The green arrow at the traffic light started flashing, but driver of the green Tata at the front of the queue didn’t budge. I was the second motorist to drive around the offending party, yelling at her to move. As I went past, the driver suddenly sat upright and started moving — slowly.
She’d been fast asleep. My first thought was not to be so judgemental — after all, I had done the same thing myself before. It was 6.15am, and she could have been driving home from a 12-hour shift. But she could also just as easily have come from a night of trying her luck at Emperor’s Palace.
My next thought was, “But it’s that time of year of course.” Before long, zombies will be slouching through shopping malls to the soundtrack of inane Christmas jingles. And this is how it came to be that for the past week I’ve been walking around with an earworm from Boney M. — “Come, they told me/Pa rum pum pum pum/Our newborn King to see/Pa rum pum pum pum” — stuck in my head.
What you have just read is a prime example of “associative thoughts”. There is no obvious connection between a driver falling asleep at the wheel of her car and Christmas carols, but somehow my brain created a neurological pathway connecting Jingle Bells and a sea of fuzzy-brained humans rummaging through “50% off” Black Friday bins at Yuletide in an annual bid to make it across the finish line to their holidays.
When you cheat your mind and body of repose, they eventually reach a critical tipping point of fatigue when they begin to wrest it from you
Just the other day, I called my mother and, when she eventually picked up, I unthinkingly and involuntarily said, “Hello, you sexy beast!” Thank goodness the old lady is a bit hard of hearing these days, because she just told me to speak up. But all this is all to say that my own annual chronic fatigue is definitely in fourth gear already.
I think Karl Marx got a lot of things right, but his theories about how the First Industrial Revolution and the accompanying upsurge in technology would lead to class conflict, revolution and a classless society were pipe dreams. He grossly underestimated human stupidity and our seemingly innate desire to be the next Jeff Bezos by the advent of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. If the average human cog in the machinery that churns out the next billionaire valued himself or herself more, we would all take rest and recreation far more seriously than we do. When you cheat your mind and body of repose, they eventually reach a critical tipping point of fatigue when they begin to wrest it from you.
And that, my fellow member of the toiling proletariat, is how we ended up taking naps at the wheel of our Tatas. We really have to start showing some respect for the only known antidote to fatigue — rest. I should know, as my middle name is “All Talk No Action”. Overworking is the Black Plague of the 21st century, and you can’t just keep pouring from the empty cup of energy reserves.
This past week, I told someone who has been a dear friend of mine for 41 years and is also a freelancer how work that previously took me three days to do now takes me two weeks. I also spoke of how, in the last two years, I have committed such calamitous errors as arriving at OR Tambo with a boarding pass indicating my departure airport as King Shaka and my destination as OR Tambo. I also told her about how recently I’ve often paid for my purchases at Dischem, put my cards away, folded my till slip neatly, and then, after three steps, heard a voice calling out, “Sir! You forgot your stuff!”
After giggling profusely, she said, “That’s nothing. The other day I had a workshop to conduct in Rustenburg. It’s only when I saw the Panorama Petroport on the N1 did it occur to me that I was headed for Polokwane, purely out of habit.”
Do as I say and not as I do and take a rest. And remember, if it all becomes too much, just keep humming "Pa rum pum pum pum". It will help to calm you down no end.
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