yesterday at the neelsie i walked round the corner carrying a table with chris to the elevator and as we rounded the corner two guys with hand guns stepped out – they were the money guarding people – third guy came round the corner with the bag which didn’t look all that big – and it’s the neelsie (student centre in Stellenbosch), what exactly are they protecting? con-doms?

so we step back and let them have the elevator and as i turned round there was this fourth guy – medium to large build black dude with this huge semi-automatic (i assume, don’t really know what that means but that’s the word i would grab out of the air to describe that kind of gun) gun which is at least half as long as him

he is doing the customary ‘people who guard money don’t smile’ grimace (‘grimace’ is a great word, kind of like ‘frolic’ and ‘begot’) so i smile at him and say hey or something

and then, because it has been quite a while since i took my life into my hands i asked him a few lets-try-get-a-smile questions – nothing. so i asked him do they pay you a lot for this and he was like ‘not really’ – so i said ‘but you’ve got that huge gun – go in there and demand some more’

i think if i was a money-guarding man that would have made me smile. even if they have strict men-who-guard-money-don’t-smile regulations which are seriously drummed into you at men-who-guard-money training camp, that was still a good one. at the very least a slight head nod to show he acknowledged it. But no, that dude kept the stereotype alive

altho i bet you that just after he kissed his wife and then rolled over to go to sleep later that evening he chuckled a short chuckle to himself, and when his wife said, ‘what is it dear?’ he just smiled in the darkness and said ‘nothing’ – i’m pretty sure that’s what happened, although he may have castigated her for the ‘dear’ thing.