Stock Exchange Publisher
Not long after 1994, gigs began to thin out. It was harder and harder to find the rent for the Bellevue flat, that I had taken over from Ashleigh Ward. After a long slog answering ads, I found temp work at a stock exchange publisher in Houghton. It was enjoyable for the people and the bosses—the most likeable pair of bosses I had up to then met in the corporate world. I was really hungry the day I started work. No money had come in for weeks, and I was down to nothing. It was a long walk from Yeoville to Houghton, down there next to the Ben Schoeman highway, and by mid-morning, I realised I was not going to make it through the week.
When I asked the young boss for a loan to get me enough food for the week, he was surprised, but tolerant. After authorising something, he asked out of genuine curiosity, “How did you get so out of pocket?”. That is not an easy question to answer, especially after being “platsak” for years already. One just finds oneself there, hand to mouth, one day, and from then on every day is a tense and fearful compendium of strategies, hopes, and deceits, hoping for one’s “ship to come in”. I really thought to tell the boss that if he really cared to know, he should buy a copy of Nat Hentoff’s The Jazz Life, but I didn’t. In fact, I realised the absolute best strategy now was to shut the hell up, because any answer would render me even more of a fool than I actually am. I shrugged, feeling very uneasy, and he let it go.
The work was not great, and debt-collecting, most will know, is not the most exciting of jobs. Hands up “Who loves debt collecting?”. No hands. I thought so. An Israeli friend, an actuary, whom I sometimes had coffee with in the Killarney Mall nearby, one day told me one of the only two accounting jokes I have ever heard. He asked me the definition of an actuary. I couldn’t define it for him, so he supplied this:
An actuary is someone for whom normal accounting is far too exciting.
Well, that coffee bar heard my belly laugh that morning!
Collecting outstanding debt money is certainly not a musical job either. But it had its musical moments: I had to phone a lady about an unpaid amount. After speaking her name, and hearing me out, there was a very long silence. Then she said:
“The f—–. The f—. Oh! I could just scream!”
Thank you, Suretha, you can never know how much fun you gave me and my friends.
I brought in a lot of money for the firm in my first six weeks there. After scanning my lists one morning, I realised I had worked myself rather speedily out of a job. Well, that’s me. With perhaps only about five percent of debt uncollected, and given that one seldom collects that, it was time to go. I went to the boss.
“Good morning. There is nothing more to do here. If it’s OK with you, I would like my money, and I would like to go home.”
The boss, a tall, young canoeing champ, was both startled and amused.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I could sit here and pretend there is still a lot to do, and take another week’s pay off you, but that is not me, I am not good at pretending to work. And I need some space and freedom and to catch up on a bit of trombone practice.”
He was tolerant, amused. I was out of there by 10h30, a cheque in my hand, and walked back to Yeoville, deposited the cheque (Yay! Paid the rent! Survive another month!), climbed the hill to my block, and lay for some hours on the balcony, my favourite space in that apartment. By nature a tense worker at the best of times, it was bliss to slough off the cares and woes of the publisher and get back into my own head.
Perhaps six or eight weeks later, the young boss called again. I always enjoyed his voice, and he got straight to the point.
“Would you like another spell of collecting? We have a whole lot more to bring in.”
I asked for a night to think it over.
“Absolutely. Think about it. Call me tomorrow.”
I took the job. There was no work coming in at all. Every muso I met in Rockey St said the same thing: “There is nothing.”
On my return, the publisher boss said, amused, “That was a first. I have never had someone ask to leave mid-morning with no work around. They always hang around to collect at least a full day’s work.”
Eventually, after coming and going as a temp collector several times for a few months each time, I lived in the publisher’s office building—once a Houghton residential mansion, now a business house. They gave me a room to live in rent-free. In exchange for rent, I would reboot the server whenever needed, usually after a power failure. This mostly happened in the awkward small hours. I have never had a problem waking up, and always sleep very easily on return to bed, so it was a good deal in my terms, especially because (unlike currently: with loadshedding, I would be getting up daily, perhaps more than once in darkness) it did not happen often. I was happy there.
As time went by, I developed my own systems, helped by Johann, the IT manager there. He created an auto-fax routine for me using PHP and an open-source program named Hylafax. I used it as “fax merge”, basically like a mailmerge, but faxing requests for payment directly from my PC. Faxing was very slow, the fax machines were in heavy demand some days, and the VBA routines I wrote looped through a spreadsheet and sent the letters off for anything I marked as applicable. Phoning, with my ears, is not my best thing, plus it is very slow: I found more than half the time I was leaving messages, seldom responded to, so I reserved phoning for the worst payers. People not responding to email demands received letters, also printed from a mailmerge. I was very productive.
When I was given the job of accounts assistant, I wrote an Excel macro that parsed electronic bank statements and formatted statement lines suitably for the old DOS-based bookkeeping program they used there. No more poring through statements and entering things one typed line after another. The accountant was sometimes amused, sometimes disapproving, of how I went about these tasks programmatically, but he ended up being slightly impressed. I have to say, although it did speed up my tasks a huge amount, the alternative—of standing at a fax and living on a phone—was just not my style. VBA as a language is close enough to the first language I learned, Pascal, for me to pick it up very quickly, and I built on my programming knowledge daily, becoming a fairly competent spreadsheet macro programmer.
There are always some people (especially in Johannesburg) who are just never going to pay. One of the bosses decided it was time to hire a ‘real’ (as in, definitely not me) debt collector. An appointment was set, and the representative of the debt collection company arrived. In denims and a tee, he looked straight out of WWE. His neck appeared to be 3cm long and 30cm wide. We will call him Krans. So, Krans, all two metres of him, sat on an office chair. He was already large, and now took charge. He placed their letterhead on the boss’s desk. The logo at its top was a pair of crossed baseball bats. He led us through how they would handle the collections, discussed purchasing debt, and so on. Then, he said:
“Ah know youse is ganna ask how we does it, so I will outline yeer how we works.”
He glanced at everyone in the room. Sure that he had our attention, he said:
“Vis is our modus operandum. We work… WIF va police.”
He emphasised police, leaning on the word: “Pool-leese.”
“We and ve police arrests ve deleenkwent, an we puts yeem in a cell wiv forty Zoeloes at 5pm on a Friday. Funny” (rolling eyes) “by 8 in the morning, vey jis kaant WAIT to !!PAY!! us.”
Nobody said a word. You could say we were impressed, but that wasn’t exactly it!
When they left, I told this partner boss about my brother at school. He once had the bright idea of hiring a guy named Frikkie to beat up another boy he no longer liked. Frikkie’s price was Al’s sandwich pack for the day. Al handed over the sandwiches. Frikkie rose, crossed the dusty quadrangle, and duly thumped the unsuspecting boy until he begged him to stop. Al was pleased as punch. He persisted with the arrangement.
One day, he gave his sandwiches to Frik as usual. But Frik did not cross the quad. He stashed the sandwiches carefully next to some other sandwiches in his satchel. My brother had just enough time to wonder about those other sandwiches before he took a heavy thump to his ribs and found himself in the dust.
“The ou you want me to hit,” explained Frik, “gave me MORE sandwiches than you. Double,” and delivered a fat clout to Al’s cheek.
I said to the partner boss, “This guy could do the same thing to us.” He had a laugh. We never hired the debt collector guys.
My debt-collecting life continued. In time, I was able to afford a small Citroën, a GS Club. It cost me R3.5k to purchase, plus about R7k to restore, and I was once more mobile! The rehabilitated trombonist! It was the first of three Citroëns I bought over the next few years. They were so comfortable, and I loved their quirkiness.
Eventually, rising crime levels everywhere spread to this area as well, resulting in more frequent waking from alarms going off. In time, they employed a security guard. Most evenings, I would descend from upstairs and meet the security man for a chat at his guard room. “Mashinalono”1 (security guard) is the loneliest of jobs, and the guard was very friendly and, like me, from KZN. Now and then I would make a bowl of mieliepap, take some meat, and sit with him next to his sentry hut, braaing and chatting. He had by then accumulated a herd of nineteen cattle, looked after by his wife back home in Ixopo.
A quarter of a century after I had left there for Cape Town, I got a call one day, while I was in Colesberg, shopping. It was Elmon. He was effusive!
“Mr Cook? I thought I would just try this number to see if you would answer!”
We had a long chat. I was living on Maeder Osler’s farm, Hanglip, near Colesberg, at the time. Before ringing off, he said:
“Mr Cook”—then paused. Again: “Mr Cook.”
I asked what. He said:
“In all these years, Mr Cook, you are the only one. You are the only one that came downstairs and chatted, that braaied meat with me, who sat with me. The only one. The only one.”
I was a little taken aback to hear that.
“Tell me just one thing, Elmon, to make me happy. Just one little thing.”
“Anything I can, Mr Cook.”
“How many cattle do you have now, Mr Nzimande?”
The answer came with some pride. I whistled. He had, in the meantime, trebled his cattle flock size.
“Well, there you are. Nothing could make me happier than that. You have done very well, very much better than I have.”
On a recent trip to Johannesburg, before I moved here, I drove to that publishing house in the evening, hoping to clap eyes on Mr Nzimande. Either someone else was on duty, or there was a problem, but nobody came to the gate. I could see the guardhouse light winking, but gave up after waiting ten minutes while hooting from time to time.
Jhb - an old song
After some years working at the publishers, I lay upstairs in my bedroom, dealing with a certain disquiet that had been growing in me. Earlier that day, shopping at the Killarney Mall, I came across a couple pushing a child in a pram. I knew them well, but had not seen the little boy before. The child looked straight into my eyes, and I looked straight into his. Raising my glance, my eyes met the father’s. They were wild with hatred, and I was thrown wildly off-balance internally. Seeing that child had set something in motion inside me. I couldn’t say exactly what yet, but it was a strangely big moment.
Killarney Mall was where I shopped: it was within walking distance from my quarters, and I walked there most Saturdays, and sometimes more often, for supplies. The couple with the boy in the pram shopped there, too, and the meetings, to me anyway, got more and more awkward. It was so disturbing, looking into that boy’s eyes. If I had an inkling why it disturbed me, I must have buried it too deep. So, I became more and more disturbed. It was a relief when I got my car, giving me a chance to shop elsewhere, but that meant petrol, and I kept that car for emergencies, not for joy-riding. I couldn’t afford anything on what I was earning.
Things came to a head the last time I encountered this trio in that mall. Hurrying away, I thought of a line from some old Western movie, “this town ain’t big enough for the both of us”, and that thought had not left me as I lay resting. It was eleven years since my sister Colleen had died, and I had moved to Johannesburg originally for one reason and one reason only, and that was to be closer to her since she had been diagnosed with cancer. Here I was, in my 29th year in Johannesburg, and it hit me, hard:
“Eleven years! What, on earth, am I doing here?”
Johannesburg had become an old song that I no longer wished to sing.
Revenue Service
Through an unlikely train of events set in motion by a friend, I left the publishers and took a job with an agency who employed me on the premises of the South African Revenue Service. I ended up staying for two years, during which time I had a disastrous, quasi-head-on crash in Paulshof one weekend on the way to visiting my son Donovan. He was staying in the house of a DRC friend, Laurence, in Douglasdale for a time. Donovan had recently returned to SA for the first time since he had left at around twelve years of age, and I loved going through to him on weekends, when we would usually braai meat together—something that he had missed terribly in his years in England.
I think missing the braai is a thing of the past in Britain. Last night I watched a YouTube clip of a lovely young Brit couple who had driven from Morocco to SA in a Land
Rover. They made merry shopping at “Woolies” in Mbombela, and their delight at the steaks was infectious. The man later had to resort to yoga to make more room for food, with a strange gyration, hands in the air, that made him look like he was using an invisbile hula hoop.
My trip to Douglasdale to see Don. Did not end well. It was the sort of trip, from the publishing house, that I should have aborted. The king and queen of electric storms was threatening as I pulled out of the driveway, and within a few kilometres, a freak gust of a crosswind blew one windscreen wiper right off! There and then, I should have left the highway and returned home, but did not heed all the inwardly screaming warnings. We know more than we know.
At Paulshof, a young, inexperienced woman waiting to turn at a traffic light, inexplicably in a panic, accelerated into me as I passed through the intersection. My little blue Citroën was a write-off. As usual in SA, the “V-8 boys”—the breakdown guys—were on the scene way quicker than the ambulance.
In hospital, it was discovered that ligaments, both front and back, had parted company with my pelvis. So, the safety belt surely saved my life in preventing me from exiting the car through the windscreen, but in doing so, it ripped the ligaments that usually enabled me to stand. I had always stood beautifully, had for decades had a great set of tough abs, a powerful diaphragm that pumped, through the years, some pretty good trumpet and trombone notes into the air, and all that strength was ripped from me in a split second. It took more than a year to walk steadily again, and I never fully recovered.
Megawatt Juju
Working on the ‘Revenue’ premises was a pleasant experience, workwise, in many ways. It was touted to be exemplary, ahead of government generally. It probably was, but that did not make it impressive to me. It was, in the event, a quite spooky flashback to my only previous experience of that building at Megawatt Park, which had begun probably more than ten years before.
Back then, and out of the blue (this would have been in my Kaypro II or IBM clone PC days, probably late 1980s) I got a call booking me for a temporary programming contract for the Electricity Supply COMmission. That time, in the late 80s, I pitched up at their headquarters at Megawatt Park, waited for a couple of hours before being taken to a large open-plan office. A pleasant Afrikaans-speaking man asked me to follow him from reception. We weaved through corridor after corridor, where he at last led me into a large room lined with large grey metal bookshelves, with not a single folder or a single book in them. He seated me in front of an IBM PC clone, saying that he would be back. The PC had nothing on it other than MS-DOS 6.2. I sat, taking in this deserted cluster of shiny, polished desks, and once more waited.
And waited. For the rest of the day.
Returning the next day, still nothing happened. I sat there all day. The same happened the next day, and through the week. On Friday, I had taken enough, and found the pleasant Afrikaans-speaking manager who had guided me to that office on my first day.
“Sorry, but… what’s going on?”
He sat placidly, avoiding my gaze for a while. We both sat for minutes in silence. Awkwardly, he then explained. There was a delay, but the project would be brought the following week. He also said that the following week. Then, he repeated it for the next, the next, and so on. After six weeks, I had enough. He did finally explain:
“The thing is, we have a budget for temporary software contract programmers. We don’t actually need any programming done now, but we also don’t want, and really cannot afford, to lose the budget. When you need contract programmers, it is a bit like a parachute. It is always something urgent, and we are in a tight spot. So, we do this. We hire someone to come in, and, well, sometimes there is work, and sometimes there is not. I didn’t think you would mind.”
I could not carry on. For six weeks I had done nothing for them. For my own benefit, I installed, with their permission, my personal copy of Turbo Pascal on the PC, and whiled the time away on a few learning projects, and doing a few routines for my friend Terry Hamilton, but in the end, it was (even for me, the loner) too quiet, too eerie, too solitary, and frankly too irrelevant, given the society we lived in at the time. After six weeks of tendering a worksheet every Friday, and collecting a cheque for doing (as Clarky might say) “diddly squat”, I left.
To this day, I feel there is possibly some weird juju ensconced in the walls of that cluster, because it was the exact same workplace I was sent to when I worked for ‘Revenue’, and the whole process was repeated near enough exactly.
I sat for six weeks waiting for a PC. Every week I asked when it was coming, every week I was told “next week”, and every week, until the seventh week, it did not arrive. I still continued to wait from the seventh week, because now that I had a PC, I did not yet have a password. Rinse and repeat. For six more weeks I awaited a password. So it was that I tendered timesheets for a total of three months without doing a stroke of work.
There actually was some oversight. A staffer from the agency arrived every week, listened sympathetically, tut-tutted, and left. Whether he passed my entreaties on to the principal, I will never know, but I did get a password, and thus began a fairly pleasant working time in my cluster. My section comprised four of us, in a cluster of sixteen in total. We worked in a vast open-plan office. I worked for an entity known then as Large Business Centre, I think. Baie water onder die brug.2
Johannesburg - the Coda
I had always wanted to move to Cape Town—Fish Hoek, to be precise. It was a dream I had from the time, in early childhood, that my dad spoke of visiting his cousin there. Other people through my life had spoken of the place in a way that enhanced the desire. “Fishing village” was the usual description. Who wouldn’t want to live in a fishing village?
I took the necessary steps. I still lived at the publishing house. They were happy to have someone there to reboot the server and reset the alarms. We had a few burglaries, but many more times, the alarms went off, and we were never sure whether they had been triggered by burglary attempts, or just down to quirks of electronics. I gave notice and an effective date for quitting my job, after finding something else, very fortunately, in Fish Hoek itself.
Once booked on the train including a berth for my Citroën on the train with me, I began packing. I maxed out my credit cards paying bills and whatnot. The day before the trip, I packed the white Citroën GS Club to the roof.
In the morning, I drove to Park Station, to the reception point for cars. The guy in charge told me I was not allowed to have goods in my car like that. I stood expressionless, acted dumb, waiting for him to push more, but he didn’t. My car was loaded, and I headed for my coupé.
My niece Robin was to meet me in Cape Town. I had warned her I was loaded to the hilt, and that was the truth. My coupé was so full of luggage there was no room to move. The top bunk was packed. The stowage over the compartment door was packed to the hilt. Under the bottom bunk was stuffed with suitcases and bags.