The Cab Driver

It was another good Friday, of cause you known that why it is called that is because it was the day that our Lord gave himself up as an offering that we might have life, well it was another day as such - a remembrance of that. I had a flight to catch and that meant I needed a cab to take me to the airport.

Coming out of my place to the main road I found out that massive traffic had built up. Nothing works wonders like the 'okada' at times like this but the sky was cloudy. Gosh! It was already looking like a day to just stay at home except that work had to be done. So we finally settled on the initial plan - a cab. We found one got in and began the slow drive to the airport.

It didn’t rain after all, just drizzles. However I realise why it all worked out so - we needed to meet with the cab driver. By now, except you are new to this blog, you know that I love to gist. And since I started claiming ‘like to meet people’ as a hobby, I have actually started working on it. And so I started discussion with the driver. Well truth is that he actually initiated the gist - he was surprised to find out i was Yoruba when I got into the cab and spoke the dialect. He said he thought that I was Ibo. He said it was difficult to identify people now without the tribal marks.

I was petrified - tribal marks? In this age? I told him if anyone does that to a child he should be flogged. He said the child wasn’t complaining. I said why don’t they wait a little till he was able to knock them around when they brought the disease infected blade close to his cheek. We had a good laugh then. And moved to the issue of why the traffic.

Why would people not stay in their homes on days like this when it was one for them to rest and enjoy the company of their family? We sited examples of the western world where holidays are taken seriously and folks actually take loans just to go on holidays. That was the trigger for the main thrust of our gist.

The brief story of the driver

I should have just loved to be at home if not for the useless woman that is my wife. She makes the house so un-conducive for me. I decided to leave the house for her. I am a pensioner with two houses and the trouble started when I retired and wanted to move to one of the houses I built. My wife refused to move with me, she said she wasn’t moving to the bush. Looking back now i should have been patient with her. I wouldn’t have found myself in this situation that I am in now.

It was after I left her to move to the new place, one of my houses, that I met and married this then 25 years old woman. That was three years ago. And the experience has not been really good. Just yesterday she said she spent 600 naira on beans for just two people (my thoughts as sheyhun was that it must be a hybrid super nutritious beans - i didnt say that out though. The woman apparently knew how well to swindle the man. *Lips sealed*)

One time we had an argument and she took a bottle and scared her own breast. She said 'that money you don't want to spend on me, you will spend it in the hospital'. The same day she came back from being treated in the hospital she still went ahead to wash my underwear. (Here I was practically rolling my eyes – RME)

She doesn’t go to church with me and if we don't have sex in three days she hints that she would go and get it outside. She doesn’t mind 24 hours of sex, but i can’t do that. I am in my mid-60s. If it was my former wife even if we didn’t have sex in three months it won’t be a problem. Ooo listen to me, your first wife is the best o. Let my experience be you teacher. I have asked her to leave but she wouldn’t. I am so grateful to God that she doesn’t have a child for me, probably I would be dead by now from the demands she would have made.

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Hmmm. I said to him you can’t change her you can only work on yourself. All I could do was encourage him to pray more. Prayers are powerful and effective. He was so profuse in his thanks and I felt so embarrassed.

But that is God's ways he wanted that man blessed, wanted him to know that there is hope to those who are alive and that no matter how trying a situation is, like I said to him (really what was I thinking giving a 60 something year old man advice on marriage) nothing yet has happened to us that is strange to mankind.

It was another ‘good’ Friday and my flight was beautiful

Just Another Parasite!

The day had started on a not too good note - but that is story for another day. This that I am going to talk to you about is just that nasty sort you really only want to hear about.  I am going to leave it to you to be the judge though.

I get to the bank on this said day to pay the over bloated estimated, ‘relieved’ bill of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria; they literally hold on to power and both businesses and households are at their mercy. At the bank I ask an officer if i could get the customized teller for PHCN. He answered “there is no customized teller. You can use the normal teller to pay”.

-          Mess up number 1 --- how can you work in a place and you don’t know what you have and then can’t know to confirm before opening your mouth to release fog from your mind.

I go ahead and filled in the teller. Queued up to pay had a little friction with the cashier because she paid someone on my time. Anyways I was done with that and was almost getting into the car when my phone rang and it was the cashier asking me to come back in.

-          Mess up number 2 --- she had stamped my teller and collected the money of course. But it was a wrong teller and wrong mode of payment. So I had to redo the process of filling the teller all over. Bloody nuisance if you note that I was also filling the teller for my neighbour.

Eventually, I am done. I get in the car and zoom off. I needed to get this sorted out or I would end up blowing money on fuel for the generator. Mad crazy driving and in 20 minutes I was in the zonal office of PHCN. And this is where the real story begins.

I was directed to the officer in charge and the first thing she would ask is an e-receipt. ‘E what’? I asked. Not because I didn’t know what it was but because no one had told me about any e-receipt. I looked at her weirdly and told her she really didn’t expect me to drive through all the traffic way back to where I had paid to get what she was asking for? She said yes. I was most perplexed. This was not only not interesting, it was sounding like a bunch of incompetent people doing business.

Just before I lost it I placed a call to one of the few responsible officers of that parastatal that I had come across. She was the one who had given me all the info I needed to ensure that the process was a smooth one. She picked on the third ring and I explained my predicament to her, handed over the phone to the 'lost' lady and quickly dashed outside to get more call credit - I wasn’t sure of how much of the airtime was left. Anyways by the time I came back it was sorted. She had 'enlightened the lost'.

That done I went ahead to make so many copies as required and went to have them signed, first by the senior manager marketing and the manager revenue. The first signed in about five minutes, the second? Mschwwww. He had gone, I learnt, to pray. I loitered around the office area for a long while.

After waiting and waiting I asked a man and he tried to direct me to the man's office. I told him I knew just where it was and that wasn’t the problem but the man not being around was the problem. He looked at me and said that I should wait a bit that they were just coming back from the ‘prayers’. I told him that I had been waiting for over an hour; he looked at me and told me “you should have come in earlier”. And I am like what the heck? Am I supposed to resume work with them? I had been there over an hour and it was almost 2 pm. So what was this ignoramus talking about? In my mind I was thinking how he would have been without work if the enterprise was a privately held one. I had to rein in my temper at this stage.

It wasn’t long after this that someone who had seen me hanging around directed me to a place where I could have it signed. I got there and the man who was supposed to sign looked at it and declared “I can’t sign this.  You still have to wait for his boss.” Why he didn’t understand the documents I had brought in, documents authorised by their head zonal office, I didn’t understand.  I couldn’t help shaking my head.

I waited another hour before the manager (believe me the word manager is not what’s on my mind) eventually shows up. And guess what he didn’t understand it either. I was directed back to the senior manager marketing who seemed to be the only person in the entire complex who understood anything. The funny thing was he was so sure that he had communicated what had to be done in such cases to this manager who had ‘block-headedly’ not taken anything in and in the same vein passed nothing to his subordinate who was working with him on this type of issue.

So we finished there with the ‘senior’ guy and then back to the manager who promptly delegated his responsibility to his guy who he asked attend to me. The guy, more like a middle aged man though, took me to his office and then realized that he couldn’t sign because the proverbial e-receipt wasn’t included. Gosh I almost lost it there and then. What the ‘*’ was wrong with the bunch of incompetent id***s. I was so red in the face that I could have knocked him flat and feel no qualms at all.

It was in the process of storming off that the woman who had previously attended to me came to my rescue. She saw me furious and wondered why I wasn’t done and gone. I related the story to her and she spoke with the man. He didn’t believe her I guess because up he went again to the ‘senior’ guy upstairs and I went with him. The guy recounted the e-receipt tale and was promptly set on the right course.

By this time it was already past 3pm and government workers have a bad habit of closing before the official time. And the day being a Friday, they took the closing early a notch more seriously. And I needed the documents signed so I could get some credits for energy use over the weekend.

By the time he was done signing and I was done making the endless copies as required and she was done sorting them in preparation for vending, it was about 20 minutes to four. I get to the door where I would do the vending and lo and behold it was locked. They were closed for the day!

I went to the manager's office hoping he would help out since it was him that actually helped to waste my time. Albeit he couldn’t. He sat there with a tooth pick in his mouth perusing the day's paper.

Dejected and full of deep resentment I left the place hoping that eventually I would be rid of all of their problems. I finally did - 5 days after my encounter with their royal punk asses.