Don't tell anyone but...
lots of situations we get into, we think the people at the top must be really, really stupid. What does that say about us, given that we are underlings? Still, you look at some of the decisions they make and you think, 'Sh*t for brains, or what?'
Stupidity is contagious, too! You hang with dummies long enough, your own brain tends to go into 'stand-by' mode. Otherwise it keeps getting you into trouble. Eh, SASless, you with your febrile mind? (Thinks to self: he's going to have to look up that one for sure!)
I cannot say that I am any smarter than you guys still in Nigeria; I would still be there but for the mysterious workings of fate. The further away I get from it, especially after just six days in ALgeria instead of NIgeria, when no one tried anything on at all, not even when my 'pah-tick-oo-lahs' were not totally 'in ordah,' the more I wonder why I stayed so long.
In Hassi Messaoud there were no beggars, no robbers, no piles of rotting garbage... nothing like that in my (very limited, of course) initial exposure to one small corner of a very big country. It is just that in Nigeria there is sure to be something shocking, revolting or shockingly revolting just around the corner. Well, I owed my first job there to a rotting human corpse that turned my Canadian predecessor around and sent him back home before Management even knew he was gone.
There was a wrecked car in the old Ikeja Roundabout with a dead guy in it. They told the New Guy that when he arrived in the dark. Next day he took a walk in daylight and saw that there really was a dead guy there in that wrecked 504, when he had thought this was just a morbid joke they played on each New Guy. He had flown in on a round-trip ticket so he went back to the villa, got his stuff together, made his way to the airport and caught Lufthansa back the way he had come. Meanwhile the Norwegian troll who ran things was amusing himself thinking of the New Guy left to rot in the villa for a week until he could finally be admitted into The Presence. Surprise!
You guys be careful now. Remember that it isn't 'the bullet with your name on it' that you need to worry about but the one addressed, 'To Whom It May Concern!'