It's a jungle out there

Have you ever noticed that your work colleagues are fairly reminiscent of various jungle creatures collaborating against each other to create a corporate hell with fluorescent lighting, just for you to slog through traffic to reach every day.



Sometimes while my boss is talking to me, I try NOT to focus on her goatee wagging furiously and instead, I tune the sound of her shrill out and imagine her crouching down into a puma-like position, sprouting bob cat ears and streaking across the linoleum terrain to break up the office chimpanzees elbowing one another and giggling at the water cooler.


Also, on days when my morning is not completely dominated by unsuccessfully trying to hang my self with a piece of dental floss in one of the 1x1 office toilet cubicles, I like to cruise my Amazon and scope out my jungle brothers letting it all hang out in there respective departments.


Gorilla
Let us begin with the almighty office Gorilla.
Silverbacks are strong, dominant troop leaders. Each, typically leads a troop and is the center of the troop's attention, making all the decisions, mediating conflicts, determining the movements of the group, leading the others to feeding sites and taking responsibility for the safety and well-being of the troop.
When challenged in the work place this colleague will scream, beat his chest, break computer monitors, bare his teeth, then charge forward.
These pearls of joy are famous for glancing at their watches when you arrive 1 minute late in the morning and knuckle walking through the corridors ferverently searching for ANYTHING to manage. They are also grumpy for the better part of most days because they not so secretly hate themselves for not actually having any kind of life outside of the office so to speak.
They like to spit mumbled snortings at you in the morning as an intended greeting right before they demand how far you are with the Brickfield Joint Venture deal so that they can enjoy watching you clap your gums together with your handbag still draped over your shoulder and your chair not even pulled out yet. All in all, an absolute delight to spend 80% of your week with.


Jaguar
The Jaguar is sleek and seductive and powerful.
This cunning big cat is most certainly the biggest enemy in your career but yet your most trusted confidante and most treasured wing man.
Whilst having been described as the kind of feline that pulverises its Amazon enemies with a deep throat bite and suffocation technique followed by a piercing of the skull and brain, I like to think it rather scrapes marks, urinates or defecates all over the entire office and then walks slowly down the forest path corridors between work stations, stalking conversations between prey.
The office jaguar attacks from cover and usually from a target's blind spot with a quick pounce on your promotion before you even knew you had it. The species' ambushing abilities are considered nearly peerless in both the corporate and animal kingdom because we are all so seduced by her beauty and sincerity that we almost never see her coming. She is the handful of salt at the bottom of your popcorn box and the ninja star in your back, and unfortunately the jaguar's elusive and inaccessible nature make it a difficult predator to detect swooning in for the sabotage, let alone study..


Boa Constrictor
The Boa constrictor is a large, heavy-bodied ambush predator that will often lie in wait for an appropriate prey to come along at which point they will attack.
This colleague is mean as a snake and hisses loudly and strikes repeatedly when threatened or disturbed.
He also bites in defence, and whilst this bite can be painful it is rarely dangerous because snakes don't actually have balls.
That being said unlike his lethal jaguar lunch buddy who will churn out a show stopping smile right before she twists a concealed butter knife into your neck, he is predictable and tired, and we know where we stand with him - which is nowhere. No surprises when he ambushes you in your team meeting or takes credit for your idea. This ssslithering ssssad-ass is ssssimply a ssssssssss LOSER.


Vampire Bats
These messengers of Satan are bats (never...) whose food source is your blood, sweat and tears.
They never actually thrive in the business world because they only just manage to NOT get fired by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work from 8 to 5, whilst spending most of their time sucking the life out of unsuspecting naive do-gooder types who cruise around the office with blinkers on.
They also (quite cleverly actually) literally leech off of any and all resources at there disposal in the workplace and in life so to speak, and will even go so far as to stuff company toilet paper in the their handbags because it is, after all, FREE.
This corporate cretin is a somnolent animal which sleeps up to 18 hours a day but still manages to somehow run his private home business from his workstation. Like genuine vampire bats that only pluck up the energy to defecate about once a week near the same single tree that they live in and feed off, and then proceed to bury their excreta near the trunk of that tree to help nourish it. So this work parasite, in essence, lives off its own bullshit.

Termites
The termites are a group of eusocial soldiers with anatomical and behavioural specialisations, providing the strength and armour to undertake the labours of foraging, food storage, brood and nest maintenance and some defence duties. These are the worry warts who border on killing themselves for the job because they genuinely believe that the way in which their monthly stationery usage report is presented, makes all the DIFFERENCE. Now whilst Management love these dorks, all they really actually accomplish is making the rest of us regular joes look bad with their RA RA can-do high school musical attitude.
Having said that, they have actually unknowingly mastered the perfect harmonious equilibrium of not being ambitious or street smart enough to ever actually pose any threat of making any real progress in the business, but are yet just ambitious enough to want to OFF themselves if they can't manage to get their Excel spreadsheet columns aligned.
These types usually spend their time with their foot so far up the Manager's butt in an pathetic attempt to try to climb the corporate ladder, that his breath starts to smell like shoe polish.

Me, I think it's ludicrous to behave like Amazon creatures just because we feel we are failing miserably at trying to lead first world lives in a third world country. We are South Africa. Land of  monogamously challenged dancing presidents, the koeksister, and the Tokelosh, and home of the Springboks, Sponge-KNOB Vile-Pants Julius Malema and the BIG 5. If we are to try to emulate ANY animal-like behaviour, let it be that of the African Elephant.

African Elephant
The African Elephant is a symbol of wisdom, luck and loyalty and is THE master of appropriate action. They show tenderness, compassion and sorrow and yet on the rampage, they are protective and aggressive. Although they are known mostly for their size and shape, they also live in extremely advanced social organisations and have evoked a sense of fascination in human beings for centuries.

Perhaps the most enticing quality of the elephant is its undeniable similarity to us, manifested by the close bonds they form with family members, their communication, life span, the care of their young and their emotions. Elephants experience many of the same emotions as people do, ones that are usually restricted to being that of humans’, seldom seen in animals. They are capable of sadness, joy, love, jealousy, fury, grief, compassion and distress.

The elephant’s capacity for sadness and grief is truly unique amongst members of the animal world, as it is particularly complex in terms of emotions. While most animals do not hesitate to leave the weak and young behind to die, elephants are distressed by the situation, and continue to show signs of this grieving for extended periods of time.


Because elephants live in such close-knit herds and live for about as long as humans do, they form strong bonds with those around them. When these ones die, the rest of the herd mourns that death.


They are highly revered for their strength and power and their behaviour can teach us that that wise leadership, selfless discipline and tough unconditional love is the core of any working unit.


5 Business lessons we can learn from elephants

1. An elephant's skin is extremely tough and measures about an inch thick.  Lesson - Develop your own thick skin.
2. Elephants are born with fewer survival instincts than many other animals.  Lesson - Finding a good mentor with experience is critical.
3. Elephants are a symbol of wisdom in Asian cultures and are famed for their memory and intelligence.  Lesson - Respect can take time to earn.
4. The elephant is pregnant for 22 months.  Lesson - slow and steady is not necessarily a bad thing.
5. Elephants display a wide variety of behaviours including those associated with music, art, altruism, play, use of tools, compassion and self awareness.  Lesson - a work/life balance is important.

Woodwinked  - over & out
For Noah Nightingale
xx 

To dye for: Blondes do have more fun

I’m a proud brunette, no doubt about it. In fact I would go so far as to say that for the better part of the last 12 years I’ve gone out of my way to disprove the adage that blondes have more fun by simply having the most fun as a brunette. And I’ve had a pretty awesome time. I look at my blonde friends who have turned brunette as a reasonable compliment and as proof that I’ve turned the myth on its head.



That was until I went blonde.


Blondes don’t know what they have; and I had no idea that I was missing out but, there is no doubt in my mind that blondes do have more fun.


Research from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, points out that the majority of people around the world have black hair –and perhaps this is why blondes simply get more attention. They stand out in a crowd because that crowd is, by virtue of genetic statistics, probably going to be mostly brunette. This would account for the previously unprecedented rate of pick-ups in a crowd: from being asked for my number in charade-speech through two panes of glass and the rumbling space of peak-hour traffic at a highway intersection robot, to an attempted pick-up on a 10 000 clubber-strong dance-floor where I think (I really couldn’t hear him properly) I was being invited to Plet for the weekend.


Alternate research from an international Journal of Psychology supports the idea that men buy into the ‘dumb blonde’ stereotype –and perhaps this is why blondes both play to men’s physical and intellectual strengths, and in doing so stroke those very delicate egos, as well as why it is easier for blondes to surprise in conversation: what’s more enticing than expecting a pretty vacuous vapidity to stare blankly back at you in conversation at a dinner party and instead find yourself in deep and interesting conversation?


This expectation could account for why blondes get significantly more attention from possible partners on internet dating sites. Blondes can expect a flirtatious 14 messages a day versus a skimpy nine for brunettes. And then perhaps that is the problem –that brunettes are simply notoriously not skimpy enough. It is widely accepted that a gormless girl (as blondes are stereotypically thought to be) is more likely to trade on the only talent left to her. In which case any fun we’re talking about is confined to the bedroom. But research also shows that blondes have more fun in the boardroom – not on the boardroom table – as they are more likely to be employed in the legal profession and other such brainy fields.


Turns out though that this is not enough to keep a man interested. Ultimately, men seek dark-haired women as wives. Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha.


Perhaps it is not so much about the fact that blondes are not as thick (in the head, not the girth) as Marilyn represented them and more about the fact that, like Marilyn, blondes have the audacity to stand over that drain-cover in a white dress and flaunt what they’ve got because they’ve got it, and it’s awesome to have –with less concern about who is going to see their panties and think they’re a cheap slut, than a brunette. Sometimes it is smarter to play dumb. And most times that takes balls.


For whatever reason, going blonde is supposed to:


1. Make you feel more attractive;


2. Increase your confidence at work, often in such a way that you find it easier to ask for a pay rise;


3. Make you more capable of complaining about unfair treatment; and


4. Enable you to set personal boundaries more assertively.


And since going blonde I have:


1. Started wearing less make-up because I think I’m pretty enough without it;


2. Gotten a bonus this month and an increase for next year...


3. ...for doing less work than this year because I complained about how much of my free time it was stealing;


4. And informed the extended family of how we will NOT be spending Christmas together.


I guess I can sit back smiling smugly because I have the best of both worlds. I have experienced The Blondeness and believe that I can far more successfully exploit all that being blonde brings because I can spot the advantages as they befall me. And whenever I want, I can rely on my genes to secure me the
extra 4 250 pounds a year that statistics says being a brunette, not a blonde, secures me at work.


...Oh, and brunettes are also more likely to marry millionaires...now I wonder if that means a brunette can help make a man a millionaire...?


-SoBlonde

Grrrrr.

It all started going horribly wrong when they started letting men into shopping centers.
If a man was supposed to grocery shop, he would be born with a second head hidden in his neck ala-Zaphod-Beeblebrox, female of course, which would at the very least scream out directions like, "LEFT!", "RIGHT!", "STOP!" and the very necessary, "STOP PARKING YOUR TROLLEY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AISLE YOU DIMWIT!"

It's bad enough that platteland shops are filled with a myriad shoppers who have never been in a shop bigger than the local corner cafe and whose idea of a fun-filled morning with the kids is letting them run amock amongst the pilchard tins freely attempting the decapitation of toes all around them.  Add to this a couple of old people from the local aged home allowed out for a morning to restock their wafer shelf, and any attempt of reaching for a tub of biscuits to make a baking crust for cheesecake is thwarted by a row of wheelchairs racing in slow motion and a clicking maze of walking sticks. 

The worst is that I really do go out of my way to buy only the unperishable essentials at such stores.  But this means that I am left with three packs of braai wood, one roll of puff pastry and a tub of gelato in a trolley in a queu for 10 items or less that is a hundred people strong, with four people the size of small cars jostling for the single spot in the row in front of me, all buying ELEVEN items for the same household.

I heard a single, solitary, "Excuse me.  ....Sorry..." behind me as a young lady tried to pass through my row and into the hoardes behind me.  I nearly wept at her politeness, turned and caressed her face lovingly and asked her to introduce me to her parents.
Somewhere in this mad hive of battered chicken making buyers exists a young woman with manners.  One.  And she has shown me up.  Because the hive mind is infectious and I too have spent the last hour (45 minutes of it in the 10 item or less queu) with a steely face, not saying a word but instantaneously combusting people with my eyes, boring holes into the back of their heads.  And here is someone whose actions are, I imagine, on some cosmic level, an opportunity to inspire me to be a better person in the midst of the adversity of Saturday morning grocery shopping.

Screw that.  I think my lesson of choice is:  either chop your own wood or never braai again, get a cow to make your own gelato and learn to make puff pastry from scratch. 

-Soba

An Open Letter to The Universe

Dear Universe

There seems to be club of people for whom life is, well, easy. I don’t mean to undermine their trials and tribulations – long queues, user unfriendly banking hours and the absence of any attempt at customer service in South Africa are very real frustrations.  However, I don’t really feel that this compares to some of the trials and tribulations which I seem to face.

I’m nice to bank tellers. I pay my traffic fines.  I don’t try to bribe cops. I don’t drink and drive. I work hard. I try not to badmouth my colleagues (unless the situation requires it in lieu of killing them).  I even refer to many who are technically subordinates as colleagues… I’m respectful to cold-callers who insist that I  do need a second contract.

Now the people in this club seem to have no problem finding someone to love them, marry them and have kids with (even though some of them, I’d like to point out, have a lot more viable eggs left than me).  They appear to have supportive parents.  Somehow, inspite of having a smaller income than me, they manage to buy their own homes without selling organs on the black market.

The members of this club are often skinny, sometimes effortlessly so, but I’ve often found that they seem to enjoy exercise (couldn’t I have had a little piece of that pie?).  They even have time to exercise. They don’t manage to convert their mascara into raccoon eyes within 30 minutes of application because apparently when their mascara says “waterproof” and “hypoallergenic” it actually is.  They’re often pretty – and not just to the myopic octogenarians.

I’m not a glass half empty person.  Neither am I a glass half-full person.  I’m really more of a “now where did I put my glass of wine?” person. I think that should count for something.

So, my father is terminally ill.  I’m trying really hard to stop writing eulogies in my head and I cry in traffic much less these days.  I think I’m just about getting to the point where I can bear the fact that if I ever attain (at least a partial) membership to this club and meet The One, odds are, my dad won’t walk me down the isle.  If I have kids, they won’t get to know their grandfather.  I’m even a little grateful that at least I’ve had time to show him I love him and say goodbye.

Now my Ouma has also died.  She had the death she always wanted – quick, relatively painless and without any preceding disability, but really, the timing?  Was that really necessary?

On the subject of timing… Did my dad really need to be admitted to hospital with a potentially life threatening condition the night before I started a really intensive (and expensive) 3 day course that was going to suck my soul out anyway?

Now I’m told the darkest time of night is just before the dawn.  I believe this is zen-hippie speak for “toughen the fuck up” but I can’t be sure because I’m not fluent.  I’m also a little skeptical because this night is starting to seem awfully long.

In view of the above: could I not have been spared the broken washing machine, the brake pads that need replacing, the computer that freezes at completely random intervals, the stream of beggars at my door, my work, my car – many of whom seem to think that yelling at me will work when simple begging has failed…

And possibly, just possibly, could I perhaps get away without the ingrown hairs and teenage acne?  I have, after all, not been a teenager for well over a decade thanks to your relentless and sneaky speeding up of the passage of time.

Kind Regards (Although I suspect we both know that’s not what I really want to say…)

Me

PS.  Could you please smite the people who send emails around of relentlessly cheerful invalids with only 2 arms and no legs, or no limbs – just hands and feet attached to a torso, with captions like “this is really inspiring” or something underhanded that implies your life is completely perfect because you came with all your parts and you should never ever complain again.

PPS.  Failing all of the above: could I PLEASE apply for late membership to the club?

- Gleam