This is the last in the questions at the end series. I'm considering compiling them unto one blog post, but that's a matter best considered later. I find that the more personal things are, the harder it is for me to post them. The time is ripe for this one.

The Questions at the end 1
The Questions at the end 2

When will they be answered?
These questions that spanned three chapters.
We stayed with you from one through three
But were only met with obscurity.

It matters not that we knew nought,
The answers mean just as much.
We feel just as bad as you,
For not knowing what you went through.

I need not tell you,
Look to the ode on Melancholy,
I knew but I didn’t listen,
I looked to the river Lethe,
And counseled with the poisons three.

Our questions have been answered,
These questions that spanned three chapters,
But still we are not free,
Our guilt will linger long after,
For we knew we had forsaken thee.

The truth is I had forsaken me,
Had I not, we never would have come to this,
I can’t forgive your transgressions,
What you thought transgressions were surely imagined.

Your questions have been answered,
The only questions now are about the here after.
I know not what comes next,
But, I’m here to see the rest.

Happy Days,
Afam.

Yesterday I regaled my misadventures with Vodafone in great detail, but I made no mention of the blackberry. I'll be frank. It has been quite sometime since i referred to that thing as a blackberry. It leaves a funny taste in my mouth. Whenever I refer to my blackberry the prefix crack, struggle, bad or shit is usually used to replace black. Why do I have cause to insult my blackberry so? Don't worry I'll tell you.


My first blackberry was the 8520 curve. I was so excited when I got it but I wish I'd read some reviews before hand. That's not to say that I have since read some reviews of the phone, because I haven't. I haven't got the time. What I can tell you is that we of  the Afam household have a three year old 8520 in our stores. The phone currently functions as a land line, or a desk top. If you disconnect it from the power source the device has the mobile phone equivalent of a stroke. You're probably thinking that I should replace the phones battery right? But why should I do this when the Nokia E90 communicator that I used to use is still completely functional after 6 years of use?

I was not informed that when I purchased the blackberry curve 8520, I would be buying an uncooperative twit with no respect for my social life. The phone was possessed. It hard reset when it felt like, deleted my blackberry messenger contacts when it had bad days and generally tried to disrupt my life in every manner possible. When a phone displays that the battery is full and then proceeds to die in the next 30 minutes, that phone is taking the Mickey. My 8520 was stolen in Chicken George and I was relieved. I was due for an upgrade so I planned to get the newest blackberry. I thought that the phone would be free of the personality issues that had come with the one before it.

The first flaw of the blackberry bold 9780 is that it looks just like the blackberry bold 9700. What's the point of getting the newest phone if it is exactly the same as the old one? Apple had the good sense to equip the iphone 4s with Siri but blackberry was not as clever. In my opinion they only changed the colour of the casing and downloaded their newest operating system. That operating system was also available to those with the previous bold. The phone worked fairly well, until 6 months after procurement. I was using it during a light drizzle when it hard reset itself and refused to reboot . I took it to the Vodafone store, where it was diagnosed with water damage? Water damage? From a drizzle? If I were to put my phone away every time there was a light drizzle in Manchester then I would never use my phone. I was given a courtesy phone by Vodafone as a replacement. They gave me the 8520. I promptly turned it off and placed it in the box. I had no need for it.

I informed the Vodafone staff that I was returning to Nigeria for three months, so I would be unable to pick up my phone until September. During the holidays, they informed me that my phone was fixed and ready for collection. I ignored this because I had told them where I was going and they could hardly expect me to purchase a thousand pound ticket for the sole purpose of picking up a troublesome phone. I returned to the United Kingdom only to find that they had disconnected the courtesy phone, because my phone was ready to be picked up. Did they not remember that I had left the country?

On the day of my arrival, I marched to the Vodafone store to collect my blackberry that had supposedly been fixed only to find that it had not actually been fixed.

VODAFONE, BUT WHY?

(You can see that Vodafone is highly skilled in the art of corporate spanking).
It gets worse. 

The lady then told me that insurance could no longer take care of the repairs because I did not report their negligence and inefficiency after the phone had been fixed. I was stunned. I could not believe what I was hearing. This would mean that Vodafone had sent my phone off for repairs, received the phone unfixed and left it on their shelves for three months. Does such a thing seem possible. The repairs were not free. I had paid £25 pounds for them. That doesn't include the insurance premium that I pay monthly. I was informed that because I did not pick my phone up 2 weeks after it had been returned it could no longer be repaired by the insurance company. After I had gone through the trouble of telling the staff at the store that I was returning home for the holidays and that because of this I would not be able to pick up my phone immediately.

Had I not argued for several minutes about this, I would have paid for the repairs myself. In all honesty I might as well have paid for the repairs myself. The repairs would have cost £100 at the most. It is always and everywhere infinitely preferable to gain satisfaction from expenditure, than it is to lose satisfaction and a general sense of well being from expenditure. I fail to see how this can pass for customer service? It isn't even bad customer service, it's crazy!

When all was said and done, the phone wasn't repaired. I was given a brand new one phone. After all the stress I had gone through to get it fixed, I didn't want a new phone, I wanted my phone. While all this fixing was going on they added more strokes to the corporate lashing I was receiving by giving me a first generation samsung courtesy phone. They didn't even spring for a 1st generation nokia. I'm sure that I don't need to detail the damage my social life suffered as a result of this.

I find it amusing that I no longer know how to use 1st generation phones properly. Texting with one of them is IMPOSSIBLE!!

The new Blackberry 9780 was not as sturdy as the old one. It was like the reincarnation of my 8520, it did things as it pleased. It could not open web pages of a certain size, but I didn't mind too much after my experience with the samsung, I found great comfort in the qwerty keypad.

Yesterday my blackberry found itself in the Atlantic ocean. Although efforts to rescue it were successful, it remains an invalid in the sack of rice that the Afam household keep in the kitchen. If I know anything about my phone, I know that it shall use this opportunity to enjoy a quiet passage to the after life. So what should I do? After my experiences I will not be handing the phone to vodafone for fixing. I'd rather buy another.  I will not make any promises or overly bold proclamations, but I can assure you that the times they are a-changin'. In the mean time I'll make do with my trusty nokia.

I feel bad that I should have any cause to complain so. I would really prefer it if I never had to complain at all, that I may restrict my efforts to the enjoyment of the Earth and all the things inside it. But now that it's done, I can focus on better, more positive things, like my recent ungraduation from uni and my Lagosian adventures. Onward and Upward!!!

Happy Days
Afam

One of the problems associated with being a rambler is that we often forget to listen. We ramble about this and that. We make noise about everything and anything. We even forget to pause for breath. We scream ourselves hoarse and asphyxiate ourselves with our banter. Then we find that we have nothing to talk about, for because of our incessant yammering, we have missed whatever it was that happened while we were chanting. This is exactly what happened to me tonight. I came on here, ready to start going on about something and I realized that I had nothing interesting to say. So I turned to twitter. Twitter, is a bank of half formed ideas and unanswered questions.

Tonight I stumbled upon this gem of a quote from one Yam who writes poetry.

"One's more likely to risk being themselves at night than say the day and I think that's because the morning seems so far away."
AZone

When I read things like this, I find myself doing the craziest things, like counting syllables and wondering where else I could read something like this or wondering about the sort of individual that would say such. Would it be a Master talking to an Apprentice or a middle aged man feeling nostalgic about his youth. I think it's the latter. At first I couldn't make sense of it. So I mentally inserted a comma after each word thinking about where it was I was supposed to pause so that the couplet would gain some meaning. When the meaning did come I still stared at it, trying to wrest even more from it.

Would it mean more if I read it like this:

One's more likely to risk being themselves at  night than say the day,
and I think that's because the morning seems so far away.

The top line has 15 syllables and the bottom 14. There's some assonance at the end of the first line but not enough that it is immediately obvious. What could it really mean?

 To come up with a reasonable answer I decided to have a conversation with myself.

Afam: Are you more yourself at night?
Fam: When are you ever not yourself?
Afam: I'm not sure I follow?
Fam: Well, regardless of what you do, it's still you that has done whatever it was that you did so it must be part of you. To decry some of your actions as not being you because they are unlike you would be a farce because the fact that you did those things would mean that on some level they are you. So the you at night is exactly the same as the you in the morning, even though you might behave differently.
Afam: True, but maybe you're taking it a little to literally.
Fam: How do you mean?
Afam: Well, it's dark at night
Fam: You have a gift for stating the obvious
Afam: Thanks. And when it's dark we tend to do things that we hope no one else notices. Like the time we went dancing on the streets of Manchester in the pouring rain because we were feeling a little jolly.

How I remember the experience.

Fam: That was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Don't knock it.
Afam: True, but we did this at night when we thought no one would see us because had they seen we would probably have been institutionalized.
Fam: Again with the obvious.
Afam: Stop being pedantic. That's the answer. There are only some parts of ourselves we reveal at night when no one else is watching and that's only because the morning, which in this case is a metaphor for discovery, seems so far away.
Fam: I still don't see how this is of any real importance. The price of fish in the market remains unchanged.
Afam: Away.

This my friends, foes and frefoes is a lesson in madness.

Happy Days, Mellow Nights.
Afam