Of National Awards and Rubbish Hotels

You know what would make the world a better place? Less people. People are the worst. The last three weeks have contained more insanity than one man can reasonably be expected to take, especially one already living at the point of incipient insanity. I don’t know what’s gotten into people over the course of the last year, but I’ve suddenly found myself surrounded by blithering idiots deep into what was supposed to be my red letter year. If I can’t rectify this situation in the next thirty days, I swear on my left testicle you will be reading about me in the papers. I will find myself a new residence in a quiet corner of the Helensvale shopping center parking lot, where I will spend my days collecting cigarette butts and arranging them neatly in order of size, and biting off the nose of anyone who dares walk past and accidentally kick my collection.

This post is not so much an entertainment piece as an honest-hearted appeal to all intelligent Zimbabweans in the Diaspora. Please, COME HOME! Your country is being run by imbeciles! And I don’t (just) mean the politicians. I mean the workers and the suits that employ them. My staff appears to have been contracted by the Devil to drive me to commit murder most foul. And yet I employ some of the best of what’s available in my industry! But at least my company has some modicum of resemblance to a well-run business, because I have high standards, a short temper and a mean upper-cut, and my staff knows it.

The level of sheer incompetence permeating the ranks and leadership of most Zimbabwean companies at this point is utterly unbelievable. There is no such thing as customer care. To get a simple quotation can take you a week. It’s almost as if people don’t want to make money anymore. The executives are the worst – and yet these guys are constantly giving each other awards for mediocrity. Every other week there’s a damn supplement in one or other of the newspapers detailing an awards ceremony where idiot executives with businesses that are in the toilet are recognized for things like “visionary leadership”. Yeah, whatever. Using their definition, my ass has visionary leadership when it signals my brain that it’s time to take a dump. If it’s not the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce (ZNCC), it’s the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI), the Institute of Directors Zimbabwe (IODZ), the Institute of Personnel Management Zimbabwe (IPMZ)… the list of ass-kissing organizations willing to sell their souls for publicity is endless.

I have so many personal examples of this. Now, I’ve never been a fan of people who wash their skid-marked boxers in public, but I must share this particular story. I’m not too worried because most of the readers of my blog are Zimbabwean anyway.

So two weeks ago, as you all know, we had our Heroes and Defence Forces holidays. Like other tried and true patriotic Zimbabweans of similar financial stature, I decided to commemorate our fallen heroes by packing two large cooler boxes of several types of intoxicating substances and travelling to a resort town to spend the weekend forgetting what our heroes did for us.

My wife and I decided to leave the brat at her mother’s for the weekend. Someone should have told me once you have a child, there is to be little sleep, rest, or sanity while it’s alive. And honestly, if I may share a very personal anxiety, I’m not even sure he’s mine. The rascal could be anyone’s, because I know for sure he didn’t so much as dip even a little toe into my gene pool, because my side of the family is all looks and all brains. While this kid may be considered good-looking at the right angle, in the right light, in the right culture, he certainly lacks more than a little in the intelligence department. He’s one year old, but I don’t think he’s normal for his age – if you take your eye off him for a second you’ll find him engaged in every manner of skulduggery imaginable.

He looks for opportunities to wash his hands and face in the toilet, enjoys sucking used ear-buds, and prefers to climb into the oven when the need to take a nap overtakes him. Not normal by any measure, and certainly no such behaviour has ever been found in the history of my side of the family. In my opinion he will be the catalyst that causes the appearance of the world’s first boarding crèche. If you needed more proof that his mother has more to do with his behaviour, here it is: she buys him clothes emblazoned with shocking phrases such as: “Chaos. Panic. Disorder. My work here is done.” and “Trouble is my middle name”. Why? Why would you feed a baby such negative affirmations?

Anyway, I’m digressing. We dropped off the brat at its grandmother’s, and set off with another couple to Kariba, in remembrance of the gallant sons of the soil who may or may not have travelled a similar path. I’ve never been a history buff, don’t email me. Because my work days don’t leave me time to think, I hadn’t realized we were headed into a holiday until the last minute, so the only place we were able to book into was that nauseating pink monstrosity, Caribbea Bay. This hotel is owned by African Sun Hotels. African Sun Hotels used to be called Zimbabwe Sun Hotels, until their board decided it wasn’t enough to pollute only Zimbabwe with their bullshit hotels – they wanted to share their incompetence with the rest of the continent, so they transformed their company into the equivalent of a giant shitting elephant that travels long distances defecating all over people’s feet for profit.

For those of you who have never gone to Caribbea Bay, don’t. To begin with, the hotel was designed by an architect who had either a wicked sense of humour or a serious mental problem, or both. The hotel was meant to resemble a Caribbean villa, but ended up resembling a flowing stream of pink diarrhoea instead. The colour itself is frightening – the building looks like it belongs in Stephen King’s classic clown horror novel, It. At night, I kept expecting to see a murderous clown come bounding out of the darkness with a knife in his hand and evil in his heart, ready to slit my throat and then finish me off with a litany of dry jokes. Seriously, just looking at that building made my eyes bleed.

But let’s not dwell on things of the past. The current CEO, one Shingi Munyeza, may not have been with the company when this tasteless crime of architecture was committed. However, he is now a multiple award-winning director. Organizations are stepping over themselves to heap acclaim on him for his achievements. Mr. Munyeza himself suffers from severe withdrawal symptoms if he is not featured in at least one of our newspapers once a week, waxing lyrical about the expansion plans of his company and how they are a building a training school in Equatorial Guinea and blah, blah, blah.

Equatorial Guinea? What the hell is in Equatorial Guinea? There’s been nothing of any use to come out of Equatorial Guinea since the guinea pig. And if that’s not theirs, then they should just shut down their country and admit that as a people they have failed, they are a useless waste of oxygen, and let us all have the oil for free. It can be like a sort of communal bath, except for oil extraction.

Anyway, so seeing as this guy is in the papers like Jesus is in the Bible, and considering that he's training people in other countries on how to run hotels, I thought, well, maybe this won’t be so bad. It’s a good thing I didn’t verbalize that thought, because everyone who knows me knows I am never wrong, and the shock of this first ever incidence of wrongness would have made their poor heads explode and spoil my Hugo Boss sandals.

I have nothing against Shingi Munyeza, I don’t even know him personally, but I think he should shut the hell up about how great his company is, and all organizations that have given him an award should have their licenses revoked and their executives jailed for exercising such back-assward judgement.

Now I know tourism was low and our hotels in particular suffered heavily over the last ten years. They didn’t have money for capital expenditure. So I won’t talk about the peeling paint on the walls, the battered dinosaur-era non-functioning AC unit, the doors falling off their hinges and other such capital intensive shortcomings. But I will talk about the basics, which cost little or no money. Surely to win “Businessman of the Year”, or some other such award, you must be getting the very basics right, right?

Upon entering the room, I immediately went into the bathroom, because long journeys mess with my stomach like that. While dropping off my friends in the pool, I absent-mindedly began inspecting the room, because there was no literature to otherwise engage my furtive mind. I noticed that the shower curtain which was once completely white, was now a doo-doo brown at the bottom. Not cool.

Then I looked at the bathroom stool in the corner – it had steel legs and a pleather covering which was also a suspicious off-white colour. Maybe it came like that. Nevertheless, it was filthy, with brown stains that also looked like you-know-what. Upon closer inspection I noticed a red streak that may or may not have been ketchup. Since white people have slowly started trickling back into our hotels, it may well have been ketchup from chips that some drunk tourist was eating while clipping his toenails in the toilet. You never know with white people.

Not being a natural at complaining in real life, I thought it best to ignore these housekeeping flaws. I decided to finish my business and then take a bath. There was not a bath plug in sight. Strange, that a hotel that is part of such a large group of hotels and that is led by such a decorated CEO could slip on two basic things at once. Was it a trend at this facility, I wondered? While searching for the bath plug that had gone AWOL, I found something that made me realize that God loves me despite my foul mouth and voracious appetite for anything that tampers with my blood-alcohol content.

Curled in a corner of the tub, trying their best not to get noticed, were three strands of pubic hair. I named them SNE, HNE and DNE, for See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Do No Evil. I am convinced God made the bath plug disappear so I wouldn’t make the mistake of sitting in that tub and developing haemorrhoids the size of golf balls. So, clearly, this hotel has an issue with housekeeping. This was later proved beyond doubt when, the following day, after returning from a leisurely 2 hour breakfast, we found our bed stripped of all linens. We assumed the housekeeper was in the process of replacing them, so we lounged around awaiting his return. We watched TV on the couch, then decided to stretch out on the bed, then fell asleep for an hour, only to wake up and realize that the moron housekeeper STILL had not returned. WTF?

Ok, I’m tired of typing, this story will have to be continued some other time, and if any of you are thinking of bitching again, think again, coz I don’t care what you have to say. Damn, this is why God invented personal assistants.

TO BE CONTINUED…