Some shit I wrote way back under very different circumstances from my present day realities. I advise you don’t take it too seriously and see it as a work of art…creative writing bla bla bla.

While most parts of the world are making great strides towards the enshrinement of workers’ rights vis-à-vis maintaining a healthy and motivated labour force there are still those companies in modern day Nigeria who embarrassingly refuse to grow up out of the dark ages. A prime example is Team Morale Ltd, a service provider for Hello Nigeria.

Rumour has it that Team Morale Ltd managed by Doctor Pep Talker, a two term Chairman of the Committee of Approved Nigerian Telecoms Operatives is fronting for top heads at Hello Nigeria such that he was able to successfully get the outsourcing contract from Hello Nigeria for its’ Online Call Centre in Jang which has now become its’ biggest such unit in Nigeria surpassing other such units in Eko, KD and Kan Aminu.

Investigations reveal that the condition of its’ staff at The Jang Call Centre can best be described as modern day slavery. Or what else do you describe a situation in which after almost a year of operation staff there do the same work with the same targets as their counterparts in Eko, KD and Kan Aminu yet earn one third their salary and don’t even have the privilege of owning staff lines.

Hello Nigeria’s Jang workers are the most poorly motivated Call Center Representatives you’ll ever find in any Nigerian telecoms firm. A look at the behaviour of Team Morale Ltd’s HR right from the recruitment stage will show the total disregard Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd has for its staff. Hundreds of youths were deceived to leave behind better paying jobs and bare the risk of relocating to a volatile Jang in the hope of better work conditions with Hello Nigeria, one of Nigeria’s top GSM networks only to be hit with an inhuman offer of employment letter whose take home pay can’t even get them home on a regular monthly basis.

The end result of this is that Hello Nigeria’s Jang Call Center Representatives occasionally lose it, transferring their aggression on to their customers in a display of appalling customer service.

That Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd management can be very high handed is an understatement. Unfriendly policy decisions such as maternity leave with any form of pay and hoarding of Information especially as regards staff welfare is the order of the day, consequently with life at the Call Center resembling the dark days of military rule in Nigeria.

Staff are regularly punished with no form of appeal and sacked with impunity as evident in the layoff of no less than 30 workers since January 2011 for flimsy reasons such as merely offering positive suggestions which go against the managements ideal of how to move the company forward.

The rot in Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd is exemplified in that it’s Jang Call Center Operations Manager an expatriate, whose contribution to productivity is questionable has since December of 2010 being taking up residence in an hotel room whose bills for a day is enough to pay a month’s salary of the lowest of its Call Center Agent.

Staff role appointment is also to a large extent devoid of merit with the ranks being manned by many management yes boy and girls. With an ingenious divide and rule remuneration policy set up to reward such yes boys and girls on a monthly basis.

Rounding of this expose on a light note, with a population of over 900 and counting, a common Jang beer parlour gist is that Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd spinsters are the cheapest in town, easier than University of Jang female undergraduates as being eager for marriage to lift them out of their pitiable situation they have set their standards so low.

In conclusion all evidence points to the fact that a Sanusi Lamido like banking system cleansing would be welcomed in Hello Nigeria-Team Morale Ltd.

You might want to click on the link below and download the PDF; it’s great stuff about career related decisions courtesy my bro.

Multiple Choices: Planning Your Career for the 21st Century

I just wanted to add that you and I active job seekers know what the market is like. Masters/PHD without job experience is bullshit. If I was hiring any such person would be on a long thing. I find it strange that people spend their money and time doing masters in Sociology etc when they don’t plan to do jack with it. Doing masters just for the sake of doing masters; and in the end holding down a shitty paying job. Paper qualifications are overrated. In most cases a degree or its equivalent is ok. Even sef if you’re into entertainment or self employed I’d say fuck the degree and do a course/certification in line with your career objectives. Down with distant learning culture in Naija, adults 25 years and above still being fed by their parents, over reliance on lazy ass Government jobs and minimum wage paying white collar gigs. I take my hats off to entrepreneurs; Lord knows we need more of them.

My advice would be when on IT make sure you actually make great effort with learning on the job skills. Pick up a trade, there’s no shame in making money and being an independent adult. Skill is everything, while waiting to write JAMB UME immerse yourself in learning stuff: programming, tailoring, baking, carpentry etc. Like Whiz Kid said don’t dull! If the jobs that fit your skill set can be thought to an OND holder in a month you’ll continue to be the bottom of the food chain. On the other hand concrete knowledge/skills gained never leaves you; it’s like fixed capital.

Note that I’m not absolving myself of any guilt, just venting. See the below quotes. Peace!

These days when people talk about scarcity of good jobs, I sometimes wonder, I think skilled graduates are much more scarce than good Jobs.

My company has been seeking to recruit a programmer in a certain language for like 4 months and even advertised in a national daily with no success! Despite the number of interested applicants we have.

I have also been seeking a candidate who has even a basic knowledge of PHP/MySql in Abuja for weeks without success and there are still jobless computer science students in this country!

Typical dulling (under employed) Naija civil servant

As bad decisions go, I have had a few myself, the worst of which, I reckon is leaving my decent job in Abuja and turning down two other better offers to travel to the UK for an expensive Masters degree, frittering away all I had worked for. Masters degree completed, no job in the UK, no job in Nigeria, where do I go from here? Lessons learnt!

Written for the new gig…

Can you relate with this?

“The tellers and customer service ladies of Bank EW are just plain rude; imagine going to withdraw your own money and being told to wait for hours or to come back tomorrow because the servers are down; I don’t remember them telling me that when I came to open the account!”

“My sister I cried to my creator from the bottom of my heart today. I was made to feel subhuman just because I went to one office to submit my CV”.

“I can only blame myself for taking my own two feet into that place. The reply I got was so cold and unhelpful just for the simplest of enquiries. It was a total waste of time and energy.”

“Why do these ISPs keep employing clueless and dumb people? Can you imagine the guy at the help desk telling me “I was not trained to activate this plan on a phone. I can only activate on PC. Please go and bring your laptop”. Source.

“My people I don’t even know why we waste our time on this the Police is your friend mantra in Nigeria. Do you know that I always have to make sure the money in my pocket is enough before going to the Police station to report a genuine issue? It’s like those guys work on a pay as you go basis.”

If you can relate with all these read on, if not please quit reading.

Colleagues we’re in that shoe now with our present job, we can either prevent people from further experiencing and saying the same or we can tow the status quo. Let’s do away with the “everyone wants to fix humanity; no one wants to fix themselves syndrome. It begins with you, change begins with us.

Just like relationships crumble if one party doesn’t offer to say I’m sorry, or a traffic jam gridlock persist if one driver doesn’t say “I’ll be patient, you may go first”. Things can only be better off if we decide and start to make an effort.

Like the hotel bell boy let’s learn to work like our only form of remuneration was based on tips arising from the level of satisfaction our customers get from our service. Let’s learn to treat our customers like we would treat our mothers

Let the below thoughts and often made statements be things of the past

a) Nkemakonam Ezidinma Ifejika opined on Facebook that for Nigerians anywhere in the world, customer service is a gene extracted at birth. That is to say Nigerians are incapable of being consistently polite and helpful. They are the kings and queens of mood swings.

b) In Nigeria there’s no place for merit. We can’t queue or be patient. Everyone wants to cut corners and get served before others. It’s like a “my family comes first” credo. And that’s why poverty persists because those in top positions don’t allow for the wealth to flow down to the bottom, hence everyone wants to be at the top and so corruption is birthed. We were brought up this way and so bring up our kids in like fashion too. A vicious cycle.

c) There’s a deep rooted rat race or jungle mentality in Nigeria that impedes development and breeds nepotism and tribalism. Like Mark Shuttleworth said: “Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”. It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism.

d) Nigerians are only bothered about the self, there’s no sense of concern for maintenance of public/company property. That’s why the civil service is in shambles. That’s also why the white man is brought in to instil discipline; we then fight to go abroad to enjoy the perks of a disciplined society we have denied ourselves.

In line with the above and bringing the matter back home mycustomer advocates the following

1) And end to the “applications are not working please call back” sing along. Especially when we don’t even bother to get them working in the first place, have no idea of their workarounds or can’t even be bothered to remember our passwords. Food for thought: Do you know that telling a customer that the applications are not working please call back is akin to telling a pensioner who invested a lot of energy and money to go back home and come tomorrow because the bank for some flimsy reason or another cannot pay today.

2) It’s good to pick 200 calls a day but it’s even better to pick 150 and deal with them decisively. We’re lucky to have a strong brand and a consequent low elasticity of demand but we should bear in mind that ultimately customer service goes a long way in determining customer retention and business profitability.

3) Stop leaving your mails unread. You stand to keep yourself ignorant (no product knowledge) when you do so consequently manifesting in frequently putting your customers on hold and running around the call center asking questions. You also leave the knowledgeable customer shaking his head on the opposite side lamenting your cluelessness.

4) An end to the “I’ll end call on you”, “I’ll block your line” incidents. Let’s learn to manage our irritations and show compassion to the slow to comprehend and confused. You become a better person, the bigger man when you learn to tolerate customers venting their anger on you yet reply politely to empathise and educate. It shows there’s substance in your character; consequently you’ll see that people will want to look you up for a repeat dealing.

I now hope that upon everyone reading this, this other incidence that some of us regularly experience will decrease: “customers asking for a way to get back to us directly as they are afraid of speaking to others because they have no confidence their queries will be resolved on a random call back.

“Like the hotel bell boy let’s learn to work like our only form of remuneration was based on tips arising from the level of satisfaction our customers get from our service. Let’s learn to treat our customers like we would treat our mothers”

Effective information management is a bit like multi tasking and getting it right

Anyone that really knows me in person should be aware that I like to be on top of things information wise. Like the seeker I take great pride in getting relevant info and go to great lengths to organize that info for effective use (I think I got this quality from my dad). And feeling particularly generous or scholarly today I want to bless you with my “Seven habits of highly effective information managers”; hereby referred to as HEIMs. On a Zain level I’m in a frenzy like one of my previous bank big boss, who was twice flown in from Lagos to lecture us in training school, and on both occasions ended up basing his talk (both talks independent of the other) on Stephen R Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. So let’s get started on capacity building information management wise.

1) HEIMs abhor illiteracy in all its forms because to really appreciate the importance of information management one has to be technologically aware, pragmatic and open minded. HEIMs would probably work in intelligence if they were in the army. For the young ones in secondary school my advice would be not to limit oneself to only reading the Bible, religious books and self help books but to explore the world of contemporary Nigerian fiction. Personally my favourite reads are informative/write ups/novels which come with a heavy dose of humour.

2) We would all the more be HEIMs in Nigeria if we probably had a good database management system in place. All my analysis leads me to the conclusion that if we fixed that we would be on the road to resolving a lot of our national problems. From census and population planning, to voter registration, to crime detection/prevention, to fiscal control and bank loan supervision, to academic records availability and so on and so forth. That’s why it behooves on us to take the issue of record keeping and maintenance seriously in our daily dealings. There are little things in life as sweet as being updated about the past in a jiffy and thus being privileged to make inform choices in the present that will affect your future positively.

3) HEIMs excel in phone bookkeeping and are forever grateful for the miracle that is telecommunication. They understand the beauty of talking the talk and getting thoughts across at the touch of a button. So characteristically they are always reachable by phone, text and call generously as the need arises, excel at colleting contacts of useful people and those they just must deal with on the daily, have a good contact backup culture, have more than one line considering the peculiar unstableness of our telecoms networks, and understanding the importance of networking strive for phone number retention. Some extra tips: for ease of backups you might want to jot down your numbers daily as you collect them and exploit the PC suite and sync function of your phone. Also aim for hand sets with unlimited contact storage. To get ahead 200 SIM memory plus 200 phone memory handsets are not the way to go. Additionally learn to save names in full or with descriptive suffixes for ease of recall.

4) HEIMs understanding the reality that is information overload, trash programming and junk content are constantly trying to stay geeky/nerdy yet work and leisure balanced. By analyzing and sieving what is available before brain consumption they stay on the natural high. Personally I try not to over indulge myself and stay away from things that don’t add anything substantive to my IQ. This means I’m constantly battling procrastination in favour of studying and computer programming. And when it comes to news feed, favouring blogs with original content as against gossip blogs and news recyclers.

5) HEIMs being aware of the power of the world wide web/computers practice the complete use of it as a means to an end. Here’s what you’ll find them doing. They streamline their email addresses as much as possible and harness the powers of Gmail and email clients. You’d be hard press to find them on the loosing end of domain drops because of unread/unreceived renewal reminders. They are on top of password management (at my former job FinnOne, a banking suite software failed partly because of the issue of password forgetfulness). And they embrace the idea of website and company portals as information nests. A case in point: it’s dumb…almost criminal for INEC not to publish the list of qualified candidates/test invitees on its website during it recent recruitment exercise. Also as seen in many companies the issue of sending out important memos/policy updates only via email without repository on the company’s portal for easy long term reference is akin to dishing out instructions and the receivers inundating it from one ear and letting it slip out through the other.

6) HEIMs are by nature effective. In line with this they wholly embrace the use of a diary in their day to day planning. Not being cyborgs people grapple with the issue of forgetfulness but HEIMs keep on top of their schedule and plan accordingly with diary entries and reminders. Be them electronically on phone/computers or in hand in books. A follow up trait of effectiveness is getting things done without having to be prodded and doing so as if the direct gain was for oneself. In other words HEIMs treat with dispatch issues which require their attention. And in doing so they keep it scientific, scientific in the sense that their workings are carried out in a way that on analysis a third party can easily understand what has transpired thus and take relevant follow up action.

7) Lastly but also very importantly HEIMs don’t have an attitude problem. With globalization should come the common sense that nobody’s indispensable and that we all need each other sooner or later and as such we should treat each other with courtesy and respect. On a Majek Fashek-2face Idibia tip, little little patience and cordialness in our conduct now can have big positive implications later. Tolerance, politeness, a thank you here, excuse me or sorry there can in some way get you that information when the need arises that’ll help you break fronts.

The world Cup South Africa 2010 being now 40 days away, the true Super Eagles fan should have these three World cup songs on his/her playlist:

1) Power of Naija. Guinness commissioned World Cup song performed by Omawumi, 2face Idibia and Cobhams
2) Waving flag (Nigerian Version). Coca-Cola commissioned K’naan’s World Cup song performed by Banky W & M.I.
3) Goalaaaso (Inside The Net). Paj featuring Tolumide. From Paj of “Ghana go hear wien (2006)” and “skatta dem (Ghana go hear wien part II 2008)” fame.

As written and mailed out to my colleagues on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 11:46 am, but with the names edited for privacy:

Like many before me permit me to quote as follows: “ten children cannot play together for ten years”.
 
This serves to officially inform you of my redeployment to Jos 1 Branch/CMU/CCU as BRC effective Monday 29th December 2008.
 
It’s needless to say that I’ll miss Makurdi Branch (especially the under listed) but life must go on and I look forward to the greater challenges/new experiences ahead.
 
My boss MR BAM, you were an excellent tutor, I’m forever grateful to have had the privilege to tap directly from your years of experience.
 
To my HOP MR HENRY-Team spirited leaders like you are hard to find, keep up the good work sir.
 
To my mummies MADAM HARRIET and MADAM ABIGAIL-your resilience in a tough working environment is commendable, keep the fire burning.
 
To my ogas MR MOSES, MR EFOSA, MR AGADA and MR NIYI, I learnt from your wisdom in many ways than one. Thank you.
 
DIBAL for your military lingua and ABIOLA for your “uniqueness”, thanks for the laughs.
 
CANDID from UNN to NYSC Batch B 2006 Benue State days all the way to my first 2 months in Makurdi, thanks for being there.
 
GAFAR, BUSAYO, AGADA O, RAYMOND thanks for the company; MARTHA, IDRIS you won’t be forgotten in a hurry.
 
ONMA your helpfulness, YINKA your dedication and NONSO NNAM your industriousness is commendable in deed; well done
 
Thanks for everything, do forgive all my shortcomings. Much peace, love and respect!

Yep it’s all Jos for me going forward. No worries, the Rock city ain’t no Gaza; just experiencing the curfew thing for now.

P/S: if you ever find yourself in Makurdi try and (1) be at the Places and Times Night Club: had my first real regular clubbing experience there. It’s a four point fiver not at all like those bars where you’ll find people staggering in the name of dancing.

(2) Chill out at the Exclusive Lounge wine bar. Great environment; good spot to chill and feel the Makurdi urban and upwardly mobile life style.

(3) Eat at Treaties Buka. I should know, their meals kept me going. But you might want to avoid there when Lobi Stars Club Footballers are guesting. Men and their stomachs…you should understand.

(4) Get around town, taking in the beautiful road network. Much like Abuja, one of the reason I love the place.

Makurdi Branch, the many months of renovation finally paid off.

Banking, the ills: workaholicity and “no time!”

The “I say no time eh!” phrase by top Nigerian ragga artist Timaya best describes my condition in the in last four months, in which time I haven’t blogged (though “no inspiration eh” comes a distant second). Right now at 9.21 am it’s one of those precious weekends for me and as I type this on my generator-powered battery-weakened laptop in Makurdi I await the start of Nigeria’s game against Japan in the on going Olympic men’s football event. So what have I been up to all this while and what’s happened to the time? Here’s what.

I’ve since completed my bank’s ten week entry level training programme in Abuja and have been deployed to Makurdi branch in our North Central Region. Yes, my love affair with Benue State continues having served here (NYSC 2006/2007) and been back shortly afterwards for a short business venture.

Training school was fun no doubt but I also learnt a tremendous lot and had my mind opened to many new perspectives of life. Part of the gains of the training was being able to make my first ever visit to a prison…Kuje Prison Abuja to be precise. Banking being a profession based on trust, integrity is a necessary value and so the visit to the prison apart from its social responsibility import was to show us how low we could sink if we lost our integrity. The funny thing though is that Kuje Prison wasn’t at all like what I expected; it looked more like any well maintained Government boarding house secondary school in Abuja except that the inmates couldn’t leave the area…ever! There were the sober religious type, the ashamed from-a-comfortable-background type but most looked like the average Joe on the street type. Some buildings were recently painted, the compound was neat, there were a lot of new structures and the effect of charitable donations/support from the public/NGOs could be seen. Me thinks that being a population database poor, non safety and security conscious country an escape from the prison would be easy and have the least of consequences. Anyways I digress.

Back to the subject it feels good to be in banking. The opportunities it offers you are endless but the effize of the profession is too much; one could easily get carried away! One could also get “carried away” by the pressures of the job. The demands are heavy so to be on top of ish you’ve got to be sharp and proactively continuously learning. Worse still like I said at the beginning one’s time-crunched! We’ll survive though.

And survival starts with watching my first Dream Team 4 game at the Olympics in a short while. I almost can’t believe I missed their first match…an Eagle’s match!” Work sucks at time! I can believe though that the Abuja Stadium disappointed yet again spectator-wise at the Man U-Portsmouth game a fortnight ago. To the best of my knowledge the only time its stands ever filled up for a football match was The All African Games 2003 u-23 men’s final between Nigeria and Cameroun. As expected a large portion of the crowd got in for free and a much larger portion of the crowd of football lovers in the city just couldn’t be bothered. We shouldn’t loose hair or bother too much to when ever Nigeria goes out of a football tournament. Football is an art not a science and even with the best of preparations one could still falter. Someone’s bound to loose…It ain’t gonna be me though. Ah game time! Excuse me while I do the needful. One!

Happy Customer, Happy Bank. Intercontinental Bank PLC’s (IBPLC) slogan.

In the words of Durella “shout alleluia Papa God e don do am”! Yes oh, I’m now more or less a staff of IBPLC! On Monday I along with over 40 others started a 10 week training (Intensive Orientation Programme) at their Garki II branch in Abuja. We’re what are called Executive Trainees, on that entry level ish; but what’s more it’s all on merit baby!

You see I’ve always loved IBPLC right from when I opened my first real savings account with them in my undergraduate days, so the step up to actually work with them is like on the dream-come-true level. This is how my journey went, it might have been quite long but it definitely was worth it:

1) October 2nd, 2007: submitted my CV to a very close friend who’s in the system already somewhere in Niger State.

2) November 17th 2007: along with over a thousand others I wrote the company’s recruitment aptitude test in Jos, Head Quarters of their North Central region. Rated my chances of making it to the next recruitment stage very high and had fun reconnecting with acquaintances from my NYSC, University and even Secondary school days.

3) January 18th 2008: Had my Interview and medicals along with 71 others in (a bloody cold) Jos. Rated my interview as having gone very well, and meanwhile enjoyed the youthfulness of the environment and the energy floating about.

4) April 21st 2008: after a very lengthy sometimes really crazy wait was finally called to start training/resume work with the bank.

Do you know that I almost completely missed the training save for a very good friend? It’s a long story sha. Anyway I know Banking’s not easy and I’ll now be having much less free time and lot’s more commitments but I’m highly positive minded and I’m ready to make every moment count. There are a lot of people I won’t forget in a hurry in my quest for the IBPLC job, I’m unable to name them all at this point in time but from the bottom of my heart I want to sincerely thank you all. Peace, love and respect; one!

It’s just come up to over a year since my mum passed away. So first things first: rest in eternal peace mum.

One of the best examples I’ve ever come across in my life of nepotism/the-power-of-connections/long-leg/man-know-man sadly pertains to my recent job offer; “Nigeria we hail thee”! It came kind of instantly, from the least expected of places and took me by surprise. I admit for an idealist it’s not such a cool thing but at the end of the day it’s just one of those times that I have to do what’s best for me.

As my good chat buddy “Elliot Hendrix” rightly deciphered, my feeling on getting the offer can be summed up in the phrase: “she connected the dots for me to call the shots”.

As at now the Job’s not really my ideal and I’ll still be on the look out for something better but there’s no denying that I’ll now be better occupied and the steady income that comes with the job will lift my spirits tremendously. That’s highly welcomed considering the fact that over the past 3 years I’ve grown into an excessively sober person very much unlike the fun carefree dude I used to be. So let me get back into the spirit with this, albeit in a very swift manner:

I’m Nigerian by origination
Twenty four by age
A liberal Christian by inclination
A mere mortal in a cage
A football lover essential(ly)
All things music is my balm
Web 2.0 Intellectual
Fun loving young man with a charm

happily wired, happily hired

My brain’s a mansion, expanding like pews/
I feed it with good stuff, try not to abuse/
From people’s reaction, I’m filing its views/
So give me the action and I’ll give you its news/

Ok I’m done rhyming. I’ve been up to a lot lately…J-O-B scheming. And it has occurred to me that oil money has spoilt Nigeria and Nigerians silly. Entrepreneurial wise we’re not making much progress and are instead content to wait it out for the monthly oil revenue. Our civil service is lazy as depicted in their creed: “government work no dey finish”, leaving one puzzled as to how they would fare if government establishment were responsible for a larger part of their own funding. In the end a lot of people climb up the social ladder courtesy of the “oil money” and a lot of others are happy or have no option but to be their faithful dependants.

Still keeping to the article’s theme I’ve done more than is usual traveling in the past 7 weeks. I was in Lagos last month for a job aptitude test. And first of all I’ll like to say the company’s crazy for calling us up for the test a bare 36 hours to the event. The stress I had to go through to get there and the disorientation of the test venue speaks volume of the sufferings of Nigerian graduate job seekers. My impressions away from the test is that Lagos is one rugged city and it’s traffic and congestion problems are two reasons that makes me wish myself away from it as a place of abode. The trip was actually my first visit to Lagos in 8 years! And courtesy of many a blogger’s rant I was scared and equally cautious. All in all Lagos was worth it as I enjoyed the journey through the South West; a welcomed difference indeed after being saturated with the South East and North Central for far too long.

After Lagos I made a return to Gboko in Benue State as a member of a four man crew called Art IMPACT Productions whose hustle included video recording, editing and production; conducting interviews, handling customer relations and marketing for the 3 week duration of the 2007 Batch A Orientation camp program. Had an overdose of nostalgia there being that a year earlier I was having some of the best times of my NYSC life there. At Gboko I got the much sought after job experience; ate humility, diligence and dedication for breakfast, lunch and dinner and learnt many a business truths. My Gboko sojourn was invaluable…priceless, but for everything else there’s MasterCard.

November 1st 2007, with a camcorder doing what I had to do as part of my biz hustle in Gboko

The traveling ended with a trip to Jos over the weekend. Also a first time journey and this time around for the purpose of writing one of them Bank job aptitude test which are very popular with fresh Nigerian graduates. Jos is a town with an unNigerian kind of weather but it’s ok. I had a nice time there and I came back with one truth: “practice makes perfect”!

One’s state of mind = one’s mental or emotional attitude or mood. In his song “I dey feel like” because he’s found love 2face Idibia feels like Obasanjo (feels as powerful as a Head of State because his girl loves him), George Akume, Jolly Nyame, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela (because his girl fights for him), Jay-Z (because his girl’s as fine as Beyonce), Bola Tinubu, Bob Marley (because his girl makes him high), Abubakar Atiku and Donald Duke all in one. For me, I’m in a job hunting state of mind and this is how I’ve been feeling.

Bank PHB’s The Intern Reality TV Show is closely related with my Job hunting state of mind

I’ve just paid yet again another exorbitant taxi “drop” fare. And in my mind I curse Nasir El-Rufai for banning the use of motorcycles “okadas” as public transport in Abuja. It’s meant that non car owners like me whose (everyday) movement involves going to places with no bus routes have to pay through their nose to transport themselves around the FCT’s municipal area.

After the grueling job aptitude tests and the days of waiting the boss man breaks my heart at the interview. Hear him: “Youngman you’re my number one candidate and all but we needing batch A corpers serving in Abuja and you being a batch B corper serving in Benue it won’t just work. Don’t worry I’ll let you know when we have other openings”. At that moment I felt like a girl who’s just been treated to a wonderful night out by her boyfriend only for him to announce he’s dumping her and then give her a good night kiss.

An hour has passed since bumping into Ifeanyi an old acquaintance of mine when I was in the university. Looking exhausted he told me: “Nna Tochi, e no easy oh, na after service life really start”. In my mind I’m like “tufiakwa! God forbid! No be so my own portion go be”. I don’t really think he had taken this advice to heart: “as a job seeker you’re a product with steady competition and so to sell you’ve got to make yourself marketable by continuous self improvement”.

I just saw my friend Chi Babe off and on my way back I’m thinking to myself that it’s a shame how the pressures of life make people stoop low to kiss major ass. I can’t believe she’s the same chick I had a major crush on when we were in the uni. The job and marriage search thing has all of a sudden made her embarrassingly churchous!

I’ve realized that the same way marriage often dissolves friendship between very good girlfriends is the same way finances can put guys out of the league with their long time buddies. That’s really shitty…pitiful.

Yet another change: my I-don’t-give-a-fuck mode is now major. I’ve cut out a lot of stuff that’s not important to me in achieving my immediate and future life goals and in their places I’ve added those which are. I no more identify with (I don’t give a fuck about) a lot of the IQ decreasing content on TV, gossip and low substance blog reads and people who’re not adding anything of positive value to my life. That’s to name a few, on the addition side I’ve taken up a new humble lifestyle.

Lastly my conscience has been telling me to wake up and cut out on the surfing of the internet for interesting things and instead start getting with my GMAT books, NIM-NYSC studies and other nerdy ish and career bound moves.

Yes that’s my state of mind…how I’ve been feeling in brief. But what ever your state of mind, never forget that no matter how the struggles of life might be eating your heart away through the week, you’ll always have the Nigerian Sunday afternoon rice to look forward to. Peace!