Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

Posted on

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?

Posted on

How To Name The Airport

Politicians are the worst people. At 18 they head to university determined to join the various political party youth structures because at that stage they presume themselves to be already all-knowing, and capable. They leave school believing wholeheartedly that what the world needs is their input, as they know what’s best for you and I. At 18, with no world experience, they think they should be leading you. Over the years we load these mini-narcissists with money and power, and then we are surprised when things get more messed up than beer and candles night at a convent.

Politicians are single-handedly responsible for everything awful that has ever happened. Wars, corruption, apartheid, the Holocaust,  and this Jacob Zuma statue – all these things came about because of the decisions made by people who should never have been given power in the first place.

As a society, we repeatedly elect the worst of humanity, then watch as these mini-tyrants tear their countries apart, and celebrate their own greatness by naming everything after themselves, and their friends. Every government building, every airport, and every stadium gets to be named after them, inspiring yet more people who want things named after them to go into politics. Isn’t it time to stop empowering these madmen?

Now there are calls to rename the Cape Town International Airport and, unlike Britain who would no doubt have wanted it hilariously named Airporty McAirportFace, our suggestions are 99% in honour of other politicians and freedom fighters. If we want to encourage the right people to go into power, we need to avoid honouring them. We need to switch off their access to the front pages, tune down the honorifics we pay them, and have them do more work, and less talking. Let the humble seek power. The only things we should name after politicians are natural disasters because like politicians they are brutal, expensive, and infinitely worse for the poor.

Instead, we should be honouring the people that make us proud to be South African. Like me. As someone who has tirelessly, and humbly worked to achieve acclaim, I think we can all agree that I deserve something way bigger than merely having my name on an airport. So while we wait for the inevitable 300-metre high statue to me to be constructed on Table Mountain may I suggest that we name the airport, and all future buildings, after those who through their endeavours have lifted our country’s name high around the world?

I would love to land at Hugh Masekela International, or indeed any airport named after legendary artists, sportsmen, scientists and authors. Who would argue that Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Ingrid Jonker, Brenda Fassie, Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, Caster Semenya, Hashim Amla, Vusi Mahlasela, Aaron Klug, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sydney Bremmer, and countless others would deserve to be remembered, and honoured in this way?

I understand the need to respect people who dedicated their lives to give us the country we currently have, but our inability to honour anyone other than them reveals a gaping, and dangerous one-dimensionality in our thinking. By my estimates, two-thirds of things in this country are named after Nelson Mandela, but we don’t have a single significant tribute to Miriam Makeba. As long as we honour only warriors and politicians, and neglect those who bring beauty to our country we tacitly tell our children that the arts, peace,  and scientific endeavour are unimportant. We need to do something to ensure this is not the impression they are getting urgently, and the gigantic solid gold, mechanised statue of me just isn’t enough.

Posted on

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.

 

 

 

Posted on

The Only Way To Stop A Bad Guy With A Gun…

I don’t understand America’s obsession with the phrase “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”, and I don’t mean simply because it seems to be a confusing thing to say after every school shooting they have.

Let’s assume that the logic behind the saying is sound for a minute, that arming teachers with their own guns will mean that bad kids with guns will be stopped in their tracks before they can do murder on their fellow students, surely we should still take it a step further? Wouldn’t it make more sense to actually arm the teachers better than the students who have guns? If your wife was facing off against a madman with a knife, surely you would give her a gun rather than a knife of her own – given the choice, and assuming you are the same kind of coward I am who wouldn’t offer to fight him in her stead?

America doesn’t go to war against anyone without being sure they have better weapons and greater numbers than their opposition, so why are they including a fair play clause in the teacher vs student shootouts? Surely this saying should be, “The only good way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with laser guided nuclear warheads” or better yet, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy in some kind of mechanised gundam suit with arms made out of laser cannons?”.  There is no 14 year old with a tog bag full of guns who could take on an squadron of teachers flying F-16s. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with an army of battle-armoured velociraptors“.

Honestly it’s this kind of narrow world thinking that has America stranded and watching the same school shooting  every week on their news. The only thing the saying “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” is good for is selling more guns. Instead of empowering the same NRA cadres after every shooting, why not invest in some decent start ups to make the teachers not only the equal of a gun toting teen, but his superior. The stock exchange would boom as companies entered the market making bullet proof robot geography teachers, interstellar “bad guy with a gun” laser targeting systems, and problem student decapitation collars.

The other option is of course the one proposed by snowflake liberal cucks like myself in which America just takes away the guns from the students, or at least make it a lot harder for them to buy them. At the moment a six year old can buy an assault rifle with her tooth fairy money, and gun enthusiasts don’t want that to change. What they don’t understand is that if they are right, and  taking away guns from scholars won’t lower the number of attacks, then it will at least make them more interesting. I am sure we are all bored as hell of the same story happening over and over again.  Rather than watch the news to only see the aftermath of yet another schooting (a portmanteau of school and shooting, that I am leaving behind as my gift to humanity) we could all track the killer student as he stalked through the ventilation system leaping on popular kids with a sharpened stick and a Taser.

Oh what a wonderful world it could be, but doubtless, despite offering two win-win answers to this problem, those NRA haters will say I am wrong.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Anything But Selfies

I hate social media, and the reason I hate it, is because hating things on social media seems to be the best thing about it. It’s a confusing paradox. Last night someone pissed me off cause they hated something I also hate. I hated them, because they hated the thing I hate, in a snarky and off-putting manner that wasn’t in keeping with the more dignified, and quirky way in which I hate things. At least I thought so. I hope me saying that doesn’t make you hate me.

Probably the thing that I hate the most about the internet is the “selfie”. Not anyone specific’s selfie, just the concept. When I went to Japan way back in 2001 I took a few “selfies”, because I travelled there alone and needed proof I had been. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and I felt like a bit of a loser for having no friends who could take these pictures for me. A man alone taking pictures of himself, was viewed with the same suspicion as a trenchcoat owner in a play park. That was how it should be. Why was he alone? Was he a murderer? A lunatic? A Backstreet Boys fan? Turns out he was likely none of those things, just a normal, narcissistic arsehole like the rest of us. The only thing that prevented us from taking nothing but selfies back then was apparently the stigma, and once that evaporated so did our dignity. Now every second Instagram account is just pictures of the owner’s face blocking the view.

We should have seen it coming. It’s not like we haven’t always been narcissistic. Ever since the days of nobility spending hundreds of peasant’s worth of salary on oil paintings, we have wanted nothing as much as to look at our own faces. Coke had its first sales increase in more than a decade when it introduced the idea of adding names to their cans and bottles. We as a species are so self-involved, so desperate to be recognised as special, we will actually spend extra money just so we can drink from a can that says we have a common enough name to make printing it economically viable. It’s our biggest, most easily exploitable failing. We are idiots, little more than apes. Want proof? What was the first thing a monkey with a camera ever took a photo of? Itself.

I am more than willing to bet that if that ape had access to a computer it would also be posting that it has an IQ of 172 according to the test it just took on Facebook. Taking an IQ test on Facebook should automatically qualify you to fail it. “Only the smartest will be able to spot the…” If that sentence doesn’t end with the words, “data mining capabilities of this test”, then once again, finding the solution means you don’t qualify for the descriptor.

Facebook’s entire business model is based around selling our predictability. They are only able to promise that an advertiser will get x number of likes per x amount of cash they spend, because they know exactly what we will click on and when. That’s how mundane, and predictable we each are. If you see something on the internet that claims you are special it’s probably just selling your data to sex-traffickers or worse, McDonalds, cause you aren’t. You, like me, are a number.

We aren’t special so we need to stop acting like we’re among the most intelligent and handsome, just cause an app told us we are smart, or that we look a lot like the celeb Selena Gomez. No matter how many filters you use you don’t look like Selena Gomez – you look like the selfie monkey. So stop photographing your face, and turn the camera outward. At least then you’ll likely get a better view, and I will have one fewer thing to hate.

Posted on

Seeking – Cheap, back-alley liposuction.

I am overweight by about 8kgs. It’s not a lot by some people’s reckoning, but it’s enough to cause me a healthy dose of self-loathing. I therefore want to be thinner. On the surface losing weight is simple – all a person needs to do is eat less, and move more. The equation is simple. The application is not.

A few years ago I went to a dietician to see what I was doing wrong, and get an idea of what I should be eating. What she told me was horrifying. Apparently a fistful of nuts is not just the name of my favourite adult video, but rather what one should eat six times a day. “Whenever you think of pizza, just eat another handful of polystyrene,” I seem to remember her saying, sometime after I decided to ignore her completely. What she was saying made no sense – if God had wanted us to eat fruit he would never have banished Adam & Eve for an apple.

It seems when people say, “be hungry”, what they mean is, “Be hungry all the time. If you aren’t constantly famished, you aren’t living your best life”.  A famous comedian once accurately said, “Losing weight is easy. Stop eating. There were no obese people in the concentration camps.” Sure, but then those people were also notoriously hungry. Not one person left Bergen-Belsen delighted with their figure, and determined to stick to the diet.

In short you need to be ravenous, and if you are ravenous you are grumpy. If your personality has begun to make you a victim of office politics, and your wife is secretly visiting a divorce lawyer to consider options, then congratulations, you are probably dieting correctly.

The second step to losing weight is to simply move faster. Apparently moving faster, and more often is the key to making my body look less like a bag of milk. I have tried it. It’s unpleasant. Water comes out of me and makes my shirt wet, I struggle to breathe and things start to hurt. Doing this once is awful, but people say I must do it every day.

Lifting up heavy things then putting them down again also works. Lifting things up, moving fast, then putting them down is the best way to lose weight. If you pick up something heavy, move it quickly to somewhere else, then put it down, and start to see bright lights flashing behind your eyeballs, then you are both succeeding at exercise and at not eating. Well done. This is what healthy feels like.

It would be much easier just to make excuses. “It’s baby weight.” I want to say to anyone who looks at me sideways. “My son isn’t even two. I have time to drop down to my pre-pregnancy weight.” But things are getting dire.  I recently told a friend it was puppy fat, and he asked me why I ate a puppy.  So next week if you see me, please understand why I look so sad. I am starving, and spending all my energy picking things up and putting them down again, all so the TV news won’t use a photo of me with my head cut off when they talk about the dangers of obesity.

Posted on

Oh To Storm The Beach At Normandy

People don’t really ever think about the consequences of their actions. Every day all of us do things that may one day, unknown to us, cause untold misery to people of the future. For instance, did the neolithic cave person who first picked up a stick and started beating out the rhythm of a song ever consider that he was one day going to be responsible for Noot Vir Noot? Probably not.

Likewise did the first person who offered to carry something for someone else in exchange for one of his cabbages envisage the modern work environment of cramped desks, medical aid, and a 60 hour working week? If he did then I hope he is in the special hell alongside Judas, Gert Van Rooyen and Speckles from Pumpkin Patch.

In the end it was probably a few dozen of these well intentioned, but ultimately crushing decisions that lead to the world, and the lives, we now live, and it seems none of us want to go back despite being in a state of near constant misery propped up by anti-depression pills, alcohol and that “Britain’s Got Talent” video of the disabled woman getting a standing ovation.

We hate it so much that the way we relax is to connect to virtual realities where we imagine we live in a series of post apocalyptic nightmares. The deeper humanity finds themselves trapped by reality, the more popular entertainment centred on fantasy, and science fiction becomes. “The Walking Dead” isn’t a horror show it’s a vision board. We would rather spend our time pretending to wander a maze full of undead than face another day in our cubicle selling insurance, or connecting with loved ones over a lukewarm Woolworths lasagne.

Life is one long unskippable cut scene and the tedium is only relieved when we get home, switch on our alternate reality machines and pretend we are storming the beach at Normandy. What was once your grandfather’s greatest nightmare has become what we look forward to at the end of a long day. And why not? For the rest of the day we are just waiting for death by endlessly switching between the same three websites anyway. 

The best motivational speakers would end this piece by telling you, your chains are all of your own making, and that at any point you can throw them off and travel the world with nothing but an Instagram account, but then those guys are all in the only category of people capable of doing that – the mega rich, and I am not paid to make anyone think they can be their best selves. What I can do however is point you in the direction of the game Horizon Zero Dawn. As the lead character Aloy you get to be both primitive and live in a post-apocalyptic scenario. It’s basically our collective dream, and you almost never get stuck in traffic.