Women are grand masters in the art of speaking hint. We have a great talent for refusing to say what is on our minds in favour of speaking in parables that rarely make sense to the listener. However, we believe we are pushing the listener to eventually come to the right conclusion on their own.

Men are fairly useless at hint, and although it is obvious that we reside on totally different wavelengths, it doesn’t stop us from trying to bridge the gap with hint. For instance, women like to fish for compliments in round about ways which fly completely over a man’s head. The end result is that the woman is sulking because you haven’t said her hair is pretty and the man is bewildered because he has no idea what he has done wrong.  As my friend Bob says, it is as effective as winking at someone in the dark.

I understand and occasionally speak hint, but there are times when I choose not to.  Last week I was on a bus and was not in the mood for company. So I paid to have my laptop occupy the seat next to mine. Hardly 5 minutes into the journey, the man sitting in the aisle seat next to mine began to comment loudly about how he was feeling unwell and it was so cold and rainy.  I decided he wasn’t speaking to me.

Then he went on to say how difficult it was to take a nap while seated in those folding aisle chairs in the middle of the bus. I focused on counting the trees whizzing by - in Mabira forest, that can be a very absorbing pastime. Seeing as the broader hints were flying over my head, the man switched to commenting about how luggage could become more important than human beings.

When I am not in a communicative mood, I put a pair of earphones on - even if they are not connected to any music source. That way I avoid conversation but can still hearing what is going on. I put my earphones in, closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable back biting to begin. I was not disappointed.

The man turned to the passenger on his other side and complained bitterly about how he would have liked to sit where my laptop was so he could be comfortable, but I had refused to understand his problem and be a human being.

Unfortunately for him, my travelling human instincts only kick in for old people, children and heavily pregnant women, so I refused to understand his hint. Laptop and I enjoyed each other’s company for the rest of a very comfortable trip. Perhaps if he had gone the direct route instead of whining, he might have had better luck.

Published on Sunday March 7, 2010

For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.

2 Thessalonians 3:10 (King James version)

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I just got back form the supermarket - which seems to be every third shop in Jinja, but that is not the point of my tale.

Outside this particular supermarket I am now and then accosted by a rageddy woman with a bundle of junk on her head and tied around her back, begging for 100 shillings. I always have 100 shillings when I leave the superkarket - I am loaded like that. But I have never and will never hand it over to this woman.

If you are severely disabled, or someone who has lost their fingers to leprosy, I will hand you whatever change I have, no questions asked. But when you are an able bodied, sane and clean woman, younger than my mother, you best take your nonsense out of my face. You see, my father is 80 years old, and my mother isn’t far behind. They wake up every morning at 7am and by 9am they are at their place of work. So excuse me if I do not find your lazy ass an emergency.

Even though I have consistently refused to give the hag money, she consistently continues to accost me when I leave the supermarket. And then to insult me when I refuse to give her MY money. Which I worked hard for. I do no care how wicked I look shooing the woman away - on the principle of the matter I shall continue to refuse to give her money. So there.

Ranting over; regular programming can resume.

Dear Mobile Telephone People, who do I have to write about in order to get myself off this damn texting list? I have been patient, I have called the helpline, I have texted my issues to the code provided and I have even tried to get used to the unsolicited messages, but I have just about had it.

It is not that I have anything against comedy - I enjoy a good laugh and I am glad there are Ugandans making legitimate money somewhere instead of lamenting about how certain tribes have ‘their’ cash. Well done and keep your socks up. However, I did not sign up for these weekly text reminders to attend the comedy night and I therefore resent getting them. It is an invasion of my personal space, even though said personal space is located on your bigger network.

It is not like my mail inbox, where I can just mark you as unwanted spam and get on with my life. No… twice a week I will be going about my business when my telephone will alert me that I have a text message. Sometimes I will refuse to read it for ages, thinking it is the offensive unsolicited texts, when in fact it is someone I know saying something I need to hear. Then other times, I will grab the phone, expecting it to be a text from my beau telling me how fabulous he thinks I am and how he cannot live without me - and those are the times I will be confronted with the weekly invite to the thing I have never been to and do not intend to attend, with the way things are going.

Furthermore, I am a self-confessed grammatical snob. I cannot stand letters, emails or texts which are written in heavy slang, code or broken English, and this appears to be part of the ‘humour’ in these invitations. So instead of being enticed to drive 80km to Kampala in the night to watch said shows, I am actually irritated as I cannot understand half of what I am being invited to do.

So, shall I be subtle and hope people take the hint, or shall I just come out and ask MTN to get me off things I did not subscribe to? I had recent trouble with my TV providers, but seeing as they have the monopoly and my son demands his Teletubby rights, I had to tread fairly politely. But in this world of dual sim cards and talking paka-whenever, surely mobile phone companies cannot afford to be offending customers? I know you are busy with the World Cup and all, but a prompt response will go a long way in keeping me out of Butabika. Thank you.

Published on Sunday February 28, 2010

This is the year of our Lord two thousand and ten; a new decade in a relatively new century. Putting a man on the moon is old news. There are teenagers who have never seen a telephone which is connected to wires - let alone a telephone with an actual round dial.

The internet is out of control and amazing. I can count the trees in my compound on Google Earth. I can chat with someone 5,000 miles away. Using my mailbox I can work for clients I have never even met - and get paid with money transfers directly to my bank account, all without leaving the comfort of Sofa Inc.

Surgeons can operate without cutting you open. They just make a little hole, insert a tube thingy with a camera on one end and a light somehow inside the camera and a laser beam all rolled up into one. So they see and cut and stitch and they are in and out of your innards before you are even aware you were under anaesthetic.  You can shift fat from your rear to your lips or vice versa - it seems the only thing we cannot do is share fat with thin people who want to put on weight.

So can someone please explain to me why a trip to the dentist is still such a soul-numbing, bone chilling, pee-in-your-pants and weep experience? Did they miss the bus? I took my son and nephew to the dentist and after seeing two patients come out, my son, who had never even been to a dentist before, began to cry and ask to be taken home. The mere aura of the waiting room had frightened him.

And I must admit he is not the only one. As soon as you sit back in that dental torture contraption they call a chair, and he swings his tray of lethal and sadistic looking instruments towards you, you can’t help but panic. And it does not help that many dentists have perfected a tone of voice which is much akin to a psychiatric nurse soothing a madman before he plunges a great big injection full of sedatives into his arm.

We are centuries beyond performing amputations on the battle field with nothing but a manual saw, a bottle of whisky and several men to hold the patient down. Why does dentist still equal pain? Is it lack of PR? Do dentists take professional pride in being more frightening than undertakers? Is the amount of horror you generate one of the benchmarks of how well your dental practice is doing?

I guess this is my way of saying I have to have 3 teeth filled and I am not budging till someone gives me a guaranteed pain-free project proposal. Or a large bottle of whisky.

Published on Sunday February 21, 2010

My father is chairman of the board of something, and while I am very proud of him I am also very disappointed at the way he fails to utilise the perks of his position.

Just this morning, he told me he was going to a board meeting and therefore wanted to have his breakfast early and his shoes polished and his tie straightened. He did not want to be late. Now I have tried in vain to explain to him about how being the boss means you are supposed to come late, but I am just not getting through.

We have all been to weddings and graduation parties and workshops and meetings where things would not start until ‘someone’ has arrived to grace the occasion. The rest of you are not people until Honourable arrives. And when he/she does, then you can begin to matter again - but only in your capacity as the attendees who clap and ululate for the honourable guest.

You will be lucky if Honourable has dressed to suit the occasion. Usually, they have to say they have come from somewhere else where they were hard at work and they decided to ‘squeeze you into their schedule’ because they care so much about you. T-shirts; sandals; a scruffy African shirt - anything goes. You are just so grateful to have Honourable at your function that you will overlook the way he/she looks.

If the organisers were crazy enough to begin the function without the invited guest (as if the rest of those present just wandered in off the street), then when Honourable does appear, the proceedings must be stopped so that we can all acknowledge his presence. We will clap for him and for his spouse and recognise his offspring too, if they happen to be there. Then when he has said a few words about voting for the right party, you can continue being festive. This is the reason we all want to be ‘big people who are more of people than the rest’.

I have tried in vain to explain these dynamics to my dad, so that one day I, too, can stand up and be introduced as the Honourable’s member of family. However, he is intent on being neat and on time, so I’ll serve the breakfast early and shine those shoes.

But seriously, people. Stop taking the population for granted. We understand that nation building is busy work, but if you cannot organise your schedule and be where you have been asked to be almost a month in advance, then why should we trust you with big things? After all, you are always bullying your way through the traffic; why are you never on time?

Published on Sunday February 14, 2009

Today I was taking some young Basoga back to some Busoga boarding schools. I was going through the whole “did you bring brooms and TP” nonsense, when lo and behold, a big new ambulance pulled up next to my car in the parking lot.

If you are assuming it was an emergency, you are incorrect. It was someone bringing a child to school. Complete with a driver who stayed baking in the car the whole time. (I hate that, by the way. People need to give their drivers slightly more respect and consideration in general).

So anyway, there was a brand-new, probably-donated-by-some-foreign-government, ambulance from Iganga Hospital dropping a child at school in Jinja.

I will not even go into the question of on how many levels this is wrong. I will just say: Only in Uganda.

A week from today, the politics of Valentine’s Day shall be upon us, and I’d like to give advance warning of war to all parties concerned. Valentine’s Day is a fairly recent import to our society but Kampalans are not to be left behind, so here we are, Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day and all.

This week, in homes, offices and bars all across Kampala, people will be having the same old argument: If I love you every day, why should I feel inclined to make a display of it on one particular day? The men mostly believe their daily expressions of love have been so extraordinary that the women should be overwhelmed and probably swooning on the streets every day. The women have been waiting till this week to subtly let the men know that they are not nearly romantic enough. So while the men ask: why should I, the women ask: why not? What is wrong with having both the daily love and the extra special love?

If indeed you are a gentleman given to doing grand romantic gestures on a daily basis, then you may be excused from the madness. However, one may also argue that if you are used to doing romantic things every day, why stop on this particular day? How come we do not hear about the fact that you love your mother everyday and therefore shall refuse to wish her a happy Mother’s Day?

A lot of the resistance comes from folk who are out of ideas and too afraid to confront the vacuum in their minds. Coming up with unique and appropriate romance which suits your wallet and your partner’s expectations can be a daunting task. However, less is generally more, which is why the old flowers chocolate and dinner routine rarely fails. Also, in the spirit of commercialising everything, there are businesspeople offering to do the thinking for you.

In the end, there isn’t a soul, male or female, who does not like being appreciated. If you know that showing interest on one silly day of the year will make a difference, why must you fight it and give your partner something to resent you about? Relationships are about compromise and knowing what is important to your partner, and if you scratch their back, you eventually get yours scratched too.

Politics dictate that this may either be taken as a massive hint to whom it may concern to do something grand for me next Sunday. Or it may be taken as a challenge to totally ignore me and see what I will do. All I can say is by this time next week, I should have a story to tell. Enjoy the build up to the madness.

Published on Sunday February 7, 2010

Gratitude turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity… it turns problems into gifts, failures into successes, the unexpected into perfect timing and mistakes into important events. Melodie Beattie

I have a wonderful 2010 diary courtesy of ABB Uganda, if I may be allowed to toot their horn. I have used their diaries for the past three years and I do not know how I organised my life before that. Each day comes with an uplifting, noteworthy or funny quote. The above was yesterday’s quote and it really struck a chord with me.

January tends to be a month for whining and complaining on so many levels. First of all we have to spend the long 5 weeks of January paying for the privilege of getting our salaries before Christmas. Only amazingly disciplined people and total Scrooges did not go and blow that money on the festive season. So January finds you broke and probably facing (and dodging) a wedding meeting or two.

Then the kids start presenting their back to school lists and for those who did not do too well in the PLE, you have to start school-hopping to look for an alternative to their first choice. And then there are those all important annual goals that you may not have met last year and you are trying to figure out how they fit into this year. So we spend a lot of January, and indeed of life, being unhappy with our circumstances and complaining about them.

The fact of the matter is that bad things will happen. Disappointments will occur; deadlines will be missed; investments will fall through; relationships will come to a messy and painful end.  And the worst thing is that it will not always make sense. In fact, it rarely makes sense. However, the fact that bad things happen is not cause for us to focus on them. We are obsessed with spreading and hearing bad news. If something great happened to you, then why not savour the feeling and focus on that?

Gratitude is like a magic wand; really, I have no other way to explain it. In fact if there is anything I would love my son to learn, it is gratitude. If you can take stock of how far you have come and at the end of each day find something to be thankful about, then you become a powerful person indeed. You’ll stop looking for external affirmation of your progress and your worth and just look inside yourself and be happy for the good things that do happen.

Of course gratitude is not to be confused with complacency, but all things considered, I have a pretty amazing life and I am sure you do too.

Published on Sunday, January 31, 2010

Last week I was in Soroti to ‘escort a friend to collect a wife’. Soroti has a neat little two street town. It is simple, clean and beautiful and I could not get over the huge rock formations dotted all over the area.  They are amazing.

There is so much beauty in simplicity, though there are many modified things that can also look good. Take for example all the eye-catching females dotting Kampala city.  How do guys keep their eyes on the road? Forgive the sexist comment but really, there is a well dressed, preened and powdered woman walking the streets of Kampala at least every 200 metres. If I find them eye-catching, then surely they present a traffic threat. (And you may put away all the lame jokes about the B. Bill, please. I play strictly for the legal team.)

I was supposed to be writing about how I would like to visit all the towns of Uganda, instead of planning holidays to Mombasa and wherever, but bear with me as I instead turn this into a rant about Kampala. I often have to be in Kampala to work, but aside from the cinema and a few favourite restaurants, I find it a nuisance having to go there and I do not miss it at all. The dust, the traffic, the never-ending road works… the potholes developing in exactly the same spot they were last year. While I am sure every writer/journalist/columnist/concerned citizen has been grateful for the easy topic of potholes to bail us out on dry days, it is sort of getting ridiculous that absolutely NOTHING is ever done about the problem areas.

The same thing goes for the flooding, which up to the second decade of the 21^st Century is still baffling city engineers. Yesterday I had the uniquely worrying experience of paddling my car through about a metre of flood water while at the same time trying to avoid potholes lurking under the water from memory. And of course since all the markets and trading centres are right by the roads, you have to do this swimming drive while trying to avoid splashing the citizens going about their business by the roadside.

Whenever you get onto raised ground you will have a good view of the slums clinging tenaciously to the bottom rung of every residential hill, melting almost perfectly into grand mansions and apartment blocks with limited parking space. I have only a handful of friends in Kampala who live on roads which are clearly marked and qualify to be called roads. The rest I have to visit using a combination of Google Earth, GPS tracking and good old bodaboda know-who.

However, I am sure Kampala has its charms, as do all the towns of our beautiful country. And to go back to the line of thinking which I should have originally pursued; it is worth your while to discover Uganda.

Published on Sunday January 24, 2010

There are many kinds of service providers right now, with a great number of people employed to be at the end of a service helpline should you choose to call. However, there is no guarantee that the person who picks the phone up will know how to solve your problem. Or how to talk.

Take for instance a certain airline E which I called to find out about the availability of a flight. Each person I spoke to asked me to hold and transferred me to yet another till I had been moved a grand total of 5 times.  When I was finally connected to the person who should know, I was advised to call back later because the person was not sure. One would think that they would take my number and call me back - but perhaps that is asking too much. When I asked what the direct line to that person was, I was told to ‘call the number you called in the first place’.

For reasons I cannot truly explain, I am a two-phoned tycoon and both services have a customer care line. Yesterday I had to call Provider M. I got an engaged tone about a million times before I suddenly was connected. “Hellomynameisblabla,thisisMhowmayIhalpyou?” They all know they are meant to say who they are and what they are about and greet you and ask you how they may assist you, but I think after the 100^th call, they stop caring whether you actually can understand that introductory sentence.

After about a minute explaining my issue (namely, I am sick of getting text invites to things I did not subscribe for) I was informed I could not be helped till the next day; no idea why. I then called Provider W, to make some inquiries about how to use their internet service. I was connected to a girl who was either having her feet tickled under the table, or was high on what a Rastafarian would call ‘the holy herb’. I had to endure maniacal giggling while she answered a question I had not yet even asked. When she finished, I had to ask her to please listen to my actual question and begin her answer again.

In the midst of my whining, I must acknowledge that the DSTV and the UMEME call centres generally seem to have their act together (or they have memorised my number and speed things up to get rid of me!)

I don’t think my editor would smile if I sent half a column and said the rest was unavailable due to temporary interference and I did not know when it would be back. If you expect people to take you seriously, please edit the voices that directly represent your companies.

Published on Sunday 7th January, 2010