Neck duties redefined

Apr 04, 2005

BACK in the days when it was compulsory to master and speak English, stringent measures were put in place to ensure that all pupils adhered to this regulation. <br>

BACK in the days when it was compulsory to master and speak English, stringent measures were put in place to ensure that all pupils adhered to this regulation.

One of the most nasty of these regulations was to strap a stringed smelly bone around your neck once you were caught speaking in vernacular. Not only was it discomforting, but it also earned you all the guffaws from fellow students.

And because of this, it became a detestable thing to have anything strapped around the neck even if it was a gold necklace. Pupils either gave up talking or tried hard to master the English language. Fast forward to the dot com era of ‘more’ enlightenment. Companies have awakened to the need of openly identifying their employees at the work place.

It is no longer enough that Mr Ras works for The New Vision. He has to flash his ID for all to see. For sometime, the ID was clipped either on the shirt pocket or around your waist and it served the purpose. Enter the corporate world and with all the hype surrounding it, the shirt pocket and waist can no longer work, as it wouldn’t earn the company ‘points’.

Copying from their western counterparts, the better way to go for ID’s is around the neck. Then as this settled, in came the mobile phones. When phones were still something to be proud of, the waist was the best place to show off that you had one. When it became a household item, the waist couldn’t garner points anymore.

Suddenly, people’s hands have become busy and bags as well as pockets lack enough space. That is when a fast thinking entrepreneur introduced the strap to hold the phone around the neck. Now turn around and everyone has a phone dangling around the neck in the name of being busy!

With the ineffectiveness of our lovely floppy disk, geniuses in the computer world have provided a flash disk to work alongside it for those who can afford. You can figure out where all this is going. Now a man has an ID, a phone, a flash disk, a necktie and a stringed pen - all strapped around his neck.

When this person drops dead at any point, there would be no need to carry out a post mortem to establish the cause of death as it would be obvious that suffocation from the straps around the neck, killed him!

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