Those were the good ole days... When working life was still a social affair
Or: Catering for Nigerian Telephone operators
Will you listen to uncle Gerd’s story, children? When Uncle Oyingbo Gerd was still a bouncy young man he used to tell his white brothers and sisters, listening to German radio, about the strange ways of Africans, particularly Nigerians. Now, in those days, many years before CNN, MTV and the others, there really was a thing called RADIO, but there was no such thing as the FAX, the internet or much less a thing called CELLULAR. All there was was da TELEEPHONE, and dat machine was NOT quite common in the beautiful city of Lagos.
So, if you wanted to make a call to such places like America, Lebanon or Germany, you had to go to a telephone centre to book your call and … wait. The Centre where I waited many, many hours for my call to one of my many radio stations in Germany was the one at ‘Falomo Centre’ on Victoria Island. This is where I spent many a long night to speak my reports to my radio stations in Cologne, Munich, Hamburg and many other strange cities in Germany, and even in Switzerland, Austria, France and Britain.
And after a few nights I became friends with the telephone operatores in Falomo, who, whenever I entered that centre, greeted me with a loud: “Good evening Mr. Moya, Oyingo Peppe, you want Cologne, Hamburg, and and you want dat call kia-kia, no be so!“.
To which I replied: “Yessah!”
I then had to put down heavy ‘deposits’ for my longish calls, let’s say a thousand or more dollars, since at that time a single minute was still costing five dollars or so. And then I had to wait till my first call went through. There was thus ample time to cater form my operator friends. Very soon the operators had chose a ‚small-boy’, whose first task was to write down a list of what his colleagues wanted and then to go out into the street, shopping for ice-cream, for da Ladies, and delicious Suya sticks for da men.
Half an hour later Abiola would ‘deliver’, serving ice-cream, Suya and even Dodo. The correspondent was also being served.
And then the correspondent was ‚put through’ immediately to the German phone centre in Francfurt and from there to all of his stations. Well, sometimes that Francfurt centre was simply told that those calls would be coming ‘in no time at all-o’, but that for the time being we were having... a meal. But once that meal had been ‚devoured’ the calls went through one after the other – an kia-kia!
To the bewildered, shocked amazement of the long queue of Lebanese and Indian families who had been waiting there for hours, hours before the correspoident even arrived.
They simply had to swallow that ‚da white man, our friend-o’ has an important job to do…’, got preferential treatment.
Well, my children, you known that in Germany people are very strict, when it comes to financial matters, and so Uncle Gerd had to ‚justify’ his nightly expenses for all those many ice-creams and Suya sticks. And Uncle did find a away, by simply writing his own bill and ‘justifying’ those expenses as “speeding up phone calls at Falomo.”
And since Uncle never-ever went to prison for faking his travel expenses the accounts section of his radio stations must have believed him- na true-o! |
