16 — Deolu

June 25, 2016

16 — Deolu

I tend to oversleep anytime I wake up in the middle of the night. Yesterday was one of those days.

For some reason, IBEDC have chosen to only supply us with electricity at night in the past few weeks. Most of my (research) work requires staring at a screen for hours whilst pecking at the keyboard. This coupled with the fact that my laptop battery barely lasts past the hour mark, I’m forced to wake up the moment I feel cool breeze from the standing fan on my skin.

Well, wake up I did, but it took another 15 minutes to convince myself that I really had to stand up and get some work done. I needn’t have bothered. Power was cut even before my laptop completed its boot sequence. Sleep was destroyed nonetheless.

It was only 3:30 so I reckoned I could get a couple more winks before the day started in earnest so I went back to the bed, grabbed my phone and opened the twitter app (sleep is for the weak). Two hours later, I was watching prank videos on YouTube when my phone gave me that pesky “battery low” warning. That was my cue to shut my stubborn eyes, I had to meet a friend at the Post Office at 10 anyway.

True to form, I didn’t wake up till 9:30. Tobi (my friend) had already called twice and sent a Whatsapp message. “We’re still on for 10, I’m just about to leave home”, I swyped across my keypad in reply. I was only 19 minutes late — a whole 41 minutes early by Nigerian standards.

Thirty minutes after opening my post office box (with a screwdriver, because bad luock) to withdraw the slips that we’d use to collect the packages from China we’d been awaiting for over 4 weeks, the people at the counter had still not attended to us. It took a further ten minutes before they found two of the three packages and told us to come back for the last one “later”. I gave the lady N200 for the packages (even though they were clearly marked “FREE”) because she asked nicely and didn’t sound entitled, as public officials are wont to.

It was only 11am but it already felt like a whole day.

—

‘Deolu (@vernalsage) | Engineer, Reader, Researcher and Procrastination guru. I’m a study in contrasts. On a journey to self-discovery, and not liking what I’m err… discovering.