Thinking outside the box helps us get out of the rut

ONE OF the problems with the human brain is we easily find ourselves stuck in a rut, then when things go wrong, all we can think of is widening our rut instead of getting out of it. Take the water shortage, as an example. Our dams are empty so we are blaming our ancestors for not having built bigger dams. Maybe storage dams were not the best solution to begin with.

We complain about the congested traffic and shortage of city parking spaces. Maybe the problem lies in the fact that half the people who cause the traffic jams could actually work from home just as effectively. They don’t really need to be sitting in traffic jams twice a day.

If the majority of people worked from home maybe there would be far less traffic and all those parking lots could now be used as rainwater collection areas. Huge underground parking garages could become very effective water storage reservoirs to supply the city.

A large proportion of the “work” people do in the city consists of moving money about from one bank account to another.

It might have been necessary to lug sacks of gold coins about in Samuel Pepys’s day in the 1660s, but I suspect we are still doing it that way in our minds today.

Real money hardly exists today. It’s all just numbers on computers. An insurance manager can transfer a million rand from his head office in New York to an account in Pofadder in less than two seconds while sitting in his bed in Cape Town and tapping a few keys on his iPad.

(I am writing this column in my bed after midnight, with two cats sleeping beside me and a cup of coffee on my bedside table right now. I did not need to travel to an office.)

I recently went through a series of medical “adventures” that required several tests. I would give a blood sample to a nurse in Fish Hoek and it would appear on the computer screen on the desk of a doctor in Constantia who would study it and tap out a prescription that came up on the computer of a pharmacy in Muizenberg. No travelling was actually necessary. I guess the doctor could have popped the test result through to an insurance broker in Switzerland who could have put it on the screen of an assessor in Chicago so he could advise the insurance company in Zurich what they should charge me for a life insurance policy.

Think of the kilometres all this would save. But the best we can do is sit in the traffic and wish for rain.

They are digging up the road in front of my house right now. I think they’re making me a deeper rut.

Last Laugh

Late at night a man hailed a taxi outside a pub and gave the driver his address. When they arrived the driver said: “That will be R22 sir.”

“I’m afraid I only have a R20 note on me,” said the passenger, but the driver was adamant. “You must pay the R22 you owe me,” he insisted.

“Okay,” said the passenger, “I’ll tell you what. You reverse for two blocks then Ill pay you the R20 and get out and walk the rest of the way.”