Thursday, June 25, 2009

Printer’s Devil (Intermission)

Contrary to a certain impression, no I am not dead. Serious…

Kai! Which kain face can I use to look at you people again? Before you sharpen your pitchforks abeg, I MUST apologize for the extremely elongated absence on this particular blog. Trust me, it was the devil’s handwork. Poor devil. Ok, frankly the devil didn’t have much to do with it. Here’s why.

First of all, I admit I was deceased literature-wise but that’s not what I am talking about. I resigned from S.L.A.V.E. Inc waaaay back months ago and after imagining flinging my resignation letter in Mr. Heem’s face - with a certain glee I might add - I walked out of his office only for the economy to throw a Global Recession straight in my face the very next day. My guess? Mr. Heem is most likely the one sniggering now.

There’s nothing funny about being financially dead. Not at all. I mean, how can I write a funny story on a hungry tummy? In all honesty I haven’t had to actually go hungry (GOD be praised!) but you get the drift? I’m always worrying where my next buck is going to come from that that the idea of coming here to make y’all laugh by gisting of employment while I still remaining unemployed is…

In short, you get the drift.

In actual truth, I was shocked with the favourable responses on the last post so much so I have been scared typing, re-typing and scrapping the sequel several times because I was afraid it wasn’t as good as the prequel. Sincerely, I’m hoping lightening strikes twice this time…

If this was an award acceptance speech of sorts, I would at this point give a special shout-out to a group of six fine young women who go by the collective name, Dame Halos. When I thought no-one would recall the presence of this blog and I could safely nuke it into oblivion, you had to go and drop a comment abi? Thanks for giving me the abbreviated wake-up call.

Meanwhile I am still trudging the streets of Lagos. I relocated here because like Alali in Basi & Company, I hear the streets of Lagos are paved in gold. Alali never found them but I am not as unlucky or ill-equipped as he was. I have an old diary map of Lagos and as if that isn’t enough, NOKIA and Garmap are launching mobile maps for Nigeria. So you see, I will find them.

As you must have guessed by now, I am freestyling on this post, making it up as I go. Pardon the silence and the drivel. I am back. For those who expressed concern, thank you. For those still interested in finding out how I handled Aunty, your request will be answered in exactly I-don't-know-how-many days' time.

Now to go find those streets of gold I talked of a little earlier. I just have to look somewhere around Ozumba Mbadiwe, I think…

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Chapter 2: Adventures With Aunty

The interview was coming to an end. Mr. Heem (my boss) looked up and asked me one last question. "How do you like traveling?"
I replied, "Like it says on my CV sir, traveling is one of my hobbies..."

Drama In Real-Life

When my few friends seek my advice concerning matters of the heart, I usually don’t tell them to pray about it. No, I do not doubt the veracity of prayer. I of all people should know that prayers do work.

The problem you see is not the efficacy of prayer but the fact that like I always tell them, God does have a very good sense of humour. And I should know. He is my Father.

In the course of my job, I have done my fair share of traveling, transversing the country from one hospital to another. Whenever I get into a bus or any other means for transportation for a very long journey, I usually say a short prayer for journey mercies and a particularly long one for the person who will eventually sit besides me. It is very necessary because I happen to detest being yoked with a totally unpleasant character as a fellow seatmate for the travel span of more than 2 hours.

My prayer always goes something like this:

Dear Lord, please may a very beautiful, totally un-shy, bootylicious, appropriately-aged young lady of very sound intellect and great sense of humour who will engage me in very brilliant, varied and entertaining discourse be my seatmate for the duration of this journey. Amen!

But my Father like I said, always has the last laugh.

Only once has this request been ever granted and even though Nike wasn’t particularly beautiful or bootylicious, she fulfilled all the other above requirements perfectly. It was too good to be true! My heart was already dancing a rhumba to Ron Kenolly’s “Jesus is the Winner Mon” by the time Nike asked me for my phone number as we alighted and I was too overjoyed to think it odd when she refused to give me hers.

The very next day, MTN knocked my number off their network and even their Engineers can’t fathom till today why they can’t recover it for me anymore. After yet another failed attempt to recover the line, I looked up to the skies in exasperation and heard a celestial “Ha ha”.

Anyone who makes the journey from Bida to Osogbo knows that you might have to first stop at Ilorin and switch vehicles. Thus on this particular trip was I burdened to say the same prayer twice. My seatmate who shared the front seat with me from Bida to Ilorin was a man who was very determined that I share every eating experience with him. No, he didn’t offer me anything but he did make sure that a portion of the egg-roll, biscuits, egg, Viju Milk, egg (again!) and pure water that he drank somehow found a way to stain my shirt.

Ilorin to Osogbo was bound to be a far better experience and my Daddy didn’t disappoint. Seated next to me in the bus was a fat Yoruba woman (emphasis on woman, not young lady) of multiple complexions on her hands, neck and face. Luckily, she didn’t smell and seemed to keep herself within her seating space meaning she was “self-contained” and I wouldn’t be buffeted into suffocation by her mammoth upper arms or similarly-proportioned bust.

Thanking God for the respite I closed my eyes and settled down to relax and enjoy the journey only to be jolted awake by “Aunty” rummaging in her handbag. “Oh no!” I thought. “Not one of these drug sellers, surely?”

“Take it easy, my son” I heard the heavenly voice say. “You know I don’t hate you that much, don’t you?”

Comforted I turned to look as Aunty narrated to anyone who cared to listen (which was everyone in the bus by the way) how her shop “purson” had stolen her earnings and her handbag and run away. She had just only recovered the said handbag from the Police Station where the robber was cooling his or her heels off (she kept mixing up he and she so I couldn’t figure out the “purson’s” gender). Aunty then proceeded to show us her torn savings book with several leaves missing where purson had tried to withdraw her money from the bank and her two stolen now-recovered cellphones none of which cost over N3500 in my opinion.

Fully caught up in the heat of the story by now, she then pulled out two battered textbooks to prove that she had even been helping purson by sending him/her to school and yet the ungrateful wretch had been siphoning funds from her CBN. I caught a peek of one of the books she was waving in the air like a truce flag. The title read “Community Health”.

After all the hmmms and haaaaaaas had accompanied the story and Aunty had put back her recovered belongings in the Dolce & Cabana (sic) handbag I closed my eyes and settled back to my reverie. “Thank you, Father” I mouthed.

Aunty was quick to pounce. “You talk to me?”

“No” I muttered still with my eyes closed.

Ten minutes later and the only sound in the bus was the noise of the excessively loud engine and the protesting shock-absorbers as we hit the potholes in the road. Another five minutes later and Aunty was rummaging again, only this time it wasn’t in her handbag but on my shoulder! Groaning very loudly and giving her the full blare of my weary stare (if there was such a thing) I sat up again to see a half-eaten banana poked a few centimeters from my mouth.

“I don’t like banana” Aunty said as her colossal jaws chomped on the other half in her mouth. (Poor banana).

Wearily I said, “So why the heck are you eating it then?”

But Aunty repeated the same statement: “I don’t like banana”.

I looked at her stupidly for a while before it slowly dawned on me that she wasn’t making a statement. She was actually asking a question.

Sitting erect, I turned to face Aunty as the poor half-banana suffered mastication in her mouth which seemed to duplicate the spin-action of a washing machine.

Aunty still poked the other half in my face. “I don’t like banana?”

“No,” I replied, “I don’t like banana” And before she’d be quick to offer me anything else edible or liquid to suck (including her tits for that matter) I added, “I don’t like anything”.

But she wouldn’t let me go so easily. “Why?”

“Because I don’t take anything whenever I travel.” And before she’d ask why again, I decided to let her know. “My tummy gets upset if I eat anything while I’m traveling”.

It was a lie of course. I had just consumed 2 Galas and a bottle of La Casera but Aunty was probably too slow to challenge that. The conversation as far as I was concerned was over and to prove it, I brought out my phone to text my sis. Aunty however wasn’t done with me.

“I like your phone”

“Oh yeah? I like it too.”

“And is Samsung!” she exclaimed. “How mush (much) you buy it?”

“It was a gift.” Case closed. That was the end of it. Or was it?

“Who are you texting?”

“I am texting my sister”. God, this is becoming a bit too much for me oh!

My stereoscopic vision turned mono-scopic all of a sudden as my right field of vision went pitch-black. It didn’t take me long to realize Aunty had leaned over to press one of her Ndi Okereke-type breasts on the right side of my face!

It did take quite a fight to come up for air and I was surprised to see the smile on Aunty’s face as she tried suffocating me yet again so that she could see better what I was typing on the phone. I guess that was when I really lost it.

“PLEASE CAN YOU GIVE ME SOME PRIVACY? I WANT TO SEND A TEXT MESSAGE!”

The two girls sitting behind me who had been watching the unfolding drama burst out in peals of laughter. Aunty’s face suddenly became shrouded by a rain-cloud. It closely matched the sky on a rainy day in May. I couldn’t care less. When I boarded this vehicle and carefully chose my seat I had planned to take a journey to Osogbo and not into the Great Beyond. Besides imagine how the newspapers would have carried my obituary: Man suffocated to death by mammoth breasts!”

I thought my cold treatment would be a put-off for any normal person but she definitely wasn’t normal. She was still looking for a fight. She seemed to reflect for a while as I spied at her face out of the corner of my glasses. She caught me.

“Why you look me like that?” she accused. I denied ASAP. “I wasn’t looking at you”. Her face became cloudier still. I rejoiced.

“You don’t like me,” she declared after another spell of reflection. (Finally! At long last she had taken the hint). With the biggest smile I could muster on my face I said “Yes, I don’t like you”.

“Why?”

“Because you’re disturbing me and I want some peace and quiet on this trip.”

“But me, I like you. Where do you live?”

WHAAAAAAT! I shot up straight from my seat as if a bolt of lightning had zig-zagged down my spine, cracking my head on the roof of the bus in the process while turning to look the woman square in the face. Behind me, the two eavesdropping girls couldn’t prevent their guffaws from escaping.

“I LIKE YOU!” Aunty repeated very loudly. What kind of horror trip was this turning to? Instantly I had gone from relative anonymity to becoming the cynosure of 15 other eyes including the driver who spun around and craned his neck to catch a glimpse of my rapidly-shrinking self.

The bus suddenly turned graveyard quiet as even the engine and tyres tuned in to eavesdrop on the drama between Aunty and me. I felt like screaming at the driver “Face the road jo!” but I knew it’d be no use. The angels in heaven were probably rolling in stitches at my discomfiture while the devil was most likely calculating if by adding to it I would be more easily convinced to trade my soul just to be anywhere else but here.

PS: Like all bad Nollywood movies, this story is To Be Continued...

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Chapter 1: The Office Seductress

Office Romance Quote:
Hi! My name is Jack,” the Little Man said, “and you know what happens to me when there’s all work and no play…”

The story begins…
I read it again.

“Tunde, come and suck my nipples. I am already on my bed waiting for you.”

Needless to say, the message had me speechless. 

The reasons were simple.

First of all, my name wasn’t Tunde. It is JonXavier.

Second of all, the message wasn’t even meant for me. This wasn’t really surprising considering the fact that it hadn’t come to my phone in the first place. It had gone to Tunde’s. I had no previous idea who he was or that he even existed till now. It was barely a few minutes ago that I had actually made acquaintance with his code name: M. H. 1.

Thirdly, the nipples in question did belong to a lady whose tits I had been eyeing like mad for months. It agonized me seriously that despite all my failed schemes for some weeks now to collide with those breasts “accidentally”, Tunde was been given them free of charge and even being commanded (in my opinion) to come and suck them.

Life is so unfair…

And to think that before she had been the one flaunting those mammaries in my face and shaking her marvelously shaped rump at me and I was the one who acted then like I had a bad case of glaucoma. Now the tables were turned and I was the one who had been seriously gunning for her like an English Premier League team struggling to stay out of relegation. She held all the aces now. She had become the umpire in our seduction game.

It pissed me off even further how for the past few weeks I had been crazily chasing after her, she had been waving the religion trump card in my face, successfully drowning out all my mushy talk by quoting well-chosen Bible verses. To make matters worse, she had recently taken to call me “Brother Jon”.

Brother indeed! Just make a mistake and visit my crib one evening and I’ll show you how well we’re related!

There is an accessory that can be usually found in almost every workplace where males and females are employed. From construction sites to bank boardrooms, this personality always makes its presence felt and even in the few environments where individuals of only one gender work, it is a given that this device will find its way from its own office into your own as sure as men have testosterone.

I am talking about the Office Seductress. When in all-female surroundings, the accessory then changes gender and materializes as the Office Seducer.

Miss Tits didn’t work in my male-dominated office so we just borrowed her as our own Office Seductress.

But back to that text message. I navigated out of the Sent Messages menu and into the Inbox. What had turned into an eye-opener for me had actually begun innocently enough. The phone on which I had just read the SMS actually belonged to Miss Tits. She had given it to me to play with and out of boredom I happened to scroll through the phonebook which was ultra-boring indeed. Every name on it was Brother This or Sister That. No “Mugu One” or even “Uncle” for that matter. Then my eye caught a number with the code name “M. H. 1”.

I love code names. In my Spy Book, M. H. 1 stands for only one thing: My Husband 1. Or Mr. Handsome 1. OK, make that two things…

Naturedly I had to make all the right excuses where she was concerned. I knew she was single because she wore no wedding band. Simple. The intrigue was amplified. Soon I had unearthed another phone number tagged M. H. 2. Was that My Husband’s second number or did she have a second My Husband? From there, the voyage to reading her text messages to and from MH1 and MH2 was the natural option. I lamely soothed my conscience by saying I had to find out if she was really “married”.

I still wasn’t disappointed. In the Inbox was a message from MH1. It read:

“My dear, I am very sorry for what I did yesterday. You will not run mad with thinking, in Jesus name…” 

(Honestly, it took all my effort not to die laughing at this point. So people still wrote this kind of crap? Miss Tits was watching my face intently and laughter would give away my ruse of playing a game on her phone. Let me kindly reproduce the said text without interruption this time)

“My dear, I am very sorry for what I did yesterday. You will not run mad with thinking, in Jesus name. Here are some PINs for loading your phone: X and Y (two N200 PINs for MTN) and Z - a N500 voucher for Glo. Later when you are less busy in the evening, come and pay in this N5000 into your account.” 

Hmmm…. Little wonder! So Mr. Tunde was paying N5900 just to suck nipples. I shook my head and sighed and Miss Tits must have interpreted the gesture to mean “Game Over” on her phone. It was “Game Over” definitely for me on her case.

As far as I was concerned, I now was sure of two things:

One, Mr. Tunde ought to be shot for his stupid choice of words. What did the dumb ass mean by “come and pay this N5000 into your account” like as he was funding her educational grant or something?

And two: I certainly wasn’t going to toe his line and drop 5.9 K, nipples or no nipples!

So the stupid guy had most likely been dropping close to six big ones just for a round of lactation and probably a little touch-touch? For what?!!

I shook my head and looked at Miss Tits sitting opposite me. Her nipples stared back at me.

Damn! Life was unfair!

Monday, February 2, 2009

Foreword: Rantings of the “wrongfully” employed

One of the very first newspaper articles I read about the blogging phenomenon concerned a blogger who was fired for posting office matters online. Obviously he had no idea that the office was sacred. I too hold no such notions... After all, This Is Not The Office.

This is a place where nothing is sacred and everything is scary. This is SLAVE Inc. Of course that isn’t its real name but all the attributes of the nickname fit the situation. My Boss, whom you’ll meet later in this post by the way, is the Chief Slave Driver while I’m the Major Slave.

Half the time when I am not authoring the Media Nemesis blog, I spend the better part of my life stuck in an office where I am tied to a job that entails frenzies of hard work and equal amounts of laziness. I work as a Trainee Biomedical Engineer in our small-time Engineering Company.

Biomedics was not my natural calling (Elect / Elect Engineering which I got a degree in wasn’t either) but as a Trainee I’m still learning the details of this job. But Mister Heem (that’s my Boss) won’t even allow me the dignity of a proper job title. He insists on calling me a “Pupil” Engineer and it even says so on my cardboard (yes, cardboard!) company ID card - which I detest by the way. Most people take a look at the miserable thing and burst out laughing. The more sensible ones keep their guffaws for after I leave.

It is a very small time business – literally a one-man show – though there once were better days. Unfortunately, I did not meet those days. My pay package leans very far away from being called huge and tilts very close, much too close to being very small. It is barely just enough to get on by. But just barely.

A typical day in the Office or out of it sees the Technician, Big Boss and I jumping into his car and zooming off to any hospital near or far that may require our services. We either fix their machines or we try to sell them newer machines or buy off the old ones which we sell to other hospitals which will later call us when those ones break down. It’s a tough cycle. For those machines...and for us.

Life might have been arduous but ordinary if that was all we did but the mix is made richer by the quirks of the Office and the temperaments of its staff, I inclusive and the gossip of the other offices around us. And this is where I get to tell the gritty details...

Let me share with you the goings-on in my Office where life can be as tough as writing a degree exam.

Where, according to the Boss’ sentiments, all the employees are complete idiots some - if not most - of the time.

Where I get to shed weight daily as I acquire an ulcer and an admixture of elation and unhappiness are my daily companions.

Where I say everyday that I’ll leave and I still come back again the next morning...

That is my Office... Where sometimes I lose my initiative and gain stupidity...

As I gather experience...

Sunday, January 25, 2009

The Pre-Foreword Written In Past Present Tense

On the 1st of April 2008, I was given an appointment with a company called S.L.A.V.E. Inc to work with them as a Trainee Biomedics Engineer. This blog is about my experience there. 

Working for S.L.A.V.E. Inc wasn’t actually my first taste of paid employment; during my Industrial Training days I had worked in the Engineering section of a major soft drinks bottling company and also served the nation as a Science Teacher in a secondary school during the mandatory NYSC service year. My relationship with SLAVE Inc however, has been radically different.

Over the course of the months I have worked there I have written a couple of posts about several incidents and people I have met there. These posts therefore form the basis of this blog.

By the time you read this, I would most probably have left my job and maybe moved on to something else and so I’ve had to re-write most of my posts in what I call the Past-Present tense to capture a timeline that was once the present but is now past. Some of the stuff you are going to read on this blog may therefore be a bit confusing chronologically.

Some other things you’re going to read here have also been superficially altered but only for reasons of privacy. The names for example, and certain geographical locations have been changed where necessary so as not to cause embarrassment to the parties concerned. The gist however remains the same and as true as I can tell it from my point of view.

So many words have already gone by so I think it’s best right now to start at the very beginning.

“Story, story…”

“Story!”

“Once upon a time in an Office far far away…”