As a few of you may know, yours truly is "priviledged" (dagnabbit, I can never spell that word right!!!) to work at a company which happens to reside a couple of streets barely 200 meters away from my office building. Now, yours truly happens to enjoy living at work, purely because "work" at the moment happens to be in a posh suburb and the rooming provided by a gracious boss in what used to be an Embassy building, now transformed into a software company, is very comfy and rent-free indeed. This has the added benefit of yours truly being able to post on JWD late into the night from a very, very fat line.
Plus, yours truly currently happens to be car-free, and thus only capable of travelling to the nearby shopping center (mall?), a big one, which is right next to the Convention Center, on foot!
Normally, this would just be a dandy arrangement, shortening my morning commute to the length of a particularly long yawn and a flight of stairs between work and home, so to speak. However, the United Nations has other, dastardly plans to disrupt my peaceful, machine-code filled existence. Those ruddy twits have decided to stage the world's largest convention on Sustainable Development right in the previously mentioned Convention Center.
Generally, this is good and all. Yours Truly is not one to turn up his twitchy, whiskered nose at the prospect of planefulls of gorgeous Foreign environmentalist chikkas who desperately need a tour guide to show them the darker side of South African wildlife, so to speak. (AMANDA, I AM JOKING!!!) In fact, during the last two weeks, all of the talk at my workplace has revolved around the other programmers learning enough French, Cambodian, Turkish, and Spanish to say "Do you have any South African in you? Want some?" well enough to get laid by chikkas from several different countries. You can't blame the poor sods, after all, they are adventurous mofos with a taste for the exotic, although I suspect in this instance the exotic is going to taste them, to use more of that delicate running-around-the-bush phraseology I'm so fond of. My Ghod, I think I just made six separate puns in one sentence. That has to be some sort of record
Despite my continous mutterings of things like "They will all be 40 year old men with beards, paunches and unhealthy predilictions for Schneizer pr0n", my colleagues have ignored my advice and gone on epic condom-buying sprees, totally "draining" nearby gas stations of any form of contraceptive, including candles and lightbulbs. This has proved to be a record year for our beloved Ugandan condom-manufacturing companies, the ones that staple instruction leaflets through their condoms just to make 110% sure they are used properly, you know? Don't my colleagues understand the dangers of South American CRABS? Those things can jump right across the bed while you are tied down!
Nonetheless, I've begun getting a bit uptight about all the goings on in this little corner of Johannesburg. From the news I've heard that there will apparently be in excess of 10,000 protestors at this Summit. For starters, it would probably be a bad idea to eat biltong (beef jerky for non-South Africans) in front of such a crowd, as a bunch of Moby-wannabes might see me and try to trample me. All my beef jerky would truly belong to them. That leather biker jacket I've been contemplating has also been removed from YDE - why, I wonder?
Speaking of jerky, I've been trying to understand Vietnamese (apparently those Vietnamese delegates are hot), but I have a lot of trouble pronouncing the words. I'm really terrified that I'm going to run up to some Vietnamese chikka and say "Your anteater is swerving alarmingly far to the left" when I really meant to say "How about you come back to my place for some chicken soup?"
Another thing I really hate about this whole shebang is the fact that my suburb will briefly become UN property, and as such be seen as a UN Embassy, for the period of the Summit. What exactly this means is rather foggy, I might add. In the pit of my stomach, I have a feeling it means that UN helicopters will be landing on my roof so that "important" tea-trolley pushers can disembark and jog off to the summit. It also means that the place will be crawling with coppers - you won't be able to sit down at a coffee shop without getting a traffic ticket from an over-enthusiastic trainee cop! This is also going to be a bad time for me to indulge in my near-daily habit of traipsing off to the shops in the shopping center nearby to buy some fresh buns from the bread shop there.
Officer: "What's that in your bag?"
Yours Truly: "Erm, it's a bun, your Majesty!" <insert sarcastic grin>
Officer: "I don't like your attitude, young scallywagger! Now pull down your pants!"
Yours Truly: "But that wasn't in the script???? CUT! CUT! Take two!"
Officer: "All right, I will have to pull them down for you. Percival, help me subdue this frisky, powerfully muscled young man with such tight buttocks. Go on!"
Other Officer: "OK, John!"
This, truly is the stuff of nightmares. Will my bun be mistaken for a Weapon of Mass Destruction? Will my pastries cause large traffic jams? Will my croissants result in infamy?
Find out in the next installment of SYN at the UN Summit. Urgh.