21/04/2022
10025 times read
21/04/2022
10025 times read
While browsing through National Geography Magazine in 1964, I came across a questionable photograph of an elderly German worker operating a gigantic machine, and beside it a wooden table with boxes wrapped in gift paper and ribbons.
The comment under the picture indicated that that day was the last for that worker, after forty years of work in the factory, and that his colleagues asked him to stop working during the lunch break so that they could celebrate his farewell, but he refused their request, and said that the lunch break is for his rest and that his time after that is for the factory, and if they wanted to celebrate with him, they had to wait for him until the end of working hours.
The colleagues were impressed by his sincere and strict attitude and decided to respect his desire, and wait for him according to his desire to respect the work, even after forty years of service. This is the correct application of morals, and not what we see here.
As soon as a manager or official in a factory, an authority or a university takes over, mired in backwardness and chaos, we find that he devotes entire working days to receive congratulations and he hardly knows the names of his office staff and the way to it, instead of postponing the celebrations until his institution is recovered from the low gendarmerie in which he found it.
I don’t know why the director is so keen on people who don’t know to come to the university to congratulate him?
The new official acceptance of congratulations on assuming the position has never been known in the university but it has now become a precedent and will develop with time and become a custom, and the epidemic of courtesy will spread and take root in an educational institution that teaches good morals, or so it is assumed, and this strange thing may spread in the majority of state departments and ministries.
A friend says, justifying what the university director did, that employees, in any party, often out of hypocrisy will go to congratulate the official and waste their time and his time and therefore it is better to specify an hour or a specific day to accept the congratulations.
My friend’s words may seem convincing to some, but the issue is not in the timing of the congratulations but rather in the custom itself, and the necessity of stopping it completely and by a decision of the Council of Ministers, as it is a defunct clan behavior, and it should not prevail.
We also find another phenomenon that requires a decision to stop it, and it relates to that small army of senior state officials who are present at the airport to bid farewell or receive an official, who may have gone to a neighboring country for a period of two days or less, sometimes.
Note: The state is going through a political crisis, and the Ministry is resigning, and there is confusion on the horizon and a legislative stalemate, yet there are those who strongly demand the convening of an urgent, unique and single session of Parliament in order to approve a grant, or a semi-acquisition and waste of pension fund to pay them to retirees and save the lives of the hungry.
I do not know why the hopes, aspirations and priorities of this nation have become so shameful ?
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By Ahmad alsarraf