Missed Call Returned, Cynicism Relieved

AT the outset, I need to point out that I am a hypocrite.
You see, I hate missed calls – those pathetic excuses people use to get you to call them on your own dollar. A missed call means: ‘I want to talk to you, but not so urgently that I’m prepared to go out and get five bucks of airtime to prove it.’

What I tell people is that I dignify missed calls either by ignoring them entirely, or by giving a missed call in return. If the other party responds with another missed call, the cycle of non-communication continues until either they tire of the admittedly silly game of tit-for-tat, or they go out and get some airtime.There are some people from whom I will accept a missed call – people I know who genuinely don’t have the spare cash. But totally unknown numbers, especially those phoning at 09h00 on a Saturday? Not a chance.I told you I was a hypocrite.I returned the call, to find myself talking to an unfamiliar voice belonging to a certain Lampert, who said he worked for the Police, and who told me he had with him a certain green bag containing books.Initially puzzled, it soon dawned on me that he was talking about a bag that was stolen from my house, about which I moaned in this august paper about a year and a half ago. It had been lurking in a lost property box at a Police station all this time. When I asked him if he wanted a reward, Lampert told me he didn’t feel entitled to one, but I could reward him if I liked. Refreshing.I went over there, and lo – there was my bag. Naturally, my iPod, pencil, eraser and USB memory stick were missing; in case the thief is reading this, I hope you really hated my music but couldn’t figure out how to format my ‘pod, forcing you to listen to classic Goth and industrial thrash. Anyway: there it was, the long-lost bag, containing – more important than anything else, about a year’s worth of research notes, sketches, outlines and draft writing for a book I’ve been trying to wring out of my brain for a long time. Glad to have it back.Anyway, it turns out that Lampert checks out this lost property box in his spare time, and chases up what he can. In my case, he found my phone number in the front of all of the notebooks, so that’s where the missed call came from. He told me that he first wanted to send a missed call, and then a message, and after that he’d planned on handing it on at The Namibian’s offices, since he found one of my old payslips tucked in a pocket at the back.So before I forget: huge, mad, unconditional kudos and thanks to this officer’s efforts; Namibia needs more people like you.I was a little disappointed that it hadn’t occurred to the Police officer who put the bag in the lost property box, along with a report detailing when and where it was found, to check to see if my number was in it somewhere. I would have had reason to feel good about the Police a lot sooner. But Lampert told me that really, the Police are terribly understaffed. He reckoned that the Police force had about a quarter of the staff that it needed. He felt that it was important to recruit lots more, and suggested that it was perhaps even a solution to the ongoing ‘everyone fails at Grade 10’ crisis.This isn’t the place to debate the merits of a nationwide national service, but I think it’s important that it’s debated. For one, I think that the biggest police force in the world is nothing but a liability if the levels of training and education are still sub-par, and it’s worse if the insufficient level of funding doesn’t lead to anything but overloaded detectives with a gazillion dockets each, overcrowded holding cells, slow trials, and late salaries (any of this a-ringing a bell?).Be that as it may: I hereby want to apologise in public for having no faith in the Police at all. That was wrong of me. The men and women in Police uniforms, with very few exceptions, are fighting a rising tide of criminal impunity with too few resources, too few people, and with too little backup from the community.The Police can’t protect us on their own; the community at large – that’s us – needs to get serious about not tolerating the criminal element in our midst. In conclusion: thanks for my bag! Now I can get back to work …* The author, no longer a production staffer at The Namibian, is relieved that people don’t all suck after all. And my mean cynical facade? Still there, but there’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.