And so: Decorex 2013 where a funky necklace resembling cubes of nougat were my good lady's sum purchase. I can certainly live with that.
And, as ever, as much as innovative lifestyle accoutrements serve to enrapture Karen, simple anthropological phenomena conspire to keep me engaged - human behaviour just endlessly fascinating to behold.
This began with the queue into the car park. Why is there always some douchebag trying to busk his way past the parking authorities in an effort to save the R15 parking fee? That's Au $1.60 or £1.00 - hardly a king's ransom is it. After using some emphatic body language which unequivocally conveyed our disgruntlement to the would-be Scrooge, he coughed up and we all moved on.
It would make more sense to be negotiating at the exhibition entrance if you wanted to save money - that fee being R85 a head (Au $9.40 or £5.50) but this activity too was cause for amusement.
The event organizers have spent squillions on marketing, posters, advertising and printed bumf yet there are no signs over the entrance doors identifying why a queue has formed at one door and not the other adjacent empty inviting one.
I am understandably perplexed by this although no one else seems noticeably perturbed as if they already possess an arcane inner knowledge of the riddle of the ingress...
I casually ask the couple in front of me: Why is no-one using that door?
They shrug. No idea.
"Shall I go ask that security officer?" I venture, wondering why no one else has considered this. The roped queue control chutes beyond the glass doors seemed reasonably clear on that side. A quick confab with the burly security wallah revealed that the vacant door was for holders of Web Tickets only.
"Ah," says I, "might have been more helpful if someone had put a sign over the door stating that less than obvious fact..."
My witty sarcasm was lost on this recently erectile bipedal lifeform so I moved back to my place in the queue. "Web ticket holders," I said which precipitated a conversation about how inadequately things were organised in South Africa and how this would lead to its eventual and inevitable annihilation through crumbling infrastructure and abject apathy. Bit of a stretch really but people just love to moan don't they.
My lovely wife then joined me in the queue having been subjected to a similar frustration at the ATM just outside Entrance 5.
"Why the fuck," she says to me sotto-voce, "does it take people so long to draw cash at an ATM? I mean, what's involved? You arrive, put your card in the machine, make a selection, collect the money and leave. That should take about three minutes tops. But there are people who take forever. What the fuck is that all about?"
These questions, I knew, were rhetorical but it did seem as if we were being exposed to the negative forces of the evil gremlins of the biomorphic field of queues. Or something.
Once inside it was all laughter and giggles as they deftly relieved us of R170. Just goes to show that sometimes money does seem to buy happiness even if, albeit a somewhat short-lived fulfillment. I guess the lustre fades once the wads of cash that you have dedicatedly lifted from the thousands of decor drones are handed over to the so-called authorities never to pass through your grimy mitts again.
Three and a half hours, two halls, a passable lunch to saxophone accompaniment by the adult personification of Lisa Simpson later and we were back in the car wondering why we had bothered to do this in the first place.
Must've been about a nougat necklace, I surmised. It must hold mystical magic as yet to be realised.
Onward and upward, good people of Middle Earth - the adventure has yet to begin.
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