What can I say about the beauty, grandeur and unpredictability of the sea that has not already been said? But this little story only has to do with the sea, and the fact that it was the sea that took me, more than 50 years ago, to an oil refinery on the Congo River.
We were unloading crude oil and our captain invited the director and some refinery technicians to lunch. They had quite a few employees who lived nearby in small towns. I say quite a few because absences from work were the order of the day. Many of them, after receiving their weekly pay, did not show up again until they ran out of money.
Among these employees, one man named Abu stood out for his intelligence and good work. But the refinery had a problem with Abu, because his morning start time was very irregular. So the director called him one day and said, “Abu, I’m going to give you a present.” He gave him an alarm clock. He explained how it worked and reasoned with him why it was better to wake up at a fixed time in the morning so that he would have time to get to work on time.
Abu left that day, whether or not he was convinced by what was proposed to him, it is not known, but for several days in a row Abu arrived punctually in the morning. The director congratulated himself on the success of his idea. But one day everything changed: Abu showed up at the director's office and handed back the alarm clock. The director, astonished, asked him: "What's wrong, doesn't it work? Don't you like it?" And Abu replied: "Yes, it's nice and works well, but it wakes me up when I'm still sleepy." Abu was undoubtedly a happy man.