'The only difference between you and a Hillbrow hooker'

“So how was your weekend?” I ask the copywriter at the next desk. You know, being chatty and everything.

“Oh,” she says — she has this deep, smoky voice — “I was burgled on Friday”. We commiserate over the frustration of losing laptops and the sentimental work we hadn’t backed up. Same thing happened to me last year. The lesson: always, always back up, and we always forget.

“So I go to the Sophiatown Police Station with my boyfriend,” she says. Her boyfriend is Afrikaans.

“I could see they weren’t going to help him so I went up.”

She knows what they’re thinking, she says. She’s dark, has braids, speaks with a coconut accent, maybe she’s Zimbabwean. And she’s with a white man.

The officer on the other side of the counter does not have a good attitude. She’s rolling her eyes and talking to her friends. She completely ignores the people waiting to be served.

“I fucking lost it,” says my colleague. “I normally don’t swear but I couldn’t handle this. Have you ever hard swearing in Sotho? It’s hectic. I tell her: the only difference between you and a Hillbrow hooker is your uniform. If you weren’t so fat maybe you would have caught these guys. How about eating a little less vetkoek?”

For five minutes she ranted at the slack-jawed woman on the other side of the counter.

“Eventually my boyfriend had to pull me away.” The others in the station were huddling, watching her in amazement.

In the movies, there would have been applause.

I can only say you go girl because she spoke for every person who’s ever had to deal with a public official in this country. For instance, I’d quite like to have a go at the 30-something (white, Afrikaans) man who was so rude to my 85-year-old grandmother when she went to have her eyes tested for her driver’s licence at Marlboro.

“You’ve failed, now go away,” he said rudely after shouting at her because she misunderstood what she was meant to do with the newfangled testing equipment they have there. Then he snapped at my mother, “Tell her to go away, she’s disturbing me”. Would he speak to his ouma like that, I wonder? If I’d been there, I’d have been sorely tempted to have a go at him. Sorely tempted. (After all, when it comes to swearing in Afrikaans, vocabulary isn’t a problem.)

Maybe we need a few more rants, a bit more swearing in Sotho. It probably wouldn’t accomplish anything. But at least we’d feel better.