Planning I: Conquering the phobia
Chapter 2:
I lost my dad to a fatal accident before I turned five years old. Ever since that incident, traveling became a no-no. Going from Lagos to Ife (my school location) or vice versa was always traumatic for me. In fact, I did not go for any field trip or whatever throughout my school days (primary to university).
In the second week of January 2013, I arrived Enugu state. That was the day I think I finally overcame my phobia for traveling. I started loving traveling; did several long distance travels after then. In fact, I once took bike from Akwa Ibom to Aba and back on the same day. Later in 2013, I had a spoken word performance at Ibadan and had to travel, but did not want our Head of Operations (Mr Tony) to know. So I arranged with my direct manager (John) and left. Coincidentally, a certain Segun (a technician in Ebonyi) had sent his resignation letter directly to him. Mr Tony called my manager to ask why my number was switched off and where I was, sadly, I wasn’t in town. Everything was adding up to Mr Tony and he responded to the Segun’s mail by expressing his disappointment and “CCed” the chiefs and my line manager. It was when my manager saw the mail that he called me to confirm if I resigned. “How?” My manager then immediately had to call Mr Tony to tell him it was another Segun and not me.
Few hours after everything had died down, I called Mr Tony; “Good evening sir, how is work going sir?”. “Fine Segun, what’s up?” he replied. Then I threw in a joke; “Sir, I heard that I resigned today” We both laughed. As funny as that story was, it was one of the defining moments for me. Since 2013, my official phone has never been switched off for more than 3 mins. I also realized my worth and that I was adding huge value to the organization. I learnt to check the email address of whoever I am sending an email to. And I also made up my mind that whenever I was going to resign, I had to do it right.
Back to January 2013…the twelve of us were in Enugu for 4 months and were popularly referred to as “Tony Boys”, maybe because Mr Tony was the brain behind the program, maybe because of the way he judiciously championed it end-to-end. Mr Tony would give us tasks and watch closely how we delivered, how we analyzed and reported, how we worked with the field engineers and got information from them. When it was time to deploy us across the regions, everyone was praying not to be posted to Aba. Aba was a danger zone and a career killer. The place was governed by employees who were cabals, corruption there was on the high in the field, and the workers were very powerful and uncooperative. So Mr Tony decided he would need two strong guys to turn around things in Aba and then chose Tosin O. and I to become regional admins/supervisors for the Aba zone. We were supposed to support the field engineers (about 15–20 people) to ensure optimal uptime on all the sites and then be the bridge between the HQ and the region.
It was like an episode of 1000 ways to die in my head. I was very sad but the only consolation I had was that I was going with Tosin. However, my heart got broken when one of us (Tony boys) left and Tosin was going to replace the person. That meant that I was going to be handling that role in Aba all alone. “Whaaaaaat?” I knew there was nothing I could do but show courage. I could not go back to Lagos; the memory of Ay’ begging for the job flashed before me. So I summoned up courage and told Mr Tony that I could and would do it. I said it like a man. Inside me, I was a chicken, in tears.
End of April 2013, I received my letter showing that I was no longer a trainee and that my salary had been increased by around 2.5x. I packed my bag, said goodbye to Enugu and welcomed Aba. I said to myself, “If I can conquer this Aba, then I can conquer the world”. The challenge ahead was sort of exciting me in a weird manner.
You can read the next chapter here >> Planning II: The Tests
