Meet a notorious procrastinator — especially when there is past trauma involved.
Today, I am in the government’s Formula 1 queue — the SA Receiver of Revenue’s office in Chiselhurst, KuGompo.
“We are shining seats for Sars!” quips my neighbour, who speaks Xhosa and English and swears in Afrikaans — “I just want to v.. of out of here!”
I am in complete disagreement. Can she not see we are in the premier lounge of state queues?
Does she not see the cognitive wonder of savouring the moment?
I am struck by the realisation that I am an expert on this topic.
After 66 years of institutional-punctuated and punctured life, I can intuitively grade these lines — this one is five star, best of the best.
I have been yelled at, shoulder charged, had my head shorn, been left to wait all day and had the door slammed on me, the last kiepie waiting for a licence disc.
A dark standout: in the queue to be “processed” by the Security Branch.
It is 1986 in then-Port Elizabeth hours after the second “state of emergency” was declared.
There are one or three whities in the long line of dishevelled, bloodied, frightened and steely-eyed Africans.
The branch yelled, and cajoled, taking cruel pleasure in abusing my PE News Agency journo colleague, Mbulelo Linda, telling him to “take pictures” and me dumbly and loudly shouting he did not have to.
Clever move: now I was viewed by everyone as the “more-privileged” detainee shouting my mouth off, or worse, a branch plant (common strategy back then), while in truth all of us had no rights.
Now Sars and I are not well acquainted. In fact, the “Reliever” as my friend chirps, actually killed me off.
Well, they destroyed my tax number sometime after I became a pitiful insolvent in 2012.
Apparently, it’s the law. And yet, I have been paying a lot of tax since then, and never claiming or submitting annual personal income tax forms believing the penniless hack I am, I was under the threshold.
But the day had come — more on this below — to heft social responsibilities and get hooked up again — or else there would be no way to access my similarly pitiful pension.
And, of course, my children were telling me to stop with the anti-corruption personal protest, to acknowledge the ADHD plus the genetically imprinted ancestral belligerence— and make good with the receiver dad!
The queue started in the Sars basement — along with lots of banners, posters, video, steel seats and a most efficient man, resplendent in day-glo emergency vest, working the row.
He had everyone, even the digital Luddites, get their phones out and told everyone how to get dialed in online.
Unfortunately, when you are dead, Sars does not recognise you, your ghost or soul. So there was no online dating.
This was about to change.
I was given a smart little card, and sent through the security gates upstairs.
Never, and never again have I seen in any government queue party balloons billowing off the bannisters, with, a huge “Welcome!” sign and then a cheerful (gleeful?) “Filing season”.
Into this vast foyer we streamed, the floors so shiny and the Sars staff so hip in their navy bunny jackets, scarf-tie thingies, and seriously hip glasses. Everyone is in the navy here.
The seating was super-silver and air-drilled, brushed steel-sprung backrests and we moved like race cars from the starting grid.
All 67 of us were indeed polishing the silverware with our derrières, and who would complain about that?
Now we have smart-printed speech cards with a number and every few minutes the ethereal voice of a man with an American accent calls out a number on the public address system … and this next bit is unbelievable, as they say on Insta.
Consider my swim friend this morning who regales us with how she went to the Post Office in town recently and entered two large halls — all empty and echoing.
She approaches a row of counters where one lone official sits.
After much muffling and scuffling in the background, my friend was told that the parcel she kept on being called about was not actually hers. Mystery.
Today, before me are 12 or so cubicles and behind nine or 10 of the semi-perspex lives a smart human. Everyone is at work. And working.
I got such lakka service given the sorry state of my tax affairs, and within minutes had the initial problem sorted out with a new tax number, letters to my employee to redo the certificates and a walk-in appointment for next month along with online advice on how to upload my necessary documents.
My Sars official, Ms Siphokazi Felapi, WSU commerce graduate from a village outside Komani, takes a bow.
She said, “You now have a new tax number — and a new life.”
She could not have known what that meant to me and my loved ones.
That night, a cheer went up from sis, the daughters, and a few other loved ones, especially after I sent them an AI-doctored image with my new tax number tattooed prison-style on my forehead.
I am on a long road, and much missioning lies ahead, but Sars appears willing to sort it out in a weird sort of partnership.
Disclosure: I did not get there entirely on my own volition.
Nope, I had a mentor who sweetly whipped my butt into line.
Steve Keet and I met at Reef Cafe, he told me his story, I told him mine.
Sitting in the cold westerly wind, the conversation was hot.
I have worked with him on some awesome Kidd’s Beach stories — he was the leader of the ratepayers and residents’ association, I have seen him do the 1,500km Grandads’ Army north-south ride.
But this new direction was unusual.
He is no longer in a leading role — he is looking out of a “new window”.
“A venture that helps people navigate life’s transitions, its crossroads moments, through conversation.”
This is a guy with a forestry degree, the better part of a decade at Shell South Africa, first investing in a forestry division, then unwinding it — and years more across strategic roles in other parts of Shell.
Then out on his own, as an independent economic development consultant, doing strategic and business plan facilitation for organisations that needed exactly that.
His life was about “understanding complex systems and structuring goal-oriented implementation plans”.
Turns out that’s a transferable skill.
And now he chooses his worst-ever client — an Orwell-loving, bureaucracy-despising, forever outlier. A hack.
Turns out this is not coaching. It is simply a sharp-edged “disciplined thinking partnership”.
Now that is cool. We don’t have to agree, except when it comes to the tax part, where there can be no disagreement.
My new dirt track faces a large gate: those damn tax returns.
Once I am through that, we can continue “structured, confidential conversations with purpose”. Flow.
The argument: solo thinking can become circling the same square.
“You need somebody else in the room. Not to hand you answers. To keep asking the next question until you can hear your own.”
The journey started backwards — a trip to my subsidised Shady Pines end-of-life home.
I needed to know in rands and cents, what I was in for.
Instead, I almost found myself checking in to check out.
“But you only got onto the list three years ago, you still have seven to go!” a very kind lady told me.
No, I am just doing the numbers, I reassure her.
And then I visited the Reliever. I got home with all the above achieved, but I was finished.
Here’s the deal: years of being traumatised in queues, lining up for punishment, had spawned a host of private demons. It is time to blow the lid on Pandora’s box.
I was broaching the first hurdle — clarity, a neutral place to untangle the personal knot.
I had needed perspective, freedom from the buzzing mozzies of worry, round and round, every night.
I needed a trustworthy outsider, an independent mind.
And then “when there is something actually worth building”, a structured plan must be constructed with precise things to do “when you wake up on Monday”.
No vague encouragement here.
It starts from the moment you need it — in my case trying to unlock my pension.
The reasons for the moment are diverse, a career crossroads — stay, shift, step away, and you genuinely don’t know which.
Work pressures start leaking into your health, or your marriage, or the way you are with your own kids, and you’ve noticed, but you’re not yet sure what to do about it.
A new chapter’s arriving whether you’re ready or not, and your old patterns don’t fit it.
Retirement’s raising questions you didn’t see coming — not just what you’ll do with the time, but who you are once the title’s gone.
A major life event has forced a rethink of what actually matters, and the forcing’s happened, but the rethink hasn’t, not yet.
Or — simplest of all — it’s just time to reprioritise something and working that out alone in the shower at 6am isn’t getting anybody anywhere.”
Aisch! You will get here too, kids.
I know I am not the only one.
There are genuinely capable people circling the same runway, waiting for somewhere to put down.
“It’s not a crisis of ability. It’s a crisis of the ground shifting under people who were doing everything right.”
Keet does not sell certainty — he does not try.
He is “somebody disciplined enough to sit in the fog with you long enough that it stops being fog and starts being a shape you can actually navigate around”.
The wind is blowing harder at the Reef and in my life.
The reborn taxpayer I will never be, but the packaging tape around a bad old box of hurts and accusation has been sliced open.
Good s*** is starting to fly.
Keet works out of KuGompo City or online. www.lifetransition.co.za.
Daily Dispatch
