One of the biggest drawbacks of being self-employed is that you’re never really sure when it is that you’re no longer on holiday.
“C’mon! It’s the festive season. Let’s party!”
“Go home, Ben. It’s March.”
People with proper jobs don’t have this problem. They know exactly when their holiday ends, although the dread probably sets in two or three days earlier. I imagine it’s a bit like being on death row. Knowing the exact time your execution is scheduled to take place quite likely ruins your last couple of days of being alive.
Employers should factor this in when calculating annual leave for their exploited. Everyone gets an additional two free Dread Days which they can spend sighing heavily, doing the laundry, deforesting various body parts and mentally preparing for another 48 straight weeks of misery.
Some people couldn’t survive without a job. And I don’t just mean financially. It gives them purpose. While they’re behind their desk tomorrow morning, I’ll be surfing with dolphins. They give me porpoise.
Anyway. It could be worse. You could be among the 151 830 matrics who did well enough in their exams to spend the next three years getting harassed, teargassed and vilified at the university of their choice. After this, they will spend another three years looking for a job. Perth, London and Auckland are already bracing themselves for another wave of whiny privileged South Africans.
Of the 458 348 pupils who, like me, were too stupid, lazy or distracted to get a university pass, 21.5% will become substance abusers, 11% will try their hand at housebreaking, 3% will kill their parents to get an early inheritance and the rest will join the ANC in the hope of getting a tender. Two will become newspaper columnists and earn less than everyone else.
Around 550 schools achieved a 100% pass rate. This is a filthy lie. I can’t imagine this country having even one school where nobody who wrote Grade 12 failed. If it’s true, then there must have been cheating on an industrial scale. Or results were manipulated. Every village has an idiot and every school has a moron. Perhaps times have changed. My matric year was awash with morons. I don’t know if they passed or failed. When I walked through those gates after the final exam, I burnt my uniform, walked home naked and never looked back.
I also find it hard to believe that the Free State recorded the highest pass rate in the country. When I was growing up, the Free State was home to people directly descended from Neanderthals. The bloodline was virtually pure. This isn’t to say they were bad people, but they were. Of course, these days black people also live there. I can only assume they had a big hand in pushing up the pass rate. I still don’t understand why anyone would choose to live in the Free State, though.
Well done to the Eastern Cape. They are consistently the worst performing province and if there is one thing this country needs right now, it’s consistency. We have a president with the consistency, albeit a moral one, of Spongebob Squarepants and a government that is as inconsistent as its position on Taiwan.
Quite frankly, the worst thing of all is that we now have to look at pictures of the top performers. Performers? Perhaps that is the right word, considering the circus our education system has become. There they are, the last of the Rainbow Nationists, faces full of smug, all teeth and shiny eyes, smiling at we millions who never got a single distinction, let alone seventy-twelve of them.
Well done, boys and girls. Clap clap clap. Are you going to use that massive brain power to change the world? No, you’re not. You peaked too early. You’re going to insert yourself into the machine and your clever little cogs will help generate more white monopoly capital or black monopoly capital and the world will get worse, with or without your help. Some of you will end up in sheltered employment or psychiatric hospitals.
Most of you will make terrible wives or husbands because your parents forgot to socialise you as they relentlessly pushed you to accomplish everything they didn’t so they could brag about you at the golf club and bask in the reflected glory until such time as you are led away in handcuffs or a straitjacket, at which point they will say, “But we did everything we could.” Yes, you did. Now look.
This is going to be the year of the unconfirmed sweeping statement. The streets will run red, white and blue with conjecture, assumptions and hypotheses. Opinion is the new sheriff in town. Guns will be jumped and chickens will be counted. There shall be prognostication and prophesies to fit your wildest fantasies and a shot in the dark will always be better than a harbinger in the bush.
It’s started already. Researchers from the University of Limerick say they’ve discovered a new organ in the body. The mesentery, a silly name for an organ, connects the gut to the … oh, who cares.
“The anatomic description that had been laid down over 100 years of anatomy was incorrect,” said a professor of surgery. What else have we been getting wrong? Are we perhaps descended from goats? Is heroin, in fact, good for you? We don’t need this kind of malarkey. Those researchers need to be rounded up and burnt at the stake. I’m offering a prize for the person who comes up with the best limerick about the new organ.
Also in keeping with this new era of brazen balderdash masquerading as Something Significant, scientists say that powerful radio waves, lasting no more than a millisecond, seem to be coming from a dwarf galaxy more than three billion light years away. They’ve heard seventeen in ten years and have spent the last six months studying a single repeated burst. And you thought your job was tedious.
Then there was the ANC’s 105th anniversary rally at Orlando Stadium. Making as much sense as usual, party organiser and minister of fun and games, Fikile Mbalula, said, “For what we have gone through, (Sunday) is that platform from which we rekindle ourselves and at the same time we get our marching orders about what needs to be done.”
Yep, standing in the rain listening to fat men make speeches is all the rekindling the ANC needs.
Then, in twelve days’ time, Donald Trump and his repulsive family moves into the White House. Things are about to get deeply weird.