Bismillah
The more I interact with human beings is the more I think of my favourite IT lecturer Mr Joshua Phumlani Mkhize, Mr van Aardt please do not get offended. Other than being an absolute Programming Genius & lecturer, he was a Life Coach. Often when I was in high school I used to fantasise about being an adult. Why? Because these fantasies were mostly fuelled by my garbled insights of what adulthood really meant. Peer pressure, bullying, self-loathing, jealousy, arrogance and the rest, I thought were all illnesses that haunted the young and the restless aka teenagers. I thought that when we become adults we finally come to ourselves and become calm being whose spirits constantly float in a bubble of peace. I was aware that there were a few adults who suffered from these illnesses from time to time, but my mother chose not to expose me to such people; moreover she did not allow me much TV time, so I could not witness such behaviours in adults even on Soapies.
Mr Mkhize began by educating us about the “Discreet Show-Offer”. The Discreet Show-Offer begins by creating or sharing with fellow friends or other audience a crisis, such as crying profusely to catch the attention of friends or the audience, obviously the next would be to ask her “What is wrong?” try and catch it in the response if you can. Here goes… she responds “you know guys, I am so angry with my mother! She took my credit card and just used it everywhere as she wished; I just got my credit card, you know the bank doesn’t give a credit card to just anyone.” Did you catch it? The crisis was created to inform the audience about the credit card. Let’s take another incident and see if you will be able to identify the “Discreet Show-Offer” amongst your circle. “Guys I am not sure if you can help me, I need your advice. I borrowed a colleague my iPad for just a week that I was on leave as his laptop is gone for fixing; now he keeps on saying he is still busy with my iPad. I only borrowed him my iPad because he had an emergency” did you get it?
The discreet show offers will often have sickness such as gout so that you know they have plenty of money, respiratory problems because of the expensive perfume they wear, depression because of a colleague who can’t handle their intelligence, a rash because they are only supposed to wear pure cotton. The list is endless.
Now as an adult I have realised that these illnesses if not curbed at an earlier stage take another turn and become detrimental, not just to oneself but to the society as a whole. May the Almighty continue to bless Mr Mkhize for his Programming lectures and Life lessons and May the Almighty help us overcome these illnesses to that we can be better humans towards one another.
