His voice skittered like balls on a snooker table. He stylishly avoided my eyes like a kid that was being questioned for stealing meat from the soup, darting them from the computer screen in front of him to the wall behind me on which was plastered a giant shop floor drawing of the project we had just delivered. He also fiddled with the Styrofoam stress ball which had been distributed to us at the last Stress Mastery Class for Middle Managers which we had attended. It was a privilege for me to have joined them. It marked my upward inch from the position I was occupying. The facilitator had advised us to press them whenever we felt pressured. For our kind of job, pressure and stress hung like dark clouds in our offices. My eyes quit trying to catch his and rested on his forehead instead. And then to his lips - thin slices the like of the popular bread in my neighborhood. On a normal day I could have beaten this man sitting before me like a toddler. Just on any normal day. But this wasnt just any normal day. I resisted the urge to let my mouth hang open in bewilderment or that please-dont-do-this-to-me drooling. It was a pinch on my invincibility. I marveled at the incredulity of it all. In split seconds. Before me sat a man in whose hands lay the power to terminate my source. My bread. My garri. My monthly monetary flow. His reasons were implausible. I knew it was not unconnected to the vehemence with which I had challenged their decisions as the last production meeting. My principles were perpendicular to theirs and at the crisscross lay the friction. My ideas had stepped on his toes. No, his balls. Within two weeks management had decided my office wasnt needed anymore. Ten years of freaking labour. Cutting overheads, that was the reason. I remembered when he had freshly come to work with us. Fresh from the workshop of our sister company in Caracas, it seemed he hadnt handled a hammer before. I remember he had tried marking something on a barge with a metal marker and had pressed the tube at the middle. The creamy yellow liquid burst the side of the tube and squirted into his eyes and he had let out a babyish scream. We had helped him. Taught him drawings. Helped him with manpower evaluation and deployment techniques. He grew in knowledge and stature. By a reversible stroke of some sort, he had become our boss and now held us at the jugular. And the balls too. My own balls. Such fickleness of the mind. Or rather his lack of memory of those growing days when he suckled the breasts of our knowledge. My disappointment was welling up within me, threatening to escape from my nostrils like the smell of swallowed Nivaquine. My anger was brimming, roughing up my Adams apple into a bob as I struggled hard to keep a lid on it. My eyes struggled to catch his. It was my turn to talk. [Culled from my memoir : MY LIFE IN THESE PARTS] EMEKA NOBIS Best Life Strategist & Author BBM PIN : 2A15C52B
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 14:26:54 +0000
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