Ask yourself: are you battery-life-worthy?
As a human collective, we expend enough energy to power Medupi on a singularly useless endeavour — avoiding being regarded as a goat’s rear end by our peers. It is incredible just how many horrors we subject ourselves to just so no-one says, “You know, that Shameela is such an asshole!” Even though we all know that the moment you leave the room your office “friend” Janice scrunches her nose and hisses, “I can’t stand Shameela, she’s such an ass!”
Your crime? When you selected six of your closest friends to attend an “allexpenses-paid trip” to attend your parents’ 50th anniversary in freaking Muldersdrift, she didn’t make the cut. “To think that when she couldn’t figure out how the VLOOKUP function on Excel works ahead of her presentation to the MD last week, I helped her out.”
There is too often a perception disconnect between humans insofar as their importance to each other is concerned. Sometimes the disconnect is as wide as the Gulf of Mexico. I know many woman friends who found out too late that just because he was her boyfriend did not necessarily mean that she was his girlfriend.
Setting that record straight with people is an arduous task, I tell ya. I consider it my civic duty to take one for the team, this week. With this column, I will give you permission to be as much of a goat’s rectum as you please, just to set people straight. If anyone complains, “tell them I sent you” (in my best John Robbie voice).
To achieve this feat, allow me to take you back to the 119th episode of
Seinfeld, titled “The Sponge”. In the episode, Elaine Benes discovers that Today’s Sponge, her favoured contraceptive, is being discontinued. Those of us who loved Vanilla Coke know the feeling all too well.
Elaine suffers a mild panic attack. She goes on a frantic search through New York until she finally locates the last remaining 60 contraceptive sponges. But this suddenly changes her perception of sexual partners. The primary question on her mind each time she encounters a suitor is, “Is he sponge-worthy?”
And that, my dear reader, is the $64 question you must employ any time people want something from you.
This columnist’s most precious possession is time. I will happily pay R320 for a bottle of Jack knowing full well that it’ll cost me R280 at a liquor store 3km away, just to save myself the 20 minutes it will take to get in the car, drive there and stand in another pay point queue. Twenty minutes of my life that I’ll never get back is significantly more valuable than R40.
And this is why, when friends ask me to attend dinners and drinks sessions at their houses, the first question I ask myself is, “Is she/he four-hours-worthy?” Very few people make the cut. I’d much rather walk round my house in my boxers scratching my nuts than spend four hours with most human beings.
Have you ever messed up and forgotten to charge your phone? And now you are on 11% battery life? At that very moment your phone rings and it’s Janice, the Muldersdrift reject. The question you need to ask yourself is, “Is this whiner battery-lifeworthy?”
This, my dear reader, is the $64 question you must employ any time people want something from you
before shoving the phone back into your pocket.
When a friend got married some years back, his village was split down the middle. You know how the natives don’t just have one wedding day, right? We do that whole “white” wedding and “traditional” wedding thingy; one at the bride’s hometown and the other at the groom’s place. Because of venue and budget limitations, the couple only had 150 seats at the “white” reception. So they had to compile a list for the formal reception and invite the hoi polloi to the traditional ceremony, where there were no limitations.
Their fatal error? The invitation cards were colour coded. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, folks would meet at church services and ask each other, “Did you get the blue card or the gold card?” The blue card people walked around forlornly, with shattered self-esteem. And this is how the Great Village Wedding Stayaway of 2006 came about. The family had catered for a large crowd, slaughtering two oxen. Hardly a quarter of the expected crowd pitched up. That Monday I got a text from him to come and fetch a whole side of ribs from his house.
I’m sharing this story to warn you of the potential consequences of “the worthy system”.
The dating game is more littered with worthy-system landmines than Mozambican countryside in the ’80s. Some people are only one-night-inDurban-worthy while others are allweek-long-in-Milan-worthy, I hear.
Some are only sexting-worthy while others are nudes-worthy. And you, my reader, need to draw up your own worthiness list, both as the giver and the recipient. A friend tells me he booked a weekend away with a love interest at the V&A Waterfront City Lodge. She flipped and pulled out because she felt she was at least One&Only-worthy. He dryly remarked to me, “Not even Rihanna is One&Only-worthy to me.”