Do we really want the tourists to come in 2010?

At some point on Wednesday, two individuals descended upon the humble abode I share with my family. They had apparently been sent by some other individual from my efficient municipality to serve us with a “notice to disconnect” our power supply on the basis of non-payment. They figured that while they were there, they might as well disconnect the power to save themselves the trip the following Wednesday, which was the due date for the payment.

I do not personally blame Pumba and Timone for disconnecting the electricity. After all, they are merely the implements used by some other high-calibre individual who got his job on the sole basis that he has opposable thumbs and can therefore grip paper clips and punch stuff on a computer keyboard. So we had to suffer the indignity of being the black family on a predominantly white street without lights. You have to be black to get it. For the record, my wife had already paid, as she does religiously, and the payment was reflecting on their system — eight days before the due date.

Now, I relish such situations. They always give me an opportunity to dig deep inside my well of righteous indignation and dazzle people with my sanctimonious, sarcastic remarks. And boy, did I dig deep on Thursday morning. To whip myself into a sandstorm of self-righteousness, I decided not to take a shower even though, quite honestly, there was enough water in the geyser to take a 93-second lukewarm shower. Nosiree. I wiped myself down using still-cold fridge water out of a cereal bowl. This way, if I needed any extra indignation during the altercation that was about to go down, I’d only have to sniff at my armpits or feel my stiff nipples. Don’t make me spell out the details.

I like to be prepared for these encounters. Nothing pisses me off more than having a conversation with people and having no snappy, sarcastic comebacks (SSCs) to their stupid utterances. And then the SSC comes to you five seconds later — but saying it then would just make you a can’t-think-on-his-feet arsehole. Don’t you hate that? As a result, I always prepare an SSC list ahead of these encounters.

So I ride into my local municipality offices on the high horse of righteous indignation armed with a crisp piece of paper with my SSC list ready for battle. The battle never began. Instead, this embarrassed bloke openly admits the mistake and tells me a story that I can only describe as a morbid comedy of errors. The worst part, he tells me matter-of-factly, this is likely to happen again in future.

You see, according to the way that their systems have been designed, the guys who receive the money are in one office. The guys who compile the statements and send them out are in another office, 20km away. The guys who disconnect also use their own system and unless a physical piece of paper is placed on someone’s table to communicate …

I started laughing and crumpled my SSC list. As a matter of fact, I felt sorry for the poor sod. He was just the oke who got the short stick and was placed in charge of conducting this orchestra belting out a symphony of sheer stupidity.

I left the offices feeling a bit deflated. After whipping myself up into a frenzy, I had not used any of my SSCs. As a 17-year-old student whose sole method of contraception was coitus interruptus, I had experienced the same feeling before. This feeling I shall refer to as sanctimonia interruptus from now on. (Once you get a book published, you earn the right to sommer make words up if you want to.) While I had ridden in on my high horse, I was riding out on a dwarf horse of sanctimonia interruptus, my shoes dragging on the ground, clutching a crumpled SSC list.

If you are reading this and shaking your head at the incompetence of the civil service, hold your high horses. My biggest problem is not with the civil service. Civil servants are an incompetent, unmotivated bunch working within the constraints of unwieldy, crappy systems conjured up by bureaucrats who serve politicians whose only reason for living is to get on that proportional representation list. Making a profit is not part of the agenda, so they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about unhappy customers. After all, wot-you-goin-to-do? Stop using electricity in protest? But of course there are shining examples where this is not the case. But let’s not start talking about exceptions as if they are the rule.

What is the excuse for all the incompetence in the private sector? I have the advantage of having worked in both worlds and I can say, without qualification, that industry in this country is run by incompetent idiots. And I’m one of them. For example: I am sitting here writing this, with 57 unread emails in my business inbox. This is not counting the 20-odd emails that I have read but not answered. This is, of course, the height of disrespect to the poor souls who sent me emails — and the height of incompetence. It’s almost like saying people send me emails because they have nothing better to do with their time.

The human mind is designed in such a way as to reject intrinsically information that is in conflict with what it has already internalised. That is why you hardly ever hear of an atheist stopping mid-debate and crying out excitedly: “Ah! I see it now. The dude with the beard rode waves without a surfboard? Darn, that’s all you had to say! From now on, I will drink his blood every Sunday.” And vice versa. It’s a condition I’ve written about before called cognitive dissonance.

If you are a corporate animal and you’re thinking: “My company is not even in the same ballpark as home affairs”, cognitive dissonance has got you by the gonads and is messing badly with you. I’ve been in situations in the corporate world that make issuing an ID with a white woman’s picture to an oke named Jeremiah Mahlangu seem like a little finger trouble.

I worked for a large multinational corporate with the best IT and business systems money could buy. This was underpinned by complex, brilliantly designed project-management systems. But everybody underestimated the irresistible force that is human incompetence. A system that is foolproof against human idiocy is still a few centuries away. I have witnessed a process engineer manually override a software system that was trying to prevent him from transferring liquid into a tank already filled to the brim with liquid.

I have been part of a project to import 400 tonnes of a product from Europe because some senior manager dude “believed” people would love it. I believe the only “research” performed to test his belief took the form of an internal taste session in which this product was placed in saucers in front of people with the quip: “Now tell me you don’t like that.” OK, so I overstate the flippancy of the decision-making process a tad. Six months after the launch, only 10 tonnes of the rubbish had been sold. Yet the big ships carrying the next 60-tonne loads still sailed the oceans and docked at the Durban harbour. I should know; I was the short, chubby guy in a cubicle arranging all this.

After the fiasco and after all the finger-pointing had died down, the genius whose brainchild this was wrote a report with fancy graphs and cool pictures to explain where it had all gone wrong. Now, if you think he was reprimanded or fired, you probably work at home affairs. If you think that the final recommendation in his report was to can the project, you have never worked in the corporate world. No, his report explained how the sales team had screwed up this great product. By that time I was moving on to another part of the business. When I left, they were discussing bringing in another 400 tonnes of the stuff. I wish I was making this up.

The examples I have cited above are pretty big screw-ups to illustrate the power of incompetence in our midst. Are you thinking about all the incompetent people you know and not counting yourself? Then, not only are you incompetent, but also an irrational sufferer of extreme cognitive dissonance. The very first sign of this condition is the inability to recognise one’s own stupidity and thinking only of others as fortresses of stupidity.

Thousands of people will converge on these shores in about 1 000 days in what will be our chance to dazzle the world with proof of what a great nation we are. I am shaking in my boots thinking about all the cherry-faced, beerful Englishmen who will get reacquainted with their luggage only to find that their Michael Owen jerseys have evaporated. I shudder when I think about what will happen when they go face-to-face with the expressionless, big-boned fellow to whom I reported the theft of my Kaizer Chiefs jersey on a recent trip to PE. I have seen more sympathetic Borgs on Star Trek.

During my stint as a teacher, I had a colleague who had the largest collection of Afro wigs south of the Equator. We called her simply The Wig. She was a typical, unmotivated civil servant with 30-odd years of service coasting to the finish line of retirement. She delivered her most classic line as we watched the learners file into their classes at the beginning of one term: “This school runs so much better when these kids are not here.”

If your observation is that this happens everywhere else in the world, you would be correct. But my response would be for you to stop changing the subject. Are you one of those mediocrity proponents who like to point out that the Germans had their own logistical problems in 2006? That’s like standing in urine-soaked knickers pointing fingers: “Well, I’m not the only person who’s ever pissed on himself.”

Am I suggesting that we won’t get it right in 2010? Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. I live in the high hope that we’ll rise to the occasion when the moment arrives. All I’m doing is pointing out that there’s not too much evidence to suggest that we’re gearing ourselves up. 2010 is a golden opportunity to whip ourselves into shape, not for the tourists, but for ourselves even after they’ve left.

As things stand now, to paraphrase The Wig, the World Cup will run much smoother if the fans don’t come. If this vulgar rant inspires just one person to work hard at proving me wrong, my job is done here. I’ll catch up with you later; I have 57 emails to go through.

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