The Crazy Nigerian

Whisper into my burning ears

In Nigeria, you only needed three basic necessities for survival: food, water and shelter. In England, however, you needed food, water, shelter, and a mobile phone. I remember how excited I was when I was about to purchase my first ever mobile phone. I hadn’t used a mobile phone in Nigeria since they were more of a status symbol than a communication tool. I mean, only a handful of people could afford the expensive walkie-talkie-sized devices anyway, and it didn’t make sense to buy one if your network of friends were never around their landlines for you to call them. You also had to pay an arm and a leg for a phone in the late 90s, and there were no attractive price plans. Consequently, some people walked around with gigantic handsets that had little or no calling credit and hoped that they would receive calls: *Cost of a mobile phone: N250,000; *Airtime: N10,000; *the look on a Nigerian’s face whenever his/her mobile phone rang: priceless.

In England, I marvelled at just how many telecom retailers were offering free phones! Of course, there was a catch. You had to sign away your soul to the likes of either Vodafone, One-2-One (now T-Mobile), Orange or O2. This involved giving them the authority to be able to debit your personal bank account by way of a standing order, and also committing to using their telecom network for at least twelve months. It was kind of a tight leash for someone who didn’t have a part-time job at the time; namely, me. I must admit, I considered getting a third party to read the small print—not because it was so microscopic that I couldn’t read it, but because it was loaded with so much technical mumbo-jumbo that I couldn’t care less about it let alone understand it.

K.D and I were what you could call ‘partners in crime’. Either we had similar tastes, or we just copied each other’s buying habits. We walked into Vodafone and chose the same blue-coloured Panasonic handset. We got the phones for free, calls between Vodafone users were free between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., and we were eligible for free phone upgrades after twelve months. That word—FREE—was music to the ears of a student in those days. Unfortunately, some of the heartache that came with owning a mobile phone came absolutely free too.

At first, the novelty of having my own mobile phone was a bit overwhelming. All of a sudden, I felt a sense of pride whenever my phone rang, beeped or vibrated (even though it was almost certainly KD). I felt like an important business man whenever I replied to text messages or listened to voicemails. My parents were glad they could reach me without worrying about why I wasn’t picking up the landline (and I was equally glad that they didn’t have to know my exact location at any point in time). No more curfews. No more being left out of the loop with my friends. No more sacrificing half my day to sit by a telephone waiting for the gas man to call and confirm his arrival time. No more! I could get used to this newfound lifestyle of ease.

Within a matter of months, however, the novelty had worn off. I didn’t know whether the free calls after 6 p.m. to other Vodafone users was a blessing or a curse. The prolonged, silence-filled conversations I had with a few girls till the early hours of the morning left my ears with an unpleasant burning sensation. At the time, I endured this because I was using my mobile phone as more than just a communication tool; it was also a dating tool. I was making investments in what would be potentially long-term relationships (but looking back now they were probably early investments in ear cancer).

One such ‘investment’ was a girl who lived in Bradford. I had met her at a club during one of my summer holidays in London, when I was out with a few of my former high school friends. I should have just stuck to enjoying the reunion, but I had to go stick my neck out and scope some of the pretty females dancing in the club. LV, whom I was interested in, was dancing with her friend. According to LV, her friend was interested in me. This was a dilemma, because I wasn’t at all interested in her friend. Her friend was forward and she didn’t notice (or chose not to notice) that my interest lay elsewhere. After all the dancing, I collected both their numbers, but you can imagine whom I was planning to call. It was after this outing that my nights started feeling shorter, long after I was back in Plymouth. It didn’t matter what LV and I talked about; we both abused each other’s free airtime and also abused each other’s body clocks in the process. Eventually we agreed to meet in London during a house party that was being planned in Bradford. Unknown to me, I was being set up for a double ambush.

On arrival at the house party, I was barely acknowledged by LV as she hovered around a particular guy who gave me more evil looks than the Jews gave Nazis during the Holocaust. He was the boyfriend! At that point, I remembered her mentioning something about a guy she was seeing but was on the verge of breaking up with—I had presumed that the case was closed. But here she was, giving me an obviously nerve-wracking introduction. I was quick to prepare one of my plastic smiles for the awkward situation. I mean, had she deliberately left out the fact that her boyfriend was going to be at this party? Was it possible that she had told him about me? Did he know I was the one who had encouraged her every night to dump his sorry ass? I wasn’t sure he knew, but it felt like it.

All my hopes of kissing LV were dashed, let alone of getting a slow-dance with her. Instead, I was ‘pleasantly’ surprised to be handed a consolation prize in the guise of LV’s friend—who subsequently went on to accuse me of never calling her after that night in London. LV later told me that she and her boyfriend had ‘worked things out’, and she threw in the old ‘we can still be friends’ cliché. In other words, she was saying, ‘the wheels on the bicycle have been fixed, but you can be the third wheel and I may make use of you if they go flat again’. Geez! I felt used! Over three weeks of long nights enduring hot ears . . . and this was the warm reception I got (no pun intended). The only thing eagerly waiting for my return with open arms was my exorbitant phone bill.

Whether I was trying to buy train tickets over the phone or register a complaint with my network provider, I had to subject my ears to the irksome, automated telephone operators. Not only did this send heat waves into ears, but you also ended up feeling like a complete jackass. Picture this: you dial a customer care line, and then the available options are read out to you (don’t you hate how the most important option of ‘speaking to an agent’ is given towards the end?). After you’ve pressed zero, for instance, you get told by the automated nonentity that ‘you are now in a queue’ and that your call will be answered shortly. The word ‘shortly’ is used deceptively, as it suggests a wait of perhaps a mere two minutes max. During your wait, you are subjected to ridiculous violin or piano music on a constant fifteen-second loop. Your airtime is running all the while, and your patience is running out. Five minutes later, an agent answers your call, and after you tediously state your request or complaint, the agent tells you to hold while he or she reconnects you to the right department! Then there’s another queue with the same repetitive music that could make even you go loopy.

But it hasn’t been all gloom and doom for me since the mobile phone boom. In fact, there is one romantic true-life story I am going to share. It involves a beautiful girl whom I was shy of talking to at university and whom I had a little crush on too. Any time we were at the same party or on the same campus premises, we stole glances at each other. This childish behaviour went on for almost a year until one day her friend let the cat out of the bag: my crush had a crush on me too! I believe the word Casino operators use for this type of situation is ‘Jackpot’. Now it was time for me to cash in.

On one late night, we got texting. I eventually called her, and we talked for over two hours (for free on some same-network deal, thank God). Before we knew what was going on, our mild flirtations evolved into deep revelations, which ultimately broke down into full-on confessions. The penny had dropped. We, however, couldn’t drop our phones. She was only a ten-minute walk away from my place at the time, and we really wanted to see each other face-to-face, perhaps to convince ourselves that it was all real. It was around 4 a.m., and I told her I couldn’t pay her a quick visit. She sounded very disappointed, but we kept on talking until she said she had to go because someone was at her door. She opened the door and, to her great surprise, there I was, beaming at her. She lunged for me and kissed my breath away. It was a Jerry McGuire moment, which was soon heckled by drunken students coming back from a nightclub. But it was still romantic nonetheless, and for the next three minutes I totally forgot about my burning ears.