At a time like this…

Is it me or are the wheels coming off? asks Chris Bennett

WE HAVE strikes threatening to completely ruin next year’s football fiesta, the KZN government displaying a novel new style of insanity by firing close on 300 doctors (M&G 3/7/09), aeroplanes falling out of the sky and my grocer running out of poppadums.

As if that were not enough we have the spectacle of the bread making industry colluding to cheat the public; and the supermarkets (of which four biggies are involved) caught up in the same disgraceful shenanigans. And this, nogal, at a time when people are losing their jobs and food is almost beyond the reach of the increasingly sidelined poor.

Actually I shouldn’t really include Daryl in all this. He is the grocer of whom I speak, and highly at that.

The shopping centre at Munster serves a wide variety of customers and provides them with most of the essentials of life, and a lot of the not so essentials as well. There is a garage and a service centre, a good bottle store, a post office of note, and a number of hardware, gardening, swimming pool and other services at our service. The supermarket, Daryl’s home from home, is very good, sometimes excellent. At the moment the essential out of stock is poppadums. Many Herald readers will, rightly, take me to task on that one.

I know it is not the fault of the managers of supermarkets should events that are beyond their ken occur, such as head office stuffing up delivery or the auto teller breaking down, but life being what it is, customers blame those hard working managers for everything. Unfortunately that is part of the joy of being the manager of a supermarket. It is called flak. It is not difficult to sympathise with these good people; as I have said before in this column, people, by and large, are dreadful.

But there is an underlying theme to all these trying and painful episodes.

The football crisis seems to be upon us because someone somewhere has not done his homework properly and the unions are upset. The firing of the doctors, when there is an acute shortage of those excellent souls, shows little but contempt for the government's employers: that would be you and me. The aeroplanes fell out of the sky because someone somewhere had not done his homework properly. The passengers are the ones who paid the appalling price and are, sadly, in no position to be upset.

The sufferers in the pricing fiasco are the customers of all the supermarkets. Daryl is at least aware of this and doubtless he is also appalled.

In Munster we enjoy one of the most stable and peaceful lifestyles in this country, and we would like to keep it that way. I asked some of the residents of Thongasi and Nzimakwe what they thought; given that a lot of them, quite reasonably, do not think, the results were quite revealing. The Munster Centre and its Spar supermarket were the heartbeat of the area.

A few days ago I read the front page story of this most excellent newspaper and learnt of the amount of money involved in paying a bunch of junior clerks to do what are, at best simple, and at worst menial, tasks.

Minds like mine are not easily given to boggling. I have seen a few things in my trips around the block over the past half century, but for municipal workers, some of whom appear to do nothing, which is perhaps a good thing, to receive salaries and bonuses (bonuses?) of the order mentioned in this story is farcical.

It will, of course, end in tears. When the money runs out.