Nerds Eye View (and I got another crib)

I am not chucking blogger, it is just that it takes too long to get logged. Even from the Café. And as I always say, "I have things to do and people to see. This money ain't gonna make itself." I am a busy man. I can't be there there.

 

I also hate that I cannot comment as much as I want to.

 

And I have a lot to get off my fingers. I need to type and I need to blog. I am arrghing, so to speak.

 

So I followed my heroes jmataachi and Petes mama to another site.

 

Ah. http://bazanye.wordpress.com That's more like it.

 

Now, as I was saying, Nerd's Eye View continues….

 

 

 

 

 

He had wanted to fire Crooked Paul for a long time. Mostly because he was a very lousy worker. Paul (we didn't know he was crooked then) told us he was in senior three, though we were convinced he was at the very least twenty years old. He did not discuss his age, but didn't dispute the charge, when leveled against him, that he was a little bit old for O'level class. He explained, in a tiny, plaintive voice, that he had only himself in this world and that is why he went around the neighbourhood on weekends cleaning houses. It was so that he could pay his way through school and get an education.

 

I was convinced. He needed to make money housekeeping, we had housekeeping that needed doing, I didn't see any problem, only a solution. The Worm was not too keen at first. "Shouldn't a cleaning lady be, I don't know, a lady?"

 

"It's the new millenium, Worm. Gender equality. Anything a woman can do, so can a man."

 

Paul was finally contracted. The Worm's consent was secured when he discovered that rather than call Paul a maid, he could call him a valet, and life improved considerably when you could speak of having you own valet.

 

We soon found out why Paul was such a bargain. He was always late and sometimes didn't show up at all. His mopping and sweeping sometimes left the impression that if you had just blown at the dust then spat on the floor you would have achieved better results. He favoured the dip-once-squeeze-twice-rinse-now-that's-it technique when it came to laundry and often returned our clothes with the stains still intact. And his ironing was pathetic. He could actually make the clothes look more crinkled than before he began. The Worm grumbled bitterly when he would find himself ironing his clothes again after Paul was through and gone. I remember the argument.

 

"The guy needs the money! You can't just fire him because you're too pompy to iron your own clothes!"

"He is ripping us off!"

"He needs to pay his school fees! Look, do it as a kindness; send out some good karma. Let it be said of The Worm that he was a sarcastic, self-centered and vain bastard but his life wasn't entirely useless, for he once did a good deed. He ironed his own pants so that Paul could have an education."

"Mordecai, have you ever seen Paul's handwriting? He left a note the other day and I tell you it was not inspiring. The man is barely literate. Senior three? I was forced to conclude that whatever education they are giving him, its quality can only be adequately described by a person who has had his head immersed in a sewage pit. I mean to say, of course, that it is shit. So we are paying for shit service, so Paul can pay for shit education!"

 

Eventually we agreed to put Paul on probation. And he did show improvement, knowing that he was in danger. We shouldn't have. Are you familiar with the phrase "term egenda"?

Knowing that they will be out of the teachers' and prefects' jurisdiction in a few short days, naughty schoolboys go on rampage at the close of the term, vandalising, stealing, bullying etc. Sure that they are going to lose upcoming elections, bad governments loot and pilfer as much as they can before they get booted out of office. And Paul, knowing how his probation would end, also began to do his own term egenda.

 

There is a hardcover Wole Soyinka book that The Worm likes to bring out and place on the bookshelf to impress select visitors. One day it fell out of Paul's shirt as he was leaving. Suddenly we came to understand why so many books and CDs and magazines had been turning up missing over the past couple of weeks.

 

Paul said he was only borrowing it, and we said, of course you were, goodbye and have a good life. We didn't pursue the matter beyond firing him. Me, because of my sympathetic soul, Worm, because he was just stymied by the twisted nature of the crime. "The guy who decides to steal a book by the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature can barely read! Words, fittingly, fail me."

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