CANDID TALK: The monkey analogy of today’s employer and invincibility
You love stories. Don’t you? Once upon a story, there was a monkey who did all the dirty work to keep its owner fed. It danced, jabbered like mad and did a host of monkey antics. Its owner, a fat bellied fellow lived off the poor money’s performances for which the market cloud madly cheered and tossed coins and banknotes of the smallest denominations. These, he stuffed into the box and grinned like a satisfied pig after eating gruel.
One day, the monkey decided that it had enough of his “boss” and after a putting a sterling performance, he grabbed the cashbox, extracted the coins in it, tossing the contents of the box to the cheering crowd, he ran away never to be seen. What is the moral of the story?
You see, every employer these days imagines that by improving your working conditions, you will automatically develop a beer belly and a permanent belch. He reckons that for any employee to be able to work well, he should be kept on a leash like a police dog – with meagre wages paid on the 45th day of the month, constant reminder that the gate is always open to you. This is accompanied by serious pressure to deliver.
I don’t agree to that. I have severally considered to strangle my HR’s neck until a qualified doctor from Muhimbili declares him dead but am afraid of spending the remaining part of my life rotting in Segerea Prison or even being hanged.
That is why I have made a concrete decision that my daughter Jenny should take up a Human Resource course (in Uswaz the call it “Woman Resource”) to ensure that she is the one to harass people and not the opposite. I know that from the trend of her bookwork, she is a straight “E” material but I can bet my last coin (if I have any), that hiring and firing people at whim requires no “A” material. One does not need to be rocket scientist to know this. One Bongoland’s redeeming feature is that what one needs is a “tall” relative or friend to get there. If one happens to have a pretty face like Jenny has, the rest, as they say, is history.
I have since discovered that for one to be an effective HR, all you need to do is to wave out desperate staff as you make endless, and ostensibly “important” calls to God-knows-who and keep them fidgeting outside your glass windows. You also get immense pleasure signing service termination letters. In other words, fate has relegated you to the position of a god (a goddess) in that institution until death does you part!
