Without their gadgets, men tend to do silly things

We don’t realise how accustomed to our gadgets we are until the damned things start to malfunction. When this happened to me recently, I spent the whole time walking aimlessly around the house, and marveling at the sudden wondrous beauty of an ordinary ceiling above me.

When there isn’t much to do, I find an escape through doing stuff on the laptop. But when it didn’t want to function on Saturday, I knew that my sanity would be tested. I was feeling useless. Then I looked for small things to do around the house just to keep myself busy, and sane. I tampered with the door handle. And I had a lovely time trying to fix it.

I remember how my father has been dealing with his domestic boredom over the years. Men like him (who don’t go out to drink with other men) hardly go out so they kill time doing silly things like walking around the yard, chasing a stubborn chicken or admiring their garden implements. And that has never really bothered my Mother, for obvious reasons.

But Mme would get quite worked up once Ntate starts messing the whole place. Imagine the front of the house adorned with engine parts and tool boxes. Yes, when he is seriously bored, Dad’s most famous coping mechanism has often been to dis-assemble the 1977 Toyota Hilux engine - just to wipe the pistins, blow at them, and then re-assembling the engine. I kid you not.

The antics would start on a Saturday morning, which meant that Dad would be expecting me to be up by 06h00 am instead of 09h00 am, and still be passing him the vice grip and sockets by 19h00 pm, sometimes in cold winter season. On days like those, I'd simply shrug with a long face, knowing that my weekend of kicking a ball with other boys, or going on a bird hunt, was ruined.

I experience domestic boredom just like my father. But for me, laptop and mostly phone take the place of chasing chickens, admiring garden implements or stripping old car engines. But when those gadgets are malfunctioning, then I have to find something to keep me sane. When my son was born, I thought that he would keep me busy and fill the gap. But he often gets tired of playing with me. And you should see me, looking like I am lost around the house.

Even the men who drink beer, and have all the reasons to be out drinking happily with other men in the local shebeen or pub, go through these sordid moments. I know this because even a seasoned beer-drinker like Ndumiso "Mapholoba" Ngcobo has since lamented, ‘Once my kids are tired of playing with me, I walk around the house rearranging my balls in my scrotal sack.’ It is not me who is saying this, it is Mapholoba.

You might want to check out his two hilarious books:

1. Some of my Best Friends are White
2. Is it Coz I’m Black?