The Ellen Diaries

Ellen is the highly inefficient secretary-cum-personal assistant of a weak-minded self-employed friend of mine based in Kampala. My Friend has known of her inefficiency from the day she submitted her job application, giving one a hint of how weak his mind is. Concrete proof that my Friend’s brain has been adversely affected by the dust of Kampala is the fact that he has kept Ellen in employment for a year and a half now, in spite of incidents such as the below. His excuse, though, is that he only needs Ellen to run basic ‘one+plus+one=equals two” errands, and nothing more. “I can’t even issue her with more than one instruction at a time,” he says, “but that’s okay, because I have a system.” To illustrate his point, he recounted the story of the week – and yet a typical, everyday occurrence for him: Having sent Ellen out to run some errands, Friend went on his routine client visits, hoping to collect payments where possible and tout for new business. A couple of hours into the day, Friend had collected a couple of cheques and needed to find Ellen so she could go and do the banking. Thanking God for the expediency of mobile telephones, he rang her up. “Ellen,” he said, speaking slowly and deliberately as he has learnt to do when dealing with her over the phone, “Where. Are. You? I. Need. To. Give. You. Something. Now. So. I. Need. To. Find. You. Where. You. Are. So: Where. Are. You?” (Obviously, reader, this approach costs one more in airtime, but Friend is resigned to this business cost.) On the other end of the phone, Ellen gave the question some quick consideration, perhaps looked around her environs, and replied with an accuracy level that must have drawn a flush of self-pride within herself at having come up with such a correct answer: “I am in town.” Friend, over the last year and a half, had expected this and was not at all as flustered as I would have been by now were I at his end of the phone. “Okay. [insert short pause] Now, I. Need. To. Find. You. And. Give. You. Something. Now. [insert short pause here as well]. Where. In. Town. Are. You?” Ellen, no doubt looking around her to confirm her location as precisely as possible, responded with: “I am at the Shell.” Friend hung up. Not that he was giving up on her, he explained to me. “At this point, I normally have to hang up so she can take a few minutes to think about what is going on. I think she probably thinks there is a network problem or my battery is low. And I make sure I don’t wait too long otherwise she might totally forget the conversation, so I called back after about a minute.” “Ellen. I. Need. To. Find. You. At. Which. Shell. Are. You?” To which Ellen replied, demonstrating that she had indeed used the one-minute pause to think hard about what was going on and find her bearings: “Actually, it’s not a Shell. It’s a Caltex.” Friend hung up again. This time, I figured (he didn’t tell me, I just worked it out) it was Friend who used the one-minute interlude of silence to do some thinking and came up with the sentence he should have used right at the start: “Ellen, go to Crane Bank and wait for me there.”