A Philosophical Evening of Dance and Deceit

Went dancing again last night. Good fun. A salsa place in Bree Street called "Que Pasa?", where Andi helps out with classes one evening a week. Went with her and Nicolette, a friend of hers from old who I was meeting for the first time.

I’m driving back from town at about 2am, heading down Main Road in Retreat. Not the most salubrious neighbourhood by any standards. So when I see a 20-ish blond girl walking down the road in jeans and a sweatshirt, I naturally offer her a lift, lest something awful befall her on her way to wherever she’s going at this time of night.

And so the story unfolds. She’s only going a few hundred metres down the road, but you see, she’s out at this time of night because someone stole her cellphone and she’s trying desperately to get it back, and her parents are out of town and she needs to get hold of them and they don’t have a landline at home and she has all their cell numbers on her SIMcard, so she really has to desperately urgently get the phone back, and she’s found out where the guy who stole it has pawned it and it’s just around the corner but she doesn’t have any cash to get it back and she just needs a little bit of money to get the phone back and blah blah blah…

By this stage the bullshit-detector is going full-blast. There are so many holes in this explanation that I don’t know where to begin, but she’s still clearly in trouble, so I help her out and listen to her asking me to wait by the kerb and she’ll be back in two minutes, she promises, and as she gets out of the car I know for certain that I’ll never see her again. Sure enough, she walks around the corner, and I back up to see where she’s going, just in time to see her hop into a darkened car with a few unsavoury guys sitting in it, and they head off into the night.

I’m not about to follow them, because I’ve been having a good evening up to this point, and I really don’t want to spend the rest of the night trying to stem the bleeding from fresh gunshot wounds. In the end, some things just aren’t worth taking offence at.

Why didn’t I send her on her way as soon as her implausible tale of woe was presented? Not really sure. Perhaps it was just late and I just couldn’t be bothered. And the thought of her heading off alone into the treacherous night, lying little wench though she might be, was still too unappealing. I guess I felt that even frauds and liars don't deserve the thousand terrible things that could have happened to her in that situation.

But the philosophical conundrum which I’m left with is this – when does one cease to be a compassionate person with a willingness to help one’s fellow human being in need, and when does one just become a dumb-ass instead?

The cash, I’m not too worried about. I’m at a point where I’m perfectly happy to write that kind of thing off as an educational expense. If learning a valuable lesson ends up costing a certain amount of money, then screw it – it’s money well invested.

So I suppose the more important question would be: is it worth being taken advantage of occasionally in order to avoid becoming distrustful and uncaring?

Office Talk...

So we were sitting in the office on Friday, all nursing hangovers from the bowling evening and discussing various forms of alcohol-induced regret. Jacques mentioned that over-indulgence in Jaagermeister would result in a permanent stomach-turning reaction to it. I said that the same was true of absinthe.

Tony pipes up, “Ja, and just the smell of Sambuca makes you want to beat your wife.”

The Drought and the Flood

Well, the drought has ended – in every sense of the word.

Most importantly, the 9-month dry-patch of work is over. I’m now gainfully employed, which after that long without a paycheck has come none too soon. And it’s actually something with a useful future in it – IT stuff specialising in analytical data cubes. Lots to learn in a short space of time, but then I guess the deep end is the best place to learn how to swim. Small company, good people, interesting and flexible work with a focus towards learning new stuff and finding new opportunities. Couldn’t really have asked for much better. And the pay is good, too!

Other droughts – went dancing on Friday, which I hadn’t done in well over a year. There was a salsa evening at The Valve in town, so I went with Andi. Good fun, live band, but very hot. I had also been bowling the night before (company team-building thing), and taken my Dad to the airport at 5am on Friday morning, so I was already very tired before we even started dancing. The bowling was fun, too – not least because the IT team (of me, Jacques, Tony and Ian) managed to clean up the competition despite taking it far less seriously than any of the others. There were a lot more springbok shooters and draft down-downs on our team, and a lot less practice and earnest striving to perform, so we had the most fun and also won. All good.

Went to ECCC with Rory last night, too – good to see a lot of the folks there again. Had tea at his house later, musing on the present and charting the future.

But perhaps the most significant drought which has broken is the literal one – Cape Town has had water shortages for several months now, but yesterday the floods came down. Rory’s house sprung a couple of leaks as the high winds and bucketing rain lashed the Peninsula. Torrential downpour which continues well into this morning, with roads washed out and flooded highways extending the trip in substantially. Last week I left home at 7:15 and got in at about 7:50, today I left at 6:45 to try and beat the traffic jams and still only got in at 8:00. I guess everybody had the same idea.

As I write, I’m at work but unable to do any development because the rains have flooded into the server room, so we are fearful of switching any of the networks on. Hence no internet, no database connections, and no work, which is why I have time to write this…