Flogging a dead horse or what?
Dakota Native American tribal wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, says: "When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse".
However, in educative, corporate and governmental Southern Africa, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip
2. Changing riders3. Appointing a committee to study the horse
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses5. Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as "living impaired"7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed9. Providing additional funding and / or training to increase the dead horse's performance
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse's performance11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads and therefore contributes sustantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And of course ....13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!
If you understand the above, then you are obviously a South African.
2 comments:
wow, I hadn't even known I was South African until tonight!
I would swear you were South Carolinian, Christian and Presbyterian.
My friend, Esther, is an American who grew up in Dutch Curacao, and constantly struggles with idioms and clichés in all 3 or her languages. My favorite "Estherism" is "beating a dead horse between a rock and a hard place."
Good post.
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