Sunday 8 December 2013

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Ramotswe has a reason to worry: a rival detective agency is set up in town. A younger apprentice of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni finds the Lord. In the meantime, Mma Makutsi opens her phenomenally successful Typing School for Men — so successful, she almost gets a boyfriend.

That afternoon, when Mma Makutsi had been dispatched to the births, deaths, and marriages registry to pursue some routine enquiries on behalf of a client, Mma Ramotswe was visited, unannounced, by a woman whose view of the Satisfaction Guaranteed Agency and its boastful proprietor was quite the opposite of the view held by the apprentice. She arrived in a smart new car, which she parked directly outside the agency door, and waited politely for Mma Ramotswe to acknowledge her presence before she entered the office. This always pleased Mma Ramotswe; she could not abide the modern habit of entering a room before being asked to do so, or, even worse, the assumption that some people made that they could come into your office uninvited and actually sit on your desk while they spoke. If that happened to her, she would refrain from speaking at all but would look pointedly at the bottom planted upon her desk until her disapproval registered and it was removed.

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