Respect is reciprocal

During a party that my family organized recently, I went to collect food from one of the caterers’ tent and told the lady serving to serve me some things. I noticed that she was not cheerful. As she served the Chinese noodles, a strand was dangling at the edge of the plate but she did not adjust it and I did not have the courage to correct her. When her boss saw it some seconds later, she asked ‘what is this rubbish, why are you so daft?’ I was shocked at her insulting tone because it has been long I heard any boss insult a subordinate.
The countenance of the lady became worse than I met it. She was more sluggish and was frowning through out. It was obvious that if she had her way, she would rain abuses on her boss and walk away. In this day and age, people especially those in the market place should know that the easiest way to get the best out of people is to respect them. Evidently, this would not be the first time the lady will suffer verbal abuse from her boss and because of this, she was not getting the best out of her. What the boss did not know is that it’s her own business that will suffer eventually. It means she is using her attitude to ruin her business and in turn, herself.
As for me, if you call me daft, then I will become daft to you. If you call me useless and I become useless to you, please do not complain. I have heard from so many wives that when a wife respects her husband, she can get almost anything from him. I want to believe this applies a little bit to everyone.

I murdered the Fish

On the first day of this year, I was asked to kill some numbers of mud fish (the one that is popularly called cat fish). If you are familiar with the procedure, you will know that this specie is quite slippery and tricky and if one is not careful, the killer is the one that will be the victim, not the fish. This is why people make sure that when they want to kill them, they temporarily disorient them by hitting their heads slightly, then the killer holds the head (with the tail shaking violently) and decapitates it. Failure to hold the head well might reduce the number of fingers you have on your hand. Even after completely severing the head, it still remains alive for a while. Talk about endurance.

So here I was on Jan 1, trying to kill one of the fish, but instead of hitting the fish slightly, I was too hard on it. Because of the hard covering of the head, it did not break but it got a slight dent. All of a sudden, the fish started shaking fiercely, I see them shake all the time but I had never seen anything like that. I knew that it was in serious pain, then it opened its mouth very wide and the whole body swole, it spew out blood and went still and the whole body relaxed. Fish coughing blood? Things like this happen only in nollywood.

I really pitied the fish because I knew I did not kill it, I murdered it. I was a sad sight to watch. The other person with me also felt bad and any other person that saw the scene would have felt that way also.

It then hit me, if we could feel this bad for a fish we were going to eat, how people able to murder fellow human beings without any feeling of compassion. Some of us are very mean to each other, engaging in extreme human torture. Terrorists use a form of brainwashing to recruit mass murderers, I define this type of brainwashing as washing away one’s conscience.

Also, talk about human riot acts, suicide bombings, war without reason and other forms of terrorism. There was the picture that was circulating on facebook showing some people who had just slaughtered a man. They were holding some parts of the body while the main body was just lying there, it was gory. They obviously had no conscience, and when there is no conscience, there can’t be feeling. Hitting or shooting someone and running away is one thing but someone actually staying there, watching and enjoying the scene as he watches a fellow human suffer to death is in sane. I always thought one of the things that differentiates us from animals is conscience, but tell me, how do these people turn to such inhumane creatures?

Blackberry Craze

‘Why didn’t you buy a blackberry? Why didn’t you buy a blackberry?’ Everyone keeps asking me, when they see my Nokia E63 phone. To say that I have been asked this question over 100 times is not an understatement. There’s this expectation everywhere in Lagos now that, once you need a new phone and can afford an expensive one, then you should go for a blackberry.

I am of the opinion that the place where people abuse this device most is the church. Can you imagine that one day, while I was sitting in church during a service, two people, one on my left and another on my right suddenly brought their blackberry and started using it right in the middle of the sermon. Guess what they were doing: yeah, you guessed right, facebooking and chatting. I was really pissed off. So many had been flashing blackberries in my face for a long time and I can’t even escape into my comfort zone while in church? People even put it as their facebook status, ‘facebooking in church’ or something similar to that, it is really shameless.

I was impressed during cross over service when the guy beside me brought out his blackberry and started taking sermon notes. Though I thought it unnecessary but at least, he was not using it to check facebook notifications. It seemed really funny to me because the people that were using pen and paper were faster and more effective than him. Before he concludes a sentence on point on his blackberry, the pastor would have reeled in about 5 more points. I also wondered why in the past, I never saw people take sermon notes with their Sagem, Trium, Nokia 3310… or Nokia N70, even though these phones have the facility to do that.

The truth is that blackberry was created mainly for business purposes, especially for business and career people who are always on the go but must always have access to their clients and mails all the time. But what do we have now? Every Tom, Dick and Harry uses a blackberry, whether they need it or not, even some youths that do not have enough money to cater for themselves must have that blackberry. To say blackberry has snatched the Nokia market in Lagos would be an understatement. The blackberry that the western worlds have used in the past and wasn’t a big deal to them has hit us and we are still trying to find our balance.

Also, have you also noticed that people that use blackberry don’t refer to it as ‘my phone’ but as ‘my blackberry? Or is it not a phone anymore? Madness!