What am I going to say about the beauty, grandeur and how unpredictable the sea can be that hasn't already been said. But this little story has only to do with the sea, the fact that it was the sea that took me, more than 50 years ago, to an oil refinery located on the Congo River.
We were unloading crude oil and our captain invited the director and some technicians from the refinery to eat. They had quite a few employees who lived nearby, in small towns. And I say quite a few because absences from work were the order of the day. Many of them, after collecting the week, did not appear there again until they ran out of money.
Among these employees, an individual named Abu stood out for his intelligence and good work. But the refinery had a problem with Abu, which is that his morning start times were very irregular. So the director called him one day and said: "Grandma, I'm going to give you a present." And gave him an alarm clock. She explained how it worked and reasoned with him why it was better to wake up at a set time in the morning so that she would have time to get to work on time.
Abu left that day, it is not known if he was convinced or not about what was being asked of him, 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 returned the alarm clock. The director, astonished, asked him: “What is it, it doesn't work? You do not like?". And Abu replied: "Yes, it's nice and it works well, but it wakes me up when I'm still sleepy." Abu was certainly a happy man.