When I worked in Dundee, in the nineteen-nineties, two of my colleagues’ wives separately told me that I and her husband were the two most sarcastic persons that she knew. Clearly neither of these wives were disposed to appreciate the advanced sense of irony that we three possessed.
From time to time, several other people also wanted to know if there was a way to stop me being sarcastic.
Hm…
On the first of January 1984, Nigeria woke up to discover that the military were now in charge. In my state, Gongola, we heard that the state governor, an army colonel, had walked into the headquarters of the Department of Education, accused the staff there of being lazy, took away their electric fans, and made them do bunny hops in the courtyard. Some of those senior staff were fifty-year old men.
In another reported incident, he turned up at a school to perform an inspection and was annoyed when the children in the class did not stand to greet him. (In northern states, like Gongola, children would not greet an older person until the older person initiated the exchange; the governor was from a southern state.)
All this was running through my mind, when, one day shortly after the coup, I glance out of my trigonometry class, and saw the colonel approaching with a corporal. The corporal entered, checked out the classroom, signalled to the colonel that it was OK to enter, then took up a position at the front right of the class, his Kalashnikov held in the ready position.
As soon as the colonel entered, I yelled “Class rise!”.
They did so: I next yelled: “Class: greet the colonel”.
They chorused, “Good morning, colonel!”.
The colonel replied, “Good morning!”.
I asked, “May I sit the class down, sir?”.
He said yes: the pupils sat down and the colonel turned to me.
“Who are you?”, he asked.
“Patterson, sir.”, I replied.
“What are you doing here?”
“I am a teacher, sir.”
“What are you teaching?”
I looked behind him at the blackboard. The lesson title, in three-inch high chalk letters was “Trigonometry 1.2”; there were three right-angled triangles; the SOH, CAH TOA definitions were prominent at the bottom right of the blackboard.
I first thought of replying, “Mediaeval history”, then I caught sight, once more, of the bodyguard’s Kalashnikov.
“Mathematics, sir”.
He nodded and left as abruptly as he had arrived.
So there you have it: if you want me to stop being sarcastic, try an AK47: it has been field-tested.