Miss. Peace Resigns in a warlike manner
Popularly, Names have strange powers and do not fail to reflect their meanings on their bearers. Not a single beaver of Happiness I had crossed her path, who was not consistently enveloped in happiness. As for those who had a “Peace” First Name or Middle Name, they usually stuck to a habit of scrambling for the nearest Negotiating Table for red-eyed disputants and sworn enemies. Indeed, just The Olive Branch is what bearers of Peace continue to see, hear, smell, taste, touch and sense throughout their life time!
Yet picture, on the other hand, an Ulcer-Embattled Miss or Mrs. Peace, who urgently needs the money she had worked for for the purchase of food and drugs! Wouldn’t she speedily drop polite manners while addressing her Heartless Boss on the subject? In short, declare war? I mean, we all know that ulcer patients are the worse for it, when there are no pellets of food in their tummies. With a lost patience their tummies wrangle, rumble, rave, whine, snarl and from time to time embark on full-scale riot!
Well, for five years already, A Chief, Tiller Miller had a Miss Peace Patrick as his sales-woman in his Grocery Dealership. The business Miller Found enough reason to float in Nigeria’s Port Harcourt. The Fifty-Five-Year-Old Chief had always loved to control money in a quiet style but officially would noise it that the Grocery Enterprise was singularly intended to address the plural food need the teeming residents of The Garden City -for those who thought Port Harcourt is one. Miss Peace, when she started with Chief Miller resolved that she would keep treating her job like those of The Civil Service she had so much doted upon.
“No delivery of crap! And God knows “No meanness, either!”
Then, Chief Miller was wonderfully discharging his own obligations to Miss Peace, promptly pushing into the palms of Peace her monthly salary. Also, he would release her A Half-Thousand for her lunch and on alternate days humor her with a half-dozen fruits from his choicest in The Tiller Miller Grocery.
Expectedly, for five straight years, there was neither in Chief Tiller Miller’s Grocery Enterprise a Miss Peace Sufferer of Bleeding Gums nor, for that matter, Casualty of the Scurvy Plague from a deficiency in Vitamin C.
Reciprocally, Miss Peace, close to Thirty, always chose for Miller a language that was at once graceful, responsible, secretarial, musical and even honey-sweet…
“Excuse me Sir… It’s your call… Do I tell the fellow to hold on or ask him to call back later?
Routinely, words that portrayed her knowledge of the civility appropriate for A Sales-Woman. Even, Peace was finding time to enquire from Miller, whenever it was 10:00am whether she might or might not fix him his cup of coffee, her voice winsomely polite. Equally, Miss Peace knew how to excite Miller with predictions of a surging crowd of customers in his shop before the end of a day...
“So please, Sir, be advised to order new stocks of our products no longer on the counter or our teeming customers shall start embarrassing us with demands for rolls of this and cartons of that!”
Only God knows why people do not quite relish keeping up with A Clean Practice or The Healthy. Just God, not We, Bloody Dissembling Souls!
In their sixth year as Employer-Employee, Miller had ill-advisedly begun to dip his hand in the wages and fringe benefits of his workers, Miss Peace not excluded, for a continual financing of his New Councillorship Political Dream. Just like that, Miss Peace Phillips free lunches and half-a-dozen fruits on alternate days ceased to be the case, dramatically becoming a fiction. Tiller Miller had felt comfortable to stop his grants of a free lunch to Miss Peace because, in his opinion, a decision to withdraw a gesture of goodwill should not normally elicit ill-feeling from its previous recipients.
Soon, with the same mindset, Miller decided to hit, too, his allowance of a half-dozen fruits to Miss Peace but for this seemingly casual decision, gave her already contorting face a reason to fully describe A Full Masquerade!
“But… But this guy knows I’m alone: no supportive hand,” Miss Peace let out from her lips barely moving in her wonderment… Her eyes she trained with indulgence on the shelved tomatoes and seasonings in Miller’s roomy store, as though she were waiting for either their honest confirmation or contradiction of what she had said. Although, Miss Peace Philip had not for once voiced it, with her new growing exasperation with her boss and her office, she was sure then that what she had been receiving from Tiller Miller at the end of every month was No Salary at all.
“Even, A bit of A Stupid Salary!” Peace braved, pulling out all the stops, “Unless Twenty Thousand Naira isn’t a little stupid as the Monthly Take-Home for A Woman of Thirty also fending for her two younger siblings”.
No doubt, if Miller had thought to once ponder The Ugly Masquerade Thing he had begun to glimpse on Miss Philip Face, he would not have dared his decided one-month delay of her salary, let alone owe her for three consecutive months! It was what had climaxed matters and Miss Peace was ready to leave the job in a war-like manner…
“Hey! Mr. Miller, “She bawled out one Monday Morning “Or is it Chief Tiller Miller?” she carelessly asked, giving no break, utterly enjoying a Transfixed-With-Shock Tiller Miller… “For finally choosing to be unfeeling, see you - Ruffian! - when you’ve at last clinched your Councillorship Ticket…”
A Satisfied Miss Peace almost as soon started to assemble her things beginning with her handbag, with a view to storming out of the hell hole!
Recently very tactless, Chief Tiller Miller dared to ask Miss Peace whether what he had just seen was the same as her resignation letter and if so, whether it was A Very Polite One to pen down after six years with him…
”You! This man, This Thief! I now know you’ve mapped a secret programmed for owing me up to a full year…”
Hasten her departure Miss Peace had to and this achieved like from An Unsafe Battlefield…
A bit of A Big Embarrassment for Chief Tiller Miller lately denying a dedicated staff access to both her salary and sweeteners.
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