think I am “A role model for married women in our country” I am unfortunately not “Beautiful inside and out”, “Hard working and ambitious” or “A strong, successful woman”.

Probably the best part about being the best in the universe from South Africa for anything is that when you die you are guaranteed to get a mention in a newspaper. Some journalist who hasn’t even been born yet will smash out a quick 200 words on the fact that you won, had three marriages, eleven kids, and died walking into the sea. It must be a comfort to her to know that the sooner she dies the longer the story will be.

At 39 I am already too old to be Miss SA and other doors have shut on me permanently too. For starters, I have missed the 27 club by more than a decade. Johann Ackerman was 37 when he became the oldest person to ever play rugby for the Springboks, meaning my total lack of interest or sporting talent are no longer the only things excluding me from the green and gold. I will never be a child prodigy and unless Prince Phillip dies soon I will also never be likely to marry into the British Royal Family.

No, I am afraid the only way left to me to guarantee myself a spot in the newspaper when I die is to form a suicide cult. So if you aren’t doing anything else send your cult application to warren@warrenrobertson.co.za. Sadly, fellow old people, applications are restricted to those who are young, beautiful, and not from Paarl.

 

 

 

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Koping With Stupiderity

One of my biggest problems I have realised is that I expect too much from humanity. My natural inclination is to assume that anyone I meet, and people I speak to, are rational, thinking, and reasonable people. When I put it to paper – website – like this I realise how foolish such a notion seems, but I can’t seem to help myself when I am out there in the world.  In my experience the great-majority of those people (the readers of this column exempted) haven’t got the sense to scratch their balls without first consulting a Youtube video.

This is of course alright. It’s absolutely okay to be the kind of person who eats corn flakes by stabbing at them with a fork. It’s something that could have happened to anyone at birth, but I shouldn’t expect the people I meet to be anything other than that. I could save myself endless hours of frustration if I just lowered my expectations of those around me. Harnessing this great power could see me breeze through traffic, smile benignly as the old woman in front of me in the Pick n Pay queue counts her coins for the fiftieth time, and sigh serenely as I hang up on call centre salespeople. At the core of this realisation is that I am seldom irritated with animals. Dogs are stupid. They spend most of their time walking in circles in an attempt to sniff each other’s behinds. The most one can expect from a dog is that it doesn’t poo on the carpet, however because my expectations of them are limited I rarely find myself frustrated. On the other hand I tend to expect so much more from the people than that they simply do “their business” outside, and this leads to disappointment.  For starters I used a public toilet the other day, and discovered that someone had in fact done their business outside the toilet. Cue existential despair.

Probably one of my favourite examples of epic stupidity occurred when in a moment of youthful exhuberance I accidentally found myself at a Boksburg nightclub I now believe was called Masquerades. I was confronted at the bar by a large bald headed man who told me that he “headbutted concrete pillars”. I smiled and asked, “Why?”, with a look on his face bordering on condescension he said, “For fun”. To which I replied, “You have had a lot of fun this way” taking my life in my hands. Naturally he laughed, said “Ja!” before smashing his head against a concrete pillar.

Lowering one’s expectations in these situations is admittedly easier said than done, but I have at least found another angle to understanding those among us who are so simple they believe white privilege isn’t real, but white genocide is.  A 2012 study led by Richard West at James Madison University reveals the stupidity that resides in each and every one us, by indicating our numerous thinking biases and errors.  Among a series of questions he uses to reveal these biases is this one:  A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Naturally most people respond that the bat is a dollar, and the ball ten cents. This is incorrect. The real answer is that the ball is 5c and the bat is $1.05. It’s what West called a thinking bias, a quick route our brain has been trained to take over time, that we use because it’s simply easier than doing the actual maths. These biases affect every facet of our lives, and are there to give us quick shortcuts to save time in our day-to-day lives. One of the most powerful of these is called the “self-serving bias” in which we tend to think we are better than others.  Most people for instance believe they are above average in intelligence – even whose who think that vaccinations cause autism.

West further found that we are amazingly good at spotting when others make these errors and are terrible at recognising them in ourselves.  The reason for this is that we judge others logically and based purely on their actions, while when judging our own behaviours we factor in emotion, motivations and intentions. In each instance, we readily forgive ourselves our mistakes, but look harshly upon those of other people. And it gets worse. The study further found that the more traditionally intelligent a person is (the more “cognitively sophisticated”) the more likely they are to make these errors. Essentially: we are all dumber than we think we are, and even if we aren’t, that just means we make more mistakes.

Of course while this does explain some of the daily stupidities we are all made to endure, and  allows us to climb down off our high-horses and view the perpetrators in a kinder light leading to peace and forgiveness, I still think the guy who did a poo on the floor of the Douglasdale shell garage right by the hand-dryer is an asshole.

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How To Judge A Parent

There is a new saying, that one should never judge another parent. The idea is that anyone with a small child, no matter how attentive, is likely to experience melt downs and moments of almost monumental shame for no reason while raising their young one. I say this is bullshit. Judge away. If my child is lying on the floor of a store thrashing his legs and arms, you would be only be right to judge me. If I don’t hear hear you whisper about what a bad parent I am, then at the very least I know you and I have nothing in common, cause that’s what I would be doing.

Probably the worst side-effect of being a parent is that one is forced into contact with other people’s children. My toddler and I like to go down to the park – he to run and climb, and me to be told to run and climb by him, like I am on boot camp and the drill sergeant calls me “daddy”.  Having a job done in odd hours, I often get to take him on week days when the park is silent, but when it isn’t I find we are often confronted with the worst specimens of childlike humanity. And on those days judgement comes in handy.

The other day a boy, who I was assured was five, but who looked as if his beard was coming through,  backed my son into a corner on a jungle gym to tell him a story. The tale went as follows, “And then the people died, and do you know what happened next?” he said. My kid, being 20 months old, polite, and having never heard a story of this kind before dutifully answered, “no” thereby encouraging young Shakespeare to continue.

“Blood came pouring out of their heads and they turned into bats, and do you know what happened next?” he asked, the gripping cliffhanger dangling in the air.

“No,” my son said again, not yet having learnt from his previous error. “They were made into stone, before exploding, and guts went everywhere. Do you know what happened next?” the elocutionist enquired, while I stood starring at him like shit smeared on a new rug.

At this stage the child’s mother must have finally noticed what was going on as she bustled over and told her young thought-leader that he probably shouldn’t be terrifying the baby. He drooled on his chin, screamed something nonsensical and dived head first down the slide. My son turned to me, shrugged and demanded I run to the swings.

I judged that mother that day. Her inattentiveness lead to a really awkward situation. What was I supposed to do? Remind her son he was speaking to a baby? Shout at him? Wade in and toe punt the hobbit over a swing set? Socially we are not allowed to do those things anymore, and so I judge. Giving some sense of shame to the parent is our last defence in the face of a badly behaved child, and if this bothers you, if you are worried that one day it could be you on the end of my glowering silence remember, “you will never experience a public tantrum if you just keep them locked in a cupboard at home.”