February 22, 2010
As Shaun Enters Another World
Cape Town Municipality. Or Hell.
Being a raging masochist, I felt like punishing myself last week and so – rather than closing a door on my hand, or having The Girlfriend kick me in the groin repeatedly – I decided to go one step further and pay a visit to the Cape Town Municipal offices instead.
Getting inside the offices is a process in itself, finding legal parking outside the building takes an extraordinary amount of luck and good fortune. Basically, there seems to be more chance of you winning the lottery than actually finding a parking bay which is available to the public, as everything seems to be demarcated and catered for what is referred to as “disk holders”. Who these disk holders are, or where you can get hold of one of these magical passes is anyone’s guess, but I’ll go on the assumption that the vast amount of parking bays are set aside for staff. It will go down as one of life’s great mysteries then, alongside the Loch Ness monster and the existence of aliens, where the municipality expects the public to park.
After several fruitless minutes searching for parking, I eventually stopped crying, composed myself sufficiently, and then reverted to the age old custom of bribery, offering the security guard at the boom gate untold riches as well as the soul of my unborn child if he allowed me to park in one of the demarcated bays.
Once inside the building, I then proceeded to do the customary inter-department dance, which involves going to a department where three clerks are available with no queues in sight, before being twirled around and spun in the direction of another department, where two clerks are available for a queue of approximately twenty thousand.
Now besides dealing with the clerks, who all seemed to have recently woken up from year-long comas, there are also the members of the public one has to contend with.
For some bizarre reason, people seem to think they can unload their life stories to one another when queuing in government buildings. Who came up with this rule? When did I agree to it? Apparently I did though, because I am now privy to the fact that Ethel, a grey-haired woman from Walmer Estate, is eagerly awaiting the return of her son Clive, who is living the dream and serving people warm beer in a seedy pub in Bradford, England. I can also tell you that she hates black people because she found it necessary to mention this to me. Repeatedly.
With the racist Ethel to my left, I was sandwiched nicely with a seemingly retarded woman on my right, who seemed to be seated there for no apparent reason, and who laughed hysterically whenever I asked her to shift up as we got closer to the clerks. To rub further salt in the wounds, I was also lucky enough to have an old man sitting directly behind me at one point, who sounded as if he had water on the lung, and who insisted on coughing on the back of my neck.
Eventually I made it to the front of the queue – although technically I was actually second, the retarded woman in front of me seemed to be treating this as a day out, and seemed more concerned with eating the contents inside her nose then being served.
From here I dealt with one of the recently revived clerks, who spoke to me in slow, dull tones, and who seemed absolutely terrified whenever he looked at his computer screen.
After what felt like a lifetime, I eventually staggered out of the building. To my surprise the whole experience had only taken two hours, it was still Thursday and, as far as I knew the year was still 2010. The municipality is a bit like Narnia in that respect, as time seems to stand still once you enter the grey netherworld.
Nevertheless, if you ever want to punish an enemy or nemesis, get them to file a query at the municipality. There can surely be no fate worse than that.
Oakes signing off.
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