When I was a boy, there was an old woman in the district who used to sell some tasty sugar cakes.
Then one day, a li’l girl told us that the old lady did not have a grater to grater the coconut, ’cause one night she passed by the lady’s house and peep through a hole and saw the lady chewing up the coconut and spitting it into a bucket and that is how she used to grind the coconut for the sugar cakes.
Well I ain’t got to tell you, all the li’l children stopped buying the old lady’s sugar cakes. So after realising what this rumour was doing to her business, the old lady came out a evening when we was playing and brought the grater to show we that she had one. She even explained that she only had two teeth in her mouth, so it was impossible for her to bite up coconut.
That was her form of damage control. Some people start back buying sugar cakes from her, but not me, ’cause up to now I still believe that she used to bite up the coconut.
Anyhow, as you know, only last week, a customer had a altercation with one o’ the store managers at H&B Hardware. According to the fella, he went into the store looking for drill bits and asked the manager to help him. He said that for no reason, the store manager got highly irritable and insulted and physically assaulted him.
This soon made headline news and the social networks were ablaze, with people calling for the manager to be fired. Well, like the old lady with the sugar cakes, Bizzy Williams, the chairman of Williams Industries, moved fast to do some damage control, and issued a public apology in the newspapers to the fella. He ain’t just apologise and say how sorry he was, he said “our manager was totally wrong”.
Our manager was totally wrong? Usually in corporate apologies you don’t ever hear them people saying them big boys wrong. They would simply apologise and leave it as that.
So I figured this manager fella gone through the eddoes and at home reading the classifieds looking for a job. However, the very next day, I read in the papers, Bizzy explaining the manager’s behaviour, saying that he was “tired and irritable” after working 12-hour shifts for months, and he was being replaced but not fired.
Bizzy should have left it at that. But he went on to say, “I can’t fire the man. He is the best hardware man in the island.” Now I can’t tell Bizzy how to run his place – Bizzy is a very successful businessman, the kinda money Bizzy got, it would take me 3 000 years on my current salary to work for it. Neither am I saying that Bizzy should fire the man, so don’t walk bout and say that I say that Bizzy should fire the man. I ain’t say so!
But people asking, what would this man have to do to get fire? Cause judging from Bizzy’s words, they wondering if this man had to die today, if Bizzy would have to close the store, ’cause obviously the place cannot function without this manager, who seems to be the beginning and end of all hardware knowledge.
You see, people asking, if this man can ill-treat customers, without fear of being fired, simply because he is “the best hardware man in the island”, or if there is another reason.
See ya.
