Recently, a friend shared some happy news with me. Since she opened her fashion design outlet, she has never had an apprentice. To those in the business around here, having an apprentice is more like a level of success. As in, the number of apprentices one has trained is directly proportional to the level of credibility one has.
When those in the business discuss or argue, they easily throw around the number of apprentices they've trained to mark their space and show authority. So you can imagine how happy my friend was when she finally had an apprentice. All this while she had been restless and feeling like a failure for not having one.
So, as we discussed about her ward, I suddenly find myself advising her. It wasn't intentional but it was necessary because of what I have seen some bosses do to their apprentices. When my friend was an apprentice, I witnessed firsthand the level of wickedness she had to endure from her boss. There was a time she was five minutes late to work, and her boss told her to go buy kerosene and use it to wash the gutters in front of her shop. I mean, what does anyone benefit from using kerosene to wash a gutter? But then, that's one of the wickednesses she had to cope with as an apprentice.
Funnily enough, when these bosses mete out terrible punishments disguised as correction, they'd tell the apprentice to count himself or herself lucky because they had it worse when they were apprentices. I have seen a boss bring her apprentice home, make her do her family's dirty laundry from morning till evening, and still punish her harshly for coming late the next morning despite the apprentice's pleas that she was very tired due to the intensity of the previous day's labour. The boss' argument? "When I was an apprentice, I dey wash my oga's clothes, clean her house, trek for over 1 hour to my home and dey no born me well make I resume late for work the next day. She go nearly kill me." My thought was that, "So your oga doing all those horrible things is your excuse for doing it abi? Must we transfer pain and suffering?"
The circle of pain is a big part of our society. Go to the neighbourhood and you'd see how people justify inflicting pain. Even in higher institutions, lecturers will come to class twice in a semester, send handouts and set practical exams on courses they taught abstractly. During the CHM 501 exam, one of the questions was for me to explain how to operate an Atomic Absorption Spectroscopic machine. For Christ's sake, the lecture didn't show us that machine, not to mention explaining how to operate it. The damn machine was laying waste in the research lab, but the dude was too busy to take us. He threw us a handout and expected us to lap it in like dogs. When we complained, he told us we were lucky he at least showed up in class twice and that when he was taught at the university, his lecturer never showed up at all.
See, parents even transfer pain to offspring and justify it. Some never-do-wells would beat their 7-year-old child for three straight days because he or she wet the bed. Tell them to have mercy on the poor child, and they'd fire back by saying their mama beat them for seven straight days when they wet the bed at the age of five. So, their 7-year-old child should be grateful they'll stop the punishment on the third day
In the end, using one's past pain to justify inflicting the same pain on another is callousness, and one should be held responsible for it. As my friend celebrated having an apprentice, I reminded her to be a responsible teacher and boss. Transferring pain is wickedness; it is a dangerous symptom of a deep-lying psychological problem.
