How I long to sit beneath a shady tree

A LITTLE while ago, I found myself in the fair Far East again at the post office in Mui Wo, a village near Hong Kong.

The young man serving me from behind the counter went about his task in a businesslike fashion, that is until a colleague interrupted him. I assumed that she asked him to explain something to her, but my Chinese is terrible … seeing as there can be over 3,500 characters in the ‘alphabet’, and up to this point, I have learned zero!

Before he turned to answer her, he looked at me and humbly said, “Sorry, sorry …”

I was struck by this apology, here’s why: I was a foreigner and someone who, unlike him, didn’t have a heritage spanning thousands of years, yet he treated me as if I was someone significant.

I saw a lot of this attitude in the ‘Fair’ East, but this illusion of being someone worthwhile or significant was brutally popped within the first week back in Kimberley.

Needing to do some business at one of our city’s municipal departments, I was beckoned to the counter by a young man, easily 20 years younger than I. He took my forms and started processing the information … as he ignored me and continued the conversation he was having with his colleagues in the office.

Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t rude, abusive or blatantly disrespectful. He was just inattentive, disengaged and disinterested in the clients he was supposed to be serving.

Next, one of his colleagues walked up to the counter and said, “ID please.” I could have sworn that I hadn’t seen her before this, but there was no greeting; no “good morning”, no “hello”, not even a “hi”. Again, she was not rude … but her actions came across as cold and uninviting.

At least that was my perception.

Then things changed on Monday when I visited the supermarket. I approached the young cashier, and she made eye contact saying, “Goeie middag, Meneer,” and proceeded to scan my items. After the transaction, she handed me my receipt with a polite, “Thank you, and have a good day.”

I immediately felt better about South Africa. In fact I hung around for a while and was impressed when I noted that she treated all customers with equal courtesy.

However, at the two tills on either side of her, the cashiers were scanning items while having a conversation with the young people packing the shopping bags. The customers just stood there looking like eavesdroppers, at least that’s how they looked to me.

Look, it’s easy to take pot shots and complain about poor customer service; there’s a lot of that around at present. But it goes deeper than what’s on the surface.

I get the impression that the South African workforce has lost sight of the reason why they are working. Sure, it’s to earn a salary, but if earning a salary is the only reason we are working, then our jobs will become a dreary, pointless, frustrating drudgery.

Now … imagine this: Would it not be something if somehow the workforce in this country could have a mind-shift? A shift from merely ‘doing a job’ to ‘striving for excellence in whatever they do’?

What the current workforce, and sadly those in positions of authority, do not realise is that we are shaping the society that our children will grow up in and that we will have to endure as old-timers. Imagine if we could shape our society and culture in such a way that being a senior citizen would be less of a burden – a safe, caring, nurturing country.

Currently, I fear that we are moving rapidly in the opposite direction, and to pump the brakes, if not turn things around, we could perhaps consider what investor and philanthropist Warren Buffet once said: “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”