Indifference on public display.

Between Panyaza Lesufi’s hotel showers, flashbacks of those garish SONA dresses and an MP attending a parliamentary committee meeting during a nail appointment at my local Sorbet – my patience and trust in public officials is in disrepair.

So there I was, after a morning of classes, overgrown nailbeds begging for mercy at what was a quiet station at my local Sorbet. The hour one has in that chair allows for a semblance of calm as you watch your assigned nailtech go through the motions. The occasional chatter from adjacent stations does drift over every now and again, but usually not in a way that would be disruptive. Before I go any further, let me make my full disclaimer that I am not an intolerant Karen, hold on to that.

Right. So, there I am, doing my best to think of nothing and no one that afternoon, when a woman with a half-open laptop walks into the shop. She makes a beeline for the station right next to mine and as she gets closer I can hear the familiar drone of a virtual meeting blaring from her laptop. She asks for somewhere to put the device because she has to attend this meeting or else. Or else what the nail tech asks, or else people will “ask questions” she retorts. At this point, I look over in some disbelief, remembering a similar incident when I needed to get something signed by a commissioner of oaths and someone in the line next to me was “attending” an online lecture in the same fashion. Absent but marked present, while her AI meeting note taker actually paid attention to her schooling. Back in the salon, the pointed look led to a minor volume adjustment, at which point my eye caught a familiar emblem flashing in the top right of the screen, the unmistakable shades of green and gold in our parliamentary coat of arms.

The next speaker then shared their screen and the presentation that popped up confirmed that this was a committee meeting. One happening just two weeks after parliament opened for the year, mind you, but some people were already attending nail appointments during meetings. The Excel spreadsheet was proving quite the snoozefest, and my multitasking neighbour decided this was a good time to hop on a quick phone call. So now we had the meeting on, a phone call on the go and all illusion of the calm and tranquillity promised on the walls gone.

I minded less about the noise and more about the brazen dereliction of duty on display. This meeting surely wasn’t a surprise, and if it was, a sane individual would make a plan to schedule around it. No? Am I the insane one here? Additionally, when one is working on things as important as public policy or matters surrounding the public purse, halfhearted attendance seems not only negligent but dangerous. And sure, we live in a time when maybe we do meet more often than we should and perhaps the conversation on the agenda has been parsed in several different ways, setting in fatigue, but nor maan. Taking a meeting in a nail salon is nuts. Let’s put your job on ice for a second, what about the other people in your company? Why should we be subjected to attending the meeting by virtue of being within earshot of it? And yes, we have all tapped out of such meetings with a “nothing from my side” or a simple 👍🏾 in the chat, but fully doing personal maintenance on a work call is a step too far. Well, that’s what I think anyway.