It happened quite some time back. This guy was in dire financial problems and he needed some real cash fast. It all had to do with an emergency that was very private and no one knew the actual details, so say his friends. Only less than an hour was remaining for him and unless he finds the money during that time something which impacts his family’s life would go wrong.
Then a fellow who happened to be his longtime friend but had a fallout with him in later years hears the story and volunteers to come to the guy’s help. When told that finally there was someone willing to give him the amount he needed they say he jumped like a child. The secret emergency was that serious.
But the story turns into one of commercial flops where the audience isn’t convinced with the ways the writer wanted to turn the story in a completely unexpected direction. At learning who his benefactor was he refused to take the money. No amount of convincing, no amount of pleading from his friends could make him change his mind. And believe it or not time run out. His friends aren’t sure what actually happened after that in the fellow’s household.
As if the world was out to get him he chose to stay away even from his closest friends. When he runs into them unexpectedly his greetings were so icy his friends were confused as to what their sins, if any, actually were. But one thing was sure, by the look of him and his strange behavior they knew that he wasn’t having it good. The most recent news they heard about him was that he was out of the country holed up in some corner of the world while his wife is still in her homeland.
Now what is the big deal about this? I’ll tell you what it is. There is this trend where people practically tear away at the social fabric they are sewn into for the most eerie reasons like misplaced ego and the sense of ‘not giving in.’ Something is very wrong and you could only wonder if we really notice it.
Coming closer to home ground you know something is wrong when the mice are playing rugby all over your house and the cat is flat on the floor with eyes open watching them. Ha! You might even suspect there was some smirk about the face of that a ‘pet’ trusted with the responsibility of keeping at bay the trespassing of mice. Your cat smirking! Yes, something is wrong what it comes to the role of cats. When you are living near recently demolished old houses your most ‘passionate’ neighbors who don’t ask permission to invade your house are mice. How did I know this? Well, let’s give the cat some meditating time and I might tell you.
I’ll tell you one instant where you’d say, “Yes, indeed something is wrong with this world!” Say there is this doorman who all year around acts like he’s the next Rambo now that the Stallone fellow might not have the muscles which made him jump over all those cliffs and run through all those dense bushes. (I’m not forgetting that he is probably one of the most ‘bulletproof’ guys mankind has ever seen!) The only thing about the Rambo emulating doorman is that he is one of the skinniest guys you’d come across and his biceps have yet to be identified by the most recent binoculars.
I mean they must be somewhere on his arm! Big screens without the Rambo or The Rock biceps! Forget it. I mean the screens are made so big so that they’d fit the Rambos and the Terminators! But when we come to our doorman he possesses no shoulders that would rip the extra-large shirts to shreds. The biceps which are supposed to be like big pipes torn out from some Middle Eastern oil field are still being sought. Ha! The thighs are supposed to look like, if only they hadn’t been covered with clothes, the trunk of a three century-old tree. When it comes to our doorman we’d have to brainstorm about another definition for thigh. And the guy smiles and says “Hello!”
Though you’re a regular at the place you’ve never seen him smile. His forehead was always cracked into thirty-plus places. His eyes practically drill through your heaviest clothes, through your skin and you’d feel them giving your intestinal machinery some hard time. Then after all that time of angry stares and unforgiving frowns one day he smiles all the way to his earlobes and says, “Hi!” What! The guy just greeted you! This is one of those instances when you’d want the help of the entire town.
“Mayday! Mayday!” You really need that! You’d probably look around if there is anyone who’d come to your rescue if the guy thinks something horrible’ like picking you up by the throat and hurling you all the way to the nearest lion’s den. After all, the guy must have lost a hundred and one screws from upstairs. What! There isn’t any “What?” about this. By smiling and saying “Hi!” the guy has broken all the rules of a normal person acting normally. For him the threatening stare at the frowns that would scare away an entire colony of wolves are ‘normal.’ Yes, that guy’s smiling and there you’ve one proof to the argument that something is very wrong with this world.
So the Musk gentleman is about to market robot women! In more ways than one such happenings are the perfect truth that not only something, but many things are wrong with this world. Look, they might be doing all those craziest of things over there when it comes to the latest technological and scientific breakthroughs. The robot women who are expected to do what the ‘flesh and bones’ women do.
You must have heard about ‘the husband and wife in bed’ sort of stories. (What the hell am I saying?) Look I fail to grasp the logic of the Musk guy project. Robots manning the machines and the like might be easier to understand though there are a lot of horrible scenarios like tens of millions losing their jobs. But a robot woman destined not for the factories and probably for the beds is hard to digest.
Yes, a lot of things are wrong about the world!
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY 23 JULY 2023