Today South Africa said goodbye to a broadcasting legend. To be honest, my experience of Vuyo Mbuli was rather limited – I used to listen to his afternoon talk show on the radio as a student and only seldom watched the breakfast news show where he was anchor. But there’s no doubt that he was one of the best and most beloved news men ever produced by our country. You only need to read this tribute to get a good idea how people felt about him.
I had been following him on twitter as well for the past few months. This morning, as I was reading the articles and tweets regarding his funeral, something made me search for his Twitter profile. I guess I was wondering whether it had been deleted or perhaps updated by a family member or something. Instead, I found the last tweet sent by Vuyo himself.
This is a piece I wrote for a creative writing course I did last year. The assignment was to write a scene showing a character experiencing boredom, but it should not be boring. I have since expanded it a little.
The following is based on real events, with some embellishment.
Boredom
David rounded the front desk for the umpteenth time. He’d lost count of how many kilometres he’d walked up and down the aisles. He stopped at attention and turned around like a soldier on parade, completely quietly, of course. The only sound in the hall was the scritching of pens on paper and the occasional cough from one of the students. Scritching. Is that even a word? It sounds right. David decided to look it up later. No dictionaries allowed in the exam room. Right now he’d even read a dictionary.
He rounded the front desk for the second time since he’d lost count. By now he had inventoried everything in the hall: floor tiles, window latches, light bulbs, bricks…He decided to add them together; without a calculator. The mental arithmetic took him all of forty-seven seconds – he had timed himself by the clock on the wall. Maybe something more challenging: square roots. Yeah! He hadn’t tried those in a while.
David rounded the front desk for the third time in four minutes. He glanced at the clock and about-faced. Excellent! Only two more hours to go. David started back down the row with a spring in his step. It’s the little things that make life worthwhile, you know?
He managed to keep that up for two circuits and seventy-eight seconds. He started humming in his head a tune from a video he saw earlier that morning on the net: Dumb ways to die, so many dumb ways to die, dump-di-dump-di-dum-dum…He stopped. Why were all the students looking at him? O crap! He was singing out loud again, wasn’t he? He stared at them crossly . They continued writing.
David rounded the front desk for the…Dammit. He’d lost count again. He looked at the clock. Only one hour, fifty-six minutes to go…
It’s finally happened. I’ve heard of it happening to other people, but didn’t really believe it. I thought it was just a story. Then it happened to me. It’s been more than a day and I’m still giddy. I’ve received…an award!
When I wanted to shock the kids I used to teach, I’d just tell them that I only got my first cell phone after I had left school. My father didn’t want to struggle to reach me, so when I left for college he gave me his old Nokia. It had an extended battery. Thrown with enough force it could bring down a cow. (No, I never tried). Most of the time the thing lay in my cupboard in the hostel and I only switched it on to phone home (why do I suddenly have an urge to watch E.T.?)
Having a phone ring in class was the most embarrassing thing that could happen and to send a text while having a conversation was the worst faux pas you could commit. I had one friend who was a self-confessed cell phone addict and we teased her endlessly about it – it was that unusual.
Fast forward a few years and I was working with teenagers who had cell phones at least since they had started high school. For the first time I experienced what it felt like to try and have a conversation with someone who was having a conversation with someone else at the same time (especially after Mxit came into the picture). Luckily I was an authority figure, so I could make them put their phones away, but I’m pretty sure they were still typing texts in their pockets while listening to me.
Apparently my post on the broken spambot has been taken as a challenge by the other spambots out there – that post has now already received seven additional spam comments (with none on my other posts). And some of them are pretty good, even referencing the post itself. A sign of intelligence?
Today South Africa said goodbye to a broadcasting legend. To be honest, my experience of Vuyo Mbuli was rather limited – I used to listen to his afternoon talk show on the radio as a student and only seldom watched the breakfast news show where he was anchor. But there’s no doubt that he was one of the best and most beloved news men ever produced by our country. You only need to read this tribute to get a good idea how people felt about him.
if all else fails...use a hammer 