All that you have is your soul (Tracy Chapman).

Wednesday 21 December 2005

The Honest Fool

I will be the first to admit that I am far from perfect. I have a vile, volcanic temper which lands me frequently in trouble with my family. I also often engage my mouth before my brain, spouting thoughts that I immediately regret verbalising.

One of the traits however that I am most proud of, is the fact that I am honest and when I say “honest”, I mean to the stupidest degree. At times, I have landed myself in hot water because I will refuse to lie - and to make things worse, I will also never assume that anyone else could be dishonest in their dealings with me.

I don’t know what happened to that damn car, but I am now kicking myself as to why I trusted the garage to dispose of my car. After all, they’d tried to cheat me over the car park and since I had caught them lying before, alarm bells should have rung, back in June. I can only surmise that my stupid attitude led to the events that unfolded yesterday.

I am slowly and painfully learning the unpalatable truth that quite a number of people out there are absolute shits who put their greed for money ahead of any consideration towards other human beings. Someone I spoke to yesterday lied to me, of that I am sure, because there’s no way a thief would have taken my car in the state that it was in. The question is who?

My innate integrity dictates that I am a lousy businessman and probably suited to doing the kind of job that I find myself in. Teaching may be hard and frustrating but the one thing I do know (or would like to believe) is that the people I work with actually care about other human beings.

Tragically, you can’t say that about most jobs (or people) these days.

2 comments:

I'm not even supposed to be here today said...

My innate trust has backfired on me as well. It's difficult to resist the urge to become a suspicious cynic. I've taken some risks with some pretty questionable characters. What's interesting is that the only people to abuse my trust are people with money,a business facade, and a worthless mission statement. The upper-crust.

Remember in Catcher, where Holden says that the richer a school is, the more thieves it has? People blessed with fortune, tend to only want more.

The Scribbler said...

How true!