My First Trip: Day Nine

Disclaimer: This is an edited version of my diary from November 2000. Some information contained may be incorrect, and opinions I expressed then are not the opinions of Aaron Rowe in 2006. I have posted it purely for the Novelty value.

Tuesday 28th November 2000

First week done

So I've been here over a whole week now. I think I'm starting to like the place, Its got something indescribable about it that makes you like it when in reality it is a hellhole. I guess if we didn't have the infrastructure we've got like drivers, security guards, cooks and housekeepers, I would find it a bit difficult to relax enough to enjoy it here. It's kind of like being on holiday but you have to work for 9 hours during the day and at evening you can kick back and relax.

Shopping

So a shower and breakfast and it was off to work. Today's mission to put together a specification for 15 Office Desktop PCs and travel around Lagos with B2... getting quotations for these systems. We got 4 quotations and one company that had stopped dealing with computers. The cheapest quote was 95,000 Naira per box, the most expensive was 230,000 for pretty much the same things. The cheapest offers were for systems that were going to be built in Nigeria using components that you can get here. The more expensive systems were branded products like Compaq and Dell imported from the UK.

I was far more impressed with the offices for the people selling the branded machines. one guy offering to build them for us wouldn't let us in to see what he had! The company I think we should go with was offering DELL 733MHz P3 with 128 MB Ram for 176,000 N each (about £1000). This comes with 3 year warranty and the satisfaction of dealing with the company that supplies Shell and Mobil out here with about 500 machines each. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! (you'd have to know what a Beowulf cluster was of course)

More Shawarma!

By the time we'd finished traipsing around it was too late to get lunch at the house so we went to the Shawarma place again. Yumm.

In the afternoon I tried to help D... deal with all the calls he was getting offering to supply our computers. We had a call from one of the people who we spoke to yesterday with regard to purchasing a new laptop for D.... They offered us a good price so we took them up on the offer. They said they would deliver tomorrow.

Park 'n' Shop

We got home for dinner at around 5ish and before we enjoyed some of V...'s spagbol we headed out to Park n Shop the local supermarket to get some more booze and snacks. We've got an account here too but this time E... was due to hand over a cheque. I think the total was over 2 Million Naira (about £11,000). This did include Furniture, a TV & video and other Electrical equipment D... had bought for the apartment as well as a supply of food for the last few months. While we were eating it was pointed out that there were 4 bottles of wine about to go off in the cupboard and we'd better finish them off before they go bad. So 6 people split 4 bottles and we got through it all by about 10:00. D... went home around then and we gradually all drifted off to our bedrooms.