>> skyward*: i’ll be straight with you. calling it off is not an option.
>> 10: It’s not a cancel. It’s a raincheck. >> skyward*: it’s critical we go ahead. >> 10: Hey, man. I got crisped and marked once already today. I’m down for twentyfour hours as it is. And I can’t do fucking anything. I’m impotent here.
>> skyward*: think of it as a test. prove to me that you’re NOT impotent. that you can get around. how am I going to trust you with bigger ops if you can’t handle a minor setback? you do still want in on the heavy impact stuff, don’t you, 10? stop splashing around in the kiddie pool.
>> 10: Don’t hardball me. This is serious shit. If I get picked up in criminal activity during a watch period, that’s a fucking disconnect offence!!!!!! It’s easy for you to kick back in fucking Amsterdam and be telling me I have to risk a disconnect in Cape Town.
>> skyward*: you’re right. it is serious shit. either you can handle, or you’re just playing. i don’t have time for dabbler wannabes.
>> 10: …
>> skyward*: well?
I watch the northern lights flickering above our avatars, the digital representation of myself and a dumpy woman who might or might not look anything like skyward*. The sky loops in fractals of colour, pale-blue fire washing into acid green and purple like tie-dye. Just lines of code, really. Some bored programmer, a kid with extra time to waste. No different from the wannabes re-creating some rock star’s mansion. It’s pretty. But empty. Just a distraction.
>>10: Okay.
Lerato
Gaborone has all the soul and personality of a strip mall, or maybe the teenage blank-heads who hang out in strip malls all desperately trying to conform. It feels like a shabby wannabe cousin of Jozi – trying too hard, too much hair gel.
This must be what Americans go through, the sour disappointment, expecting to encounter the exotic when it’s all the same homogeneous crap the world over. Only it’s Mugg & Bean rather than McDonald’s. And this is what we are striving for? Give me Lagos any day, screw the crush and the dirt and the traffic. It’s better than that blandly innocuous dust-pit.
Did I mention the dust? I arrived with a minor chest infection, but it’s like breathing silt; the air is thick with it. And it’s stinking, sticky humid. Two days in, negotiations are fraught, Mpho is on the verge of a breakdown from the tension, which makes me wonder why I even need a design architect along if he can’t take the pace, and I’m getting uncontrollable coughing fits for ten minutes straight. I had to excuse myself from the Bula Metalo meeting. Khan-Ross sent his PA to come see if I was okay.
The whole thing was hideous. The city. The coughing. Mpho getting all clingy. The problem. It took us four working days to resolve it, and it all came down to the technicalities. My department. Pure fluke that the channel code our push ads were coming in on just happened to be identical to within a digit of the Botswana police authority’s defuse signals. Sorting out the code was simple: it was the PR that was a total nightmare, not helped by the fact that Mpho has the EQ of a gecko. Sweet, but not exactly socially adept. He hasn’t caught on, for example, that our little sexual sojourn was a one-time limited offer, valid for this particular business trip only – and only then because there’s fuck-all else to do in Gaborone except fuck.
Mpho’s about as good in bed as he is a systems designer. Same technique even – mechanical as a piston shaft and unwavering from whatever approach worked last time. And it’ll work this time too, if only because he’ll eventually wear you down.
It meant I had to do a shit load of managing in both scenarios, especially with Bula Metalo. Let’s face it, I can get myself off, but soothing feathers that weren’t so much ruffled as plucked (because Mercedes is a major Bula Metalo client, and they were not pleased that their customers were being electrocuted by their advertising) took a lot more time and effort.
So eventually, it was all sorted, and we’re on our way home, flying deluxe economy, which is one more reason I have to get a new job, but I’m still coughing like I’m about to hack up a lung, and this fat chick across the aisle keeps giving me these dirty looks, and I know exactly what the paranoid wench is thinking. Don’t think I didn’t notice her call over the flight attendant, the fervent whispering.
It’s no surprise then when Customs pulls me aside at OR Tambo International, ready to slam me into quarantine with the rest of the medical refugees in the camps converted from hangars. Which is not great, considering I have a sortof illegal (in the sense of sort-of dead or sort-of pregnant) cellphone nestled in the lining of my suitcase. A chipped one – defuser-free. Needless to say, Mpho is completely ignorant of this, and manages to make the situation worse by working himself into a state of outrage on my behalf.
I’m not concerned. A dry cough isn’t exactly a typical symptom, but I am not in the mood to play coy with Customs, even if they should be commended for being so vigilant. I have my trump card. Why take the path of least resistance when you can simply eliminate it?
When the uniform at the counter asks me for my immune status, I snap, ‘I think you’ll find my company does regular, Health-Dept approved screenings,’ and slap down my Communique exec ID, which has the intended effect. Which is that they back the fuck off and fast-track me into the priority queue, the Customs guy apologising all the way. ‘We’re so sorry, Ms. Mazwai, if we’d known, it’s just the risk, and there’s been an outbreak in Tanzania; they’ve closed down Dar es Saalam…’ Like I care.
‘It’s so boring,’ I tell Mpho, who agrees absolutely with whatever I say. ‘You’d think they could just formalise the process and issue us with corporate passports. Or segregate the flights, like they do on the underway. How much is that to ask, really?’
Two hours and seventeen very mellow minutes later, thanks to a combo of Dormor and vodka served on the connecting flight, we arrive home courtesy of the corporate underway doorto-door. Mpho tries to grope me in the lift, a clumsy invitation to spend the night in his apartment, but I’m too exhausted to break it off or even avoid breaking it off with a mercy fuck. Besides, my apartment has a better view. It gives me obscene satisfaction that I’m one floor above him in the Communique residence, even if his is a single pad.
The door opens to my SIM ID and total cacophony. Jane twitches guiltily. home™ is in rebellion, the system flopping between settings like a dying fish, desperately trying to accommodate all our personal pre-programming at once. The stereo is genre-blending, overlaying the banal pop she likes onto the frantica dub I got compliments of Toby, bass lines colliding with the alarm.
I can’t say it’s not interesting, but it’s wrecking the effects of the Dormor, especially with the lights strobing, caught between the sheerday blue I prefer and the warm orange plush Jane’s convinced she likes after she read some colourtherapy article in the pushmags, and plunging sporadically into darkness as some kind of compromise.
Jane is the kind of desperately depressing unattractive that would be borderline pretty, if only her nose didn’t resemble a ski-jump or her jaw weren’t so pointy or her hair wasn’t such a stringy orange, just for example. Nor, sadly, is she the kind of girl whose personality makes up for her physical limitations. As far as I’ve paid attention, Jane’s tastes seem to be a pastiche lifted from pushmag articles, TV makeover shows and social networking recommendations that keeps her comfily secure within her own genre.