I wasn’t angry – I was outraged! Now you do realize that the latter is a highly graduated form of the former, don’t you? Well, my definition.

It was one of those days where the weather was dry coupled with the fact that the office has no window, so it depended on an air-conditioner throughout. This was a terrible combination of situations particularly when deadlines had to be met too. Instances like these usually aren’t harbingers of hunger for me, and eventually when it came at about 3.00 pm it did so with some mighty oomph – the ‘get-up-and-go’ kind.

My part of the report we were working on wasn’t even half completed, and there was no way I could follow that urge to get up and go. So I asked a colleague to get me some sumptuous jollof rice with some ‘mayonnaised’ vegetables, noodles, some plantain and mutton to go with (I am an archetypal Fanti, can you blame me?) because he was on his lunch break. On this particular day, he stayed unusually late and the animals in my tummy had begun jumping by the time he returned about an hour later. As you can imagine, I stopped everything I was doing, and whistled my way to the kitchen. I couldn’t believe he showed no seriousness or remorse when I told him there was no meat on the food. I registered my displeasure and told him I couldn’t eat without meat or fish. Yes, I actually can’t. It has nothing to do with the fact that I’m haughty, but that my sweet octogenarian grandmother who is late advised me to always have some ‘protein’ on the ‘carbohydrates’ when I was younger. Although I’d grown to realize that protein doesn’t necessarily have to come from animals, this has become a part of me. I’m working on it though, but in the mean time, ‘it is what it is’ (in Stay Jay’s voice).

He kept laughing and hissing about it for some time, and I was growing angry with each hiss, or was it the animals jumping higher after each round of laughter or maybe a combination of both? So in my infuriation, I stormed out of the kitchen not to go get meat for the food, but a totally different delicacy. I couldn’t get what I wanted as the vendors had closed save for jollof. I bought it albeit not as ‘sokyiii’ as what my colleague got for me earlier. I met another colleague on my way up the stairs and narrated what had happened to him. He also expressed surprise at my decision to buy the whole food again, rather than meat. But that didn’t stop him from deciding to munch on the one I left in the kitchen because he’s not a ‘meat-eater’.

About 10 minutes into devouring the food, my colleague started laughing again, and asked me to take a look at something he pointed. I was stunned when I discovered there was actually meat in the food buried deep down the polystyrene pack full of jollof rice. Then another colleague muttered something that’d bothered me since then – “Oh Pakay! You didn’t exercise that remarkable patience virtue you enviously possess in this situation at all!”

Anger is a perfectly normal thing for all humans. We all feel it at some point or another. But how we exhibit it is what makes the difference. Several people wallowing in our penitentiaries got there as a result of failing to exercise restraint when they had every reason to do otherwise. People have lost the love of their lives as a result of anger. Some have killed out of anger because they felt cheated in some business deal, and are currently reeling under mighty guilt. Some innocent mortals have been maimed for life by words spoken out of anger. In my very young life on earth, I’ve come to realize that patience is a virtue, and anger a terrible disaster.    

In my case, I lost some few cedis I could have saved towards my marriage. You do not know what you may lose when you flare up. You never know who is watching. I prescribe James 1:5… “If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking”…for anyone with a short fuse.    

The writer is with the finance department of Multimedia Group Limited, and can be contacted at pkbwilliams@yahoo.co.uk  . Click here for other articles he’s authored.