MY FIRST JOB INTERVIEW
I was happily on my own when the job advert wiggled its attractive lascivious pay package in front of my jobless eyes. Given that the previous night, I had an awesome dream that I was popping bottles in Club Quilox in the Island where Davido and Wizkid were struggling on who would be my waiter, I felt Prophet Otu’s prophesy over my life “that your success in life will hit you like a train” was speedily coming to pass.
“Dem send you abi, na my village people send you to stop my shine, eh. Oluwa blind your eyes there.” A dream where Wizkid was shouting that at Davido during their tiff on who will carry my bottles of champagne could bring nothing but smiles; and this job advert seemed the realization of that dream and prophesy.
My jobless soul read on the promising job requirements thus:
· A suitable and experienced accounting professional needed urgently. (ICAN, ACCA an added advantage)
Well, I read Building Technology, not Accounting. But since my graduation, I have built nothing close to tech, let alone technology, except trying to build my jobless life. So I tell myself: “What would it really take? What does an accountant really do? Just count money. It is no Rocket Science, no landing man in space. Everybody counts money; market women count money; drunks and loonies count money. As for the acronyms attached, they’re there to scare people away. My mind tells me that I’ve passed requirement one.
· Applicant must not be more than 28 years old and must have four years work experience.
“Hah,” I exclaimed and exhaled the air globule in my lungs. “That one almost got me oo,” I thought.
I was safely 26. So the two years difference gave me some morale, felt like a decade to come. I smiled at the thought of how acceptably young I was. As for the years of experience, I debated within me if NYSC year is included. Never mind that I read Building Technology but NYSC had to be NYSC and made me teach Business Studies. Accounting equals counting and recording money; money is synonymous with business, and what could be more business than Business studies. My tentative logic leads me to adding NYSC experience.
Gbam, exactly four years, I narrowly escaped my village people.
· Applicant must be computer literate(competent in use of MS Word, Excel)
What do they take me for, an illiterate? Had Zuckerberg not stole the Facebook idea from my computer-savvy mind, my name would have rang bells like I was Michael Jackson of Africa.
· Applicant must reside in Nigeria and be willing to change locations at any moment’s notice.
They must be joking. Just give me the slightest chance and you’ll be talking to me in another time zone, safely away from the +234 international dial code. Oh thank God, she failed to trap my broke ass here, God’s help comes in different forms. This time, in form a rubber membrane!! I can change locations like fart in serene air.
· Remuneration (negotiable)
God knows you people must know my worth. You want to negotiate my pay,eh. Abasi Mbok, you will see.
All requirements safely ticked, village people beautifully disappointed, I smiled like a Nigerian policeman after getting a bribe.
No sooner had I left the advert poster than I realized that I had no suit. I had a white shirt and a black trouser — the universal colour code of all gentlemen and jobless Nigerian males.
Ok, my friend Gabriel came to mind. He’d have a suit, I thought. The problem I had was that this Gabriel was no angel. Cleanliness is next to holiness, they say. As for cleanliness, this Gabriel was more of untidy than dirty; as for holiness (I wish you could see how am laughing now), well, if you call routine coitus with Idara on the Lord’s Holy day of Sabbath holy, then am lost.
Gabriel didn’t disappoint. Dust covered suit, full of molds and mildew. I had to do what all boarders in secondary school know best — the magic of sponge and water. Soap was always a risk.
I arrived at the venue sweating like Anthony Joshua after the seventh round with Ruiz. The interview venue, a really fancy hotel, makes me walk as fast as I could away from the keke that just dropped me.
When I entered the waiting hall the receptionist directed me, I stepped out again. This can’t be the interview am coming for. The group I saw looked more like fashion models waiting for an audition.
Oh, beautiful creatures of mother earth that I saw, made me adjust my borrowed tie relentlessly. Curvaceous, luscious, gorgeous, sensuous, bodacious, name it, try as you can, you won’t finish the adjectives. Beautiful girls everywhere! So, now I immediately got angry with Building Technology — to many testosterones running about. Accounting is the bomb, I thought. Hiroshima is a child’s play.
I did what comes instinctively to all gentlemen, look around for my competition. The five boys I saw amidst about hundred girls, gave me hope. My confidence returned because I knew I was the last cock strutting about in this unspoken fight of hegemony over unclaimed estrogens.
Two of the boys could safely be mistaken for beautiful simians; one was dressed like a rainbow (hurt my eyes that one with colours); one was happy with his sleep, while the last one was happy with his revision notes- bookish as a librarian. Good for me.
The man who carried out the task of directing each person into the main interview room had whiskers for a moustache, a cat in the making.
Now, I totally forgot why I was there, and why I was smiling so much. I felt a tinge on my nether side, and it wasn’t from the cold from the AC. Beautiful creatures that made me want to sin sat in front of me, behind me, beside me. Who said my destiny didn’t lie in accounting?
I’m tempted to look mesmerizingly at the bounties, but the snare is that the more you look at a bounty, the higher the chance of getting caught by the eye of another prospective bounty. So, my eyes focused on the man with the feline whiskers and on the draped curtains.
I play gentleman for the first two damsels behind me, letting them take my place into the interview room (that was me managing my portfolio). The next on the queue was one of the simian-looking boys. He looked at me with expectation, and I looked right back at him, straight in the eyes. He looked at me as if I stole his extra life in mortal kombat game.
In the room, sitting alone in front of sixteen staring eyeballs at a round table, I realized that I loved Building Technology.
Upon whispering my name from my throat which I suddenly realized was strangled by too tight a tie, a voice asked:
“What is the meaning of ICAN?”
Honestly confused, I replied with a question, “Sir, Is that an English word? I have never heard that one before.”
Another voice added, “he means, I, C, A, N.”
“Oh, that? I’m sorry, Sir. It skipped my mind”.
I remembered seeing it in the advert. So I answered “It is an acronym, Sir.”
As pens busied, scribbling on papers, my demeanor changed, and I began sweating under the cold air-conditioned room. I suddenly realized my folly, accounting is not Building Technology. But I am not to blame entirely; the greatest shame went to the society, the system, the country that made a youth willing and able to work to be jobless in the first place. Desperation leads to desperation.
I left the place and never got the employers call again. I didn’t expect too. But I did expect that Chioma and Aisha will call. And they did. Lisa and Uduak needed some effort which I gladly expended.
I returned from my first interview disappointed but smiling with success — Lemons to lemonade
THE END
By EDIDIONG EDET
IN CELEBRATION OF 3RD JUNE.
