While yanking little Caesar out of her uterus, this man's mind was on other matters

So I dial a medical doctor friend's number the other day and start gossiping about someone we both know when he stops me mid-sentence. The tone of his voice betrays obvious excitement. He can't wait to hear the rest of my story but, "Lemme call you in about half an hour, I'm performing a Caesarean in a minute." And, sure enough, he returns my call exactly 37 minutes later, salivating like a rabid Doberman at the prospect of juicy scandal.

This little interaction worried me immensely. I would not want to be that hapless woman on an operating table. When this woman's abdominal cavity was being carved open to yank little Caesar out of her uterus, this man's mind was clearly on much more important matters, such as whose wife was nabbed diddling the pool guy. Inasmuch as I enjoy the company of my doctor friends, I wish I didn't socialise with them. They have destroyed the little faith I had in the Hippocratic bunch.

Here's my thing. I was born with a major personality defect in that I spend a lot of time worrying about things that don't faze normal people. During the World Cup game between Brazil and Portugal at Moses Mabhida, my son finally asked me why I kept looking up at the sky. I mumbled something inaudible. Of the 60000-odd people at the game, I was probably the only individual who would not have been surprised if Comrade Brother Leader El Muammar Gaddafi had chosen the occasion to send his Dassault Mirages to force South Africa into his vision of the United States of Africa. And when I step into an elevator with eight people inside, I worry my weight will be the proverbial straw that sends the metal cage tumbling down 30 storeys.

You're probably wondering why my wife hasn't had me committed to the Sterkfontein facility for people like me. My impressive nocturnal prowess aside, I have gone to great lengths to explain to her why I'm a borderline loony. Take the would-be-mom I referred to in the first paragraph. She was probably lying there enjoying her epidural-induced delirium under the delusion that she was in safe professional hands. But you and I know that a hopeless gossip was probably cutting corners because he couldn't wait to hear the juicy details of suburban moral decay.

This brings me to the point of this otherwise pointless hallucination. For someone in my state of mind, ignorance is often sheer bliss. There are things I just don't want to know. I remember being stuck inside a plane at OR Tambo for over two hours during a freak snowstorm in 2007. Due to my personality disorder, I spend most flights with bullets of sweat rolling down my face. This is because every time I enter an aircraft and the cockpit door is ajar, I stare at the control for about five seconds. It seems like a hell of a lot of buttons to push for one individual, especially if he discovered his wife in the warm embrace of a chlorine professional earlier in the day.

Besides, what if he got his pilot's license on a measly 89% pass? What if the 11% he failed involves insignificant little details such as taking off during snowstorms? But the part that left me hyperventilating during this particular morning three years ago is when I looked outside and saw some Forrest Gump-lookalike standing on the wing shovelling snow off. With a shovel not too dissimilar to the one I have in my garage. It didn't look like there was much scientific method going into the shovelling at all. So I spent the next 55 minutes glancing at that wing every two seconds, wishing I hadn't seen Gump.

I envy most normal people. I've seen them open a can of beverage, take it to their lips and enjoy a healthy swig in one swift swoop. Just my rotten luck, I spent the greater part of a decade pretending to add value in the food manufacturing industry where I was exposed to more than 100 food processing plants. Part of my training involved quality management systems, total productive maintenance and ISO procedures etc. Fancy words for, essentially, "How to not murder people en masse with food." Mostly because killing people with food is easy.

I personally know these highly-trained individuals responsible for the inspection of raw materials, the design of factory layouts, the operators responsible for the processing parameters. Frankly, I wish I didn't know them.

But what's worse is that I was one of the bespectacled geeks in a white laboratory coat who used to watch over the nation's food. I can't think of anything scarier. This thought went through my mind as I opened a can the other day and my hand paused halfway to my mouth. You see, I know someone who is a QC technician at the company that manufactures this particular product. What if this very can was manufactured on the morning we had crawled out of a pub together at 3am? I couldn't go through with it.