My First Trip: Day Ten

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.

Wednesday 29th November 2000

Ugg

I found it difficult to get up this morning, I got downstairs just as D... arrived, and we had our breakfast. I tried some of "Fancy Boy's" Coffee. W... the Canadian guy who left last Friday, brought his own coffee Swiss White Chocolate Flavour. The directions ask for 2 tablespoons for one mug so I thought this was going to be something special. but it didn't taste much like coffee or white chocolate so it was a bit of a disappointment. The label proudly indicates that it uses all artificial flavouring. I call it Fancy Boys Coffee because whenever W... got it out for breakfast S... would say, "Oh Look at Fancy Boy here with his Fancy Boy Coffee". We thought this was pretty funny and so now W... has this nickname when we aren't being serious.

I headed into the office with the other guys, and was told to go with B2... one more time to look for CD rewriters. B2... was also going to look for some drugs for J2... who'd hurt her ribs on our boat trip and was getting steadily worse as the days have gone by. B2... hadn't come back from the black market where he was getting us some fairly used tyres for the Toyota LandCruiser and the American Chevrolet Luminas that we have. We have those because you can't get parts for them easily here. And this is a deterrent that hopefully stops the highwaymen stealing them from us.

Back out around Lagos

After B2... came back with the tyres we went around some pharmacists and found that none of them stocked the exact Drug that J2... wanted, but had something similar. We thought it best to check with her but couldn't get through on the phone. So I went back to the house for lunch and spent the rest of the day at the office, It didn't look like we'd have time to visit any computer shops. D...'s new Laptop arrived with this shifty looking bloke, one of the guys I met on Monday. He showed us the laptop, it's box looked a bit odd but everything inside was new and still sealed except the laptop because it had been fitted with 256 MBs of RAM which I verified quicker than the guy who brought it. The man said he would prefer cash as payment and had brought a suitcase to carry the money away in, but with the largest note we have available being 100s that's at least 3800 notes which would have taken a while to count and check for the obvious forgeries. So E... insisted on paying by cheque. This is a risky thing for a business to accept in Nigeria but we had the guy talk to our bank manager who assured him that we would honour the payment.

We told the guy about our requirement for 15 new Desktop PC's and his eyes lit up, when we told him they would all be networked he got even more excited and said he would like to give us a quotation for this work. So I got some plans of the office printed, so that he could measure up the cabling required. This is something I could do but I'd rather let someone else climb ladders and drill holes through walls in Nigeria, the ladders look like death traps. It would also save me all the hassle of getting network equipment sorted, which I could see would be a problem.

Too many people to talk too

Later the man from the company offering Dell machines came round to speak to me and show me his revised price which is even better than before. There might be a problem because to save money they are coming by ship where they can be hidden in the back of a container so they don't get import tax. This is normal practice in Nigeria but means we have to wait a while for them to arrive. We need them in two weeks before I go home preferably, else D... will have to supervise it all himself.

I had a phone call from the first guy I visited on Monday, asking me why I hadn't called him. I told him that we were offered a much better price, and the option of having the 256Mb Ram pre-installed, with the machine delivered within two days, and in fact we received it that afternoon and were using it now. He wanted to know if there was anything else we needed and I told him about the 15 machines and he got excited and wanted to visit me tomorrow, I told him no problem and to come around 2pm.

Working by myself at last

D... wanted me to put some of the important stuff on his old laptop onto his new one. I decided to use the current office network to do this and it took about an hour. I copied 600 MBs of documents 200 MBs of email his address book and a copy of lotus notes from the UK office he doesn't have the installation disk for in Nigeria.

So a pretty busy day, and I was really tired and after dinner I wanted to go straight to bed. D... gave me his old laptop to use now, while I'm here so that I can clean it out and check my own email. I have to make sure its all fit to go to some other person before I leave.

J2... asked me to help her produce some Certificates for the office staff she is giving computer training to. I eventually ended up doing 78 of them! And some of the names are just beyond my comprehension. Like M.... I............ who seems the keenest to learn computer skills here. I eventually finished producing them all and could now print them off at the office tomorrow. I typed a little bit more into this diary, and then slept very well. I don't get paid overtime at the moment so why I did all this I don't know.