I would just like to make the public aware of a deadly menace stalking the streets we live on. Many of us are completely oblivious to the threat posed to us by these motorized monsters, and walk past several a day without realizing the terrible hazard to our health.
I am talking, of course, about that ever-present Satan of the streets, the Vespa. Hailing from their religious capital, Rome, the Vespa are an extremist secular offshoot of the Roman Catholic Motorcycle, believing in practicality above style and economy above safety.
The Vespa is a natural predator in the urban environment; claiming up to seven pedestrians and two riders per month. It is a fiercely territorial beast, marking its territory by leaving single-tracked tyre marks on driveways and leaving its broken mirrors on sidewalks whenever it changes its skin. Being a sub-genus of the family of Crustaceans, the Vespa is known to moult approximately twice a year. Normally after a major encounter with its only natural enemy, the motor vehicle, it sheds its coat of paint, discards the now-broken side mirrors and dons a new look; at odd intervals, for instance when its pet (normally a member of the species homo sapiens) has achieved some kind of financial milestone, it even obtains a brand new cow-hide for its back. How it obtains the skin from this animal is as yet unknown; it is speculated that the Vespa hides in trees and waits in ambush for the grazing quadruped before jumping on its back, stripping its skin off its bones and speeding away before the rest of the herd corners it and forces it to perform donuts in the meadow.
I myself have had several near-death encounters with this bipedal barbarian. A certain street in Windhoek is home to a legendary pink Vespa of legendary durability. It is rumored that this particular model still had its original coat of paint, and that the mirrors had been replaced only twice in its entire lifetime. I was on my way to a frozen banana-makers' convention when I unwittingly trespassed on the territorial tarmac of this roadworthy ravisher. Hearing a buzzing noise, somewhat like a bee trapped inside an empty baseball bat, I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. Some primal urge kicked in and forced me to walk to the side of the road. If I had stopped to tie a shoelace or even tried leopard-crawling to the curb I would have been seriously injured. Lucky for me the human brain is hardwired for protection against the Vespa, or else I would merely have shrugged it off as some flamboyant bicycle; decades of fighting between man and machine had imprinted this predator's ways into our very genetics.
So the next time you stop at an intersection with your white Toyota Yaris and see the silhouette of that pavement parasite, don't hesitate to pursue that foul beast and destroy it without a second thought. Our streets would be a safer, less economic place for all of us if we can only stick together to wipe out this threat.
Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Day 1
This is a rage blog.
Just for today. See, I've just returned from the South African High Commission, where I've been trying to complete a study permit application for the past month or so. So this morning, I set one of my little vacationing brothers the task of waiting in line for me, and letting me know when he reaches the front of the queue. I happily bang away at my keyboard at work, comforted in the thought that I've now jumped through every single hoop that the diplomatic system can throw at me, done every single one of the tasks I was set by the office of His Grace the Ambassador and can take half an hour off work, just hand the clerk a stack of papers taller than myself and saunter out, a permitted man.
[Some of what follows might be the SLIGHTEST bit embellished. This is merely to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation and to convey the proper gravity to my story]
My phone vibrates; it's a text from my little brother that says "Hey, I'm at the front of the queue. Things are moving quite quickly; you should get here in the next half hour or so", somehow using less than 15 characters and including the number 8. I wave a quick goodbye to my boss and colleagues and jump in the car. Then the mojo hit me; I just suddenly had this hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that something, somewhere was going to go terribly, terribly wrong.
I wonder if that was how Yoda felt when...
Never mind, back on topic. I drive the 2 or so kilometers to the towering shadowy castle bearing the legend "South African High Commission" and pull up right next to the "Reserved for Old People or Really Slow People with Grey or No Hair" parking spot. I'm not quite sure it said just that, but it was something along those lines. Keys, wallet, spectacles... don't need those quite yet. Off I march to the drawbridge. I mean, door.
So I get to the entrance, right, take out my wallet, phone, keys, everything that would set off the metal detector spanned across the hallway, and turn to hand it to the security guard in the booth... who is sudden and remarkable in his absence. Okaaaay, this is slightly unexpected... But hey, like a good upstanding citizen I fill out the register stating my name, passport number, underwear size and purpose of entry. Except that the pen attached to the counter is sans a point. I.e. no writing capability whatsoever. I glance around for another pen and, lo and behold, another one is attached somewhat further down the counter! Balancing on the ball of my right foot, I precariously lean through the metal detector and with the desperate flail of a fingertip, grasp the second pen on its way to meet the floor. Swinging it over to the register triumphantly, I mash the tip of the pen to the paper only to see an empty shell hit the form in front of me. Some utter BASTARD had removed the inside of the ballpoint, leaving only the casing to give false hope for desperate people like myself.
Screw that, I thought, and walked through the metal detector. There was nobody to enforce rules that aren't visible to me anyway, and I had tried to follow protocol. Nuts to that.
So I turn the corner to the room where everybody queues for their Visas. Already I can feel my leg muscles shrinking from disuse, and that stupid stupid song from Hunchback of Notre Dame, "Out There", keeps looping in my head. Focus, Martin. Focus. Spotting my little brother up in the line ahead of me, I dodge the glowers and mutters of "line-cutter" and take the spot my little sibling reserved for me. Thanking him, I watch him skip through the exit into the sunlight.
Two people are ahead of me in the line; so about 2 hours later it's my turn. And as I get up, I realize that the passport photos required for the application are still in the drawer in my room.
I black out for a few minutes. When I come to, I'm driving my car to the nearest ice-cream and/or drugstore. Forcing my thoughts away from caramel and Prozac, I turn the car around and head for home, dodging pink Vespas and compacts with big red L's painted on their rear windows. Swerving into our driveway on two wheels, I yank up the handbrake and dive down the stairs while the engine turns over. I knock over two potted plants on my way down the stairs, but their repair can wait for this afternoon.
When I open the top drawer in my closet, I spy the telltale brown package holding the ever-grimacing snapshots of yours truly inside. Grabbing them, I jump over the dog that had come to inspect the panting, sweating permit hopeful in the room and bound up the stairs, jump in the seat and buckle myself in like in one of those Lethal Weapon movies. Spinning the wheels, I leave tyre marks all over the driveway, which was quite a feat as the car only had a 1.3l engine. Luckily the High Commission wasn't too far from my house or I'd have had to claim the fuel used as some kind of tax rebate under "paperwork".
When I get back to the embassy, my parking spot had been taken by some redneck in an Isuzu. Suddenly I start entertaining fantasies of heaving large rocks through his windshield and stabbing the man in the neck with palm tree branches, but I get my daydreaming under control, drive up the curb that caused several thousand dollars of damage to the undercarriage of my car, and slam the door.
Storming back in through the door, I find myself stopped by a mysterious black bar across the hallway. Looking to my left, I see a glowering security guard with one hand holding a baton at neck height and the other pointing accusingly at the register, as if to say "look at what you did! You broke the sanctity of the guard-normalperson trust! How can I ever trust anyone after what you did to me?". I sigh resignedly and sign the register. Leaving the muttering security guard behind, I step through the metal detector (two beeps, but what the hell, I'm not taking off my silver underwear for THAT guy) and re-enter the room. The sea of faces drained of emotion turns to me for a moment, hoping to see hope in my eyes, some sign that happiness still existed in this world - but to no avail. The moment they saw the empty look in my face, and knew in their souls that I had been here before, they turned back to blankly stare at the backs of their hands and the E-News bulletin that has been infinitely repeating on their black and white television since the year 1969.
With a determined look in my eye, I march to the row leading to a counter marked "Applications Payments None"... what does that even mean? Never mind, I told myself, man up! With a steely glint in my eye I readied myself for the clerk. It was time to lay down some diplomatic certification!
Nothing saps your determination like the undead eyes of a diplomatic security guard. They are bred for their absolute lack of any form of compassion, their need to only blink once every lunar cycle and their sponge-like ability to absorb all happiness from a room. Staring at me through the one-and-a-half-way mirror (tinted on one side, not on the other), he saps at my mental strength until I have all the resolve of an abandoned infant. By the time I reach the counter, I have blacked out several times and could barely keep myself from sobbing. Then the terrible news is stoically told to me through the bullet-proof glass of the clerk's counter: I needed to join the other (completely undefined) row at the back of the room to have my documents certified before I could re-apply with the same documents as I had in my hand.
The frail little blond girl in the row behind me started crying; she had overheard the clerk telling me to scram and assumed that it was a blanket ban on applications, and all she wanted to do was get home to her Pekinese terrier and her beloved grandmother. But no, the South African Diplomatic System was determined to keep her from her family and loved ones and dry the last drops of happiness from her soul.
Leaving the poor girl in her seat, I desperately crawl over to the line in the back of the room. I could come back for her later, if I still had the strength. Reaching the back of the room, I pulled myself over the bodies of civilians who had tried to apply for a permit to go to the bathroom, but died of starvation halfway to Counter 5 with Requisition Form 19c still clasped in their cold, dead hands. Asking a local where the line started and where it headed, the withered old man pointed to a chair against the wall, and fell back on the little mattress he had laid out in a corner. I assumed he'd decided to make base camp here and try for the line next week. Brushing two skeletons off the chair, I sat down and looked at the clock on the wall.
It had stopped.
I'm not joking here, people. The clock in the hall in the South African High Commission in Namibia doesn't work; it is permanently in a state of 15 minutes before closing. And for some reason the clerks and the guard kept on glancing at the clock as if looking for guidance.
By the time I reached the front of the queue I had eaten most of my clothes and two of the vultures circling round the air conditioner, and was reaching the end of my tether. FINALLY the man at the table turned his head in my direction with a loud creak and pointed his bony finger at me. Shuffling over to his table with the brochures and pamphlets I had woven together to protect my feet after the jackals ate my shoes, I reach the chair and gratefully sink down into the dank, dusty softness. He takes the stack of documents from the backpack I hand him and starts leafing through the contents. Randomly discarding documents I had painstakingly collected from all the corners of Namibia, the detritus from his trimming of my pile soon covered the small settlements of the permit applicants that had formed behind him. Suddenly he froze, grabbed a leaf of white A4 and shoved it in my face. "HOW DARE YOU!!!" he roars. "IT CLEARLY STATES ON FORM H15 THAT ALL MEDICAL TELEVISION LICENCES MUST BE SIGNED IN REVERSE WITH THE BLOOD OF A VIRGIN GRASSHOPPER!!!" And, indeed, I was guilty of that most cardinal of sins. Black pen just didn't cut it this time. "But where was I supposed to notice form..." "Didn't you SEE? It's very clearly printed in 8 point font on the underside of the suggestions box in the ladies' room! Get out of my SIGHT!"
And with this, I was unceremoniously grabbed by the security guard and dumped on the sidewalk outside, but not before being stripped of all official documents and most of the complimentary mints I had scavenged from the disabled toilet. I swear that he almost cracked a smile as he gave me a final shove with his baton.
"See you tomorrow, o forsaken one!" he cackled, unfolding his wings and gliding back to his post.
And sadly, he would. Because I needed that permit.
I needed nutrients, and I needed clothes. And fast. Barely managing to crawl across to the field of nettles growing where a lawn should be, I swallowed a few prickles before passing out from the excruciating pain. The last thing I saw before blackness enveloped me was the sign hanging outside the door: "We hope you have a pleasant experience with us".
So ends Day 1 of my epic saga of struggle with Consular Services to get my South African Study Permit.
Just for today. See, I've just returned from the South African High Commission, where I've been trying to complete a study permit application for the past month or so. So this morning, I set one of my little vacationing brothers the task of waiting in line for me, and letting me know when he reaches the front of the queue. I happily bang away at my keyboard at work, comforted in the thought that I've now jumped through every single hoop that the diplomatic system can throw at me, done every single one of the tasks I was set by the office of His Grace the Ambassador and can take half an hour off work, just hand the clerk a stack of papers taller than myself and saunter out, a permitted man.
[Some of what follows might be the SLIGHTEST bit embellished. This is merely to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation and to convey the proper gravity to my story]
My phone vibrates; it's a text from my little brother that says "Hey, I'm at the front of the queue. Things are moving quite quickly; you should get here in the next half hour or so", somehow using less than 15 characters and including the number 8. I wave a quick goodbye to my boss and colleagues and jump in the car. Then the mojo hit me; I just suddenly had this hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that something, somewhere was going to go terribly, terribly wrong.
I wonder if that was how Yoda felt when...
Never mind, back on topic. I drive the 2 or so kilometers to the towering shadowy castle bearing the legend "South African High Commission" and pull up right next to the "Reserved for Old People or Really Slow People with Grey or No Hair" parking spot. I'm not quite sure it said just that, but it was something along those lines. Keys, wallet, spectacles... don't need those quite yet. Off I march to the drawbridge. I mean, door.
So I get to the entrance, right, take out my wallet, phone, keys, everything that would set off the metal detector spanned across the hallway, and turn to hand it to the security guard in the booth... who is sudden and remarkable in his absence. Okaaaay, this is slightly unexpected... But hey, like a good upstanding citizen I fill out the register stating my name, passport number, underwear size and purpose of entry. Except that the pen attached to the counter is sans a point. I.e. no writing capability whatsoever. I glance around for another pen and, lo and behold, another one is attached somewhat further down the counter! Balancing on the ball of my right foot, I precariously lean through the metal detector and with the desperate flail of a fingertip, grasp the second pen on its way to meet the floor. Swinging it over to the register triumphantly, I mash the tip of the pen to the paper only to see an empty shell hit the form in front of me. Some utter BASTARD had removed the inside of the ballpoint, leaving only the casing to give false hope for desperate people like myself.
Screw that, I thought, and walked through the metal detector. There was nobody to enforce rules that aren't visible to me anyway, and I had tried to follow protocol. Nuts to that.
So I turn the corner to the room where everybody queues for their Visas. Already I can feel my leg muscles shrinking from disuse, and that stupid stupid song from Hunchback of Notre Dame, "Out There", keeps looping in my head. Focus, Martin. Focus. Spotting my little brother up in the line ahead of me, I dodge the glowers and mutters of "line-cutter" and take the spot my little sibling reserved for me. Thanking him, I watch him skip through the exit into the sunlight.
Two people are ahead of me in the line; so about 2 hours later it's my turn. And as I get up, I realize that the passport photos required for the application are still in the drawer in my room.
I black out for a few minutes. When I come to, I'm driving my car to the nearest ice-cream and/or drugstore. Forcing my thoughts away from caramel and Prozac, I turn the car around and head for home, dodging pink Vespas and compacts with big red L's painted on their rear windows. Swerving into our driveway on two wheels, I yank up the handbrake and dive down the stairs while the engine turns over. I knock over two potted plants on my way down the stairs, but their repair can wait for this afternoon.
When I open the top drawer in my closet, I spy the telltale brown package holding the ever-grimacing snapshots of yours truly inside. Grabbing them, I jump over the dog that had come to inspect the panting, sweating permit hopeful in the room and bound up the stairs, jump in the seat and buckle myself in like in one of those Lethal Weapon movies. Spinning the wheels, I leave tyre marks all over the driveway, which was quite a feat as the car only had a 1.3l engine. Luckily the High Commission wasn't too far from my house or I'd have had to claim the fuel used as some kind of tax rebate under "paperwork".
When I get back to the embassy, my parking spot had been taken by some redneck in an Isuzu. Suddenly I start entertaining fantasies of heaving large rocks through his windshield and stabbing the man in the neck with palm tree branches, but I get my daydreaming under control, drive up the curb that caused several thousand dollars of damage to the undercarriage of my car, and slam the door.
Storming back in through the door, I find myself stopped by a mysterious black bar across the hallway. Looking to my left, I see a glowering security guard with one hand holding a baton at neck height and the other pointing accusingly at the register, as if to say "look at what you did! You broke the sanctity of the guard-normalperson trust! How can I ever trust anyone after what you did to me?". I sigh resignedly and sign the register. Leaving the muttering security guard behind, I step through the metal detector (two beeps, but what the hell, I'm not taking off my silver underwear for THAT guy) and re-enter the room. The sea of faces drained of emotion turns to me for a moment, hoping to see hope in my eyes, some sign that happiness still existed in this world - but to no avail. The moment they saw the empty look in my face, and knew in their souls that I had been here before, they turned back to blankly stare at the backs of their hands and the E-News bulletin that has been infinitely repeating on their black and white television since the year 1969.
With a determined look in my eye, I march to the row leading to a counter marked "Applications Payments None"... what does that even mean? Never mind, I told myself, man up! With a steely glint in my eye I readied myself for the clerk. It was time to lay down some diplomatic certification!
Nothing saps your determination like the undead eyes of a diplomatic security guard. They are bred for their absolute lack of any form of compassion, their need to only blink once every lunar cycle and their sponge-like ability to absorb all happiness from a room. Staring at me through the one-and-a-half-way mirror (tinted on one side, not on the other), he saps at my mental strength until I have all the resolve of an abandoned infant. By the time I reach the counter, I have blacked out several times and could barely keep myself from sobbing. Then the terrible news is stoically told to me through the bullet-proof glass of the clerk's counter: I needed to join the other (completely undefined) row at the back of the room to have my documents certified before I could re-apply with the same documents as I had in my hand.
The frail little blond girl in the row behind me started crying; she had overheard the clerk telling me to scram and assumed that it was a blanket ban on applications, and all she wanted to do was get home to her Pekinese terrier and her beloved grandmother. But no, the South African Diplomatic System was determined to keep her from her family and loved ones and dry the last drops of happiness from her soul.
Leaving the poor girl in her seat, I desperately crawl over to the line in the back of the room. I could come back for her later, if I still had the strength. Reaching the back of the room, I pulled myself over the bodies of civilians who had tried to apply for a permit to go to the bathroom, but died of starvation halfway to Counter 5 with Requisition Form 19c still clasped in their cold, dead hands. Asking a local where the line started and where it headed, the withered old man pointed to a chair against the wall, and fell back on the little mattress he had laid out in a corner. I assumed he'd decided to make base camp here and try for the line next week. Brushing two skeletons off the chair, I sat down and looked at the clock on the wall.
It had stopped.
I'm not joking here, people. The clock in the hall in the South African High Commission in Namibia doesn't work; it is permanently in a state of 15 minutes before closing. And for some reason the clerks and the guard kept on glancing at the clock as if looking for guidance.
By the time I reached the front of the queue I had eaten most of my clothes and two of the vultures circling round the air conditioner, and was reaching the end of my tether. FINALLY the man at the table turned his head in my direction with a loud creak and pointed his bony finger at me. Shuffling over to his table with the brochures and pamphlets I had woven together to protect my feet after the jackals ate my shoes, I reach the chair and gratefully sink down into the dank, dusty softness. He takes the stack of documents from the backpack I hand him and starts leafing through the contents. Randomly discarding documents I had painstakingly collected from all the corners of Namibia, the detritus from his trimming of my pile soon covered the small settlements of the permit applicants that had formed behind him. Suddenly he froze, grabbed a leaf of white A4 and shoved it in my face. "HOW DARE YOU!!!" he roars. "IT CLEARLY STATES ON FORM H15 THAT ALL MEDICAL TELEVISION LICENCES MUST BE SIGNED IN REVERSE WITH THE BLOOD OF A VIRGIN GRASSHOPPER!!!" And, indeed, I was guilty of that most cardinal of sins. Black pen just didn't cut it this time. "But where was I supposed to notice form..." "Didn't you SEE? It's very clearly printed in 8 point font on the underside of the suggestions box in the ladies' room! Get out of my SIGHT!"
And with this, I was unceremoniously grabbed by the security guard and dumped on the sidewalk outside, but not before being stripped of all official documents and most of the complimentary mints I had scavenged from the disabled toilet. I swear that he almost cracked a smile as he gave me a final shove with his baton.
"See you tomorrow, o forsaken one!" he cackled, unfolding his wings and gliding back to his post.
And sadly, he would. Because I needed that permit.
I needed nutrients, and I needed clothes. And fast. Barely managing to crawl across to the field of nettles growing where a lawn should be, I swallowed a few prickles before passing out from the excruciating pain. The last thing I saw before blackness enveloped me was the sign hanging outside the door: "We hope you have a pleasant experience with us".
So ends Day 1 of my epic saga of struggle with Consular Services to get my South African Study Permit.
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