Immediately I finished service. I had to leave Lagos and came down to Abeokuta, where I schooled. It had always been in my plan to settl...
Immediately I finished service. I had to leave Lagos and came down to Abeokuta, where I schooled. It had always been in my plan to settle down in Abeokuta. From the 1st day I landed here, I knew I was gonna spend a very long time here. The City is many things apart from what is obtainable in Lagos. So much devoid of the hustling and bustling, less traffic, less people.
Sometime I would be in Oshodi after spending like a year in Abeokuta, I would be like ' damn, am I still on planet earth? The people are just too much, the crowd is sickening, seriously. The Nigerian government has a lot to do. Every other state should be developed equally and people shouldn't see any more reason why they should want to travel down to LAGOS only.
I tried supporting my Online business then with some offline stuffs. I was able to later on get a grant of about N150,000 from my dads boss, and from my personal savings during service year as well, which was about N100,000, I decided to go into recharge card distribution, in bulk. My Modus Operandi was to get directly from the marketers, who bought from Lagos and so sold to me at cheaper bulk price.
So when I buy, I just got home and sort and distributed within the locality. I had this sports bag I bought during service year. It surely came in handy at that moment. I really did well in that business. Though a lot of people will consider it so devoid of tangible profits, especially the MTN Airtime. Then we would buy MTN Pack for like N950 and sold for N960. Just N10 profit, you would say.
But due to my distributing strategy, I was able to sell between 70-100 packs of MTN on a daily basis. And for the other networks, I sold less packs, but they had more profit margin per pack. I was so lucky then to get a direct company that printed GLO, I would get Glo for N890 and sold for N950 and at least, I sold 30 packs on a daily basis. My profit then was on the average N2500 daily. I was doing well, later i tried getting a shop and got video games for kids, even as I never liked playing the stuffs.
I would wanna believe the mistake I made later on was one of my greatest regrets in life. But since there is still life, life goes on. I later left the business and came down to LAGOS thinking I would be able to get a good job, as I had tried running some job tests online and passed easily, but never followed up because of my business.
You would all wonder why I would leave such a 'lucrative ' business like that. It wasn't so easy distributing. The stress was later tolling on me and I couldn't take it anymore. I got tired easily and not only that. I then became a target to most miscreants in the neighbourhood. They considered me so rich because I was into Airtime business and I was also considered so proud, just because I chose to keep to my self and not mingle.
So some guys were actually plotting to rob me and cause me injury. And as a lazy guy that doesn't fight and most times couldn't even defend myself in a brawl, not to talk of a girlfriend. The moment I got the tip-off from one of my customers that some guys were planning to attack me, I just reconciled the whole of my account and sold the stuffs I could sell and dashed off to Lagos. It was a not so good decision I made. As I would have restrategized and probably diverted the funds into other ventures or even stopped distributing and get an office to work from.
I saved the cash and invested into some stuffs like that. And travelled down to Lagos to begin the hustle. It was hell, I began to submit applications online. Write online tests, pay agents and so on. It wasn't an easy adventure at all. Sometimes, you would just get notifications of a job you did not apply for, making you wonder how these people got to know your status as being jobless. And funny enough, The interview or test would be slated for the following day. Then you begin to borrow money here and there, even borrow tie, sometimes shirt.
But it happened that most of these agents are fake. I remember going for one general interview like that in Ikeja, I thought it was a company, only to get there and discover it was just a 3-bedroom flat, rented by the so-called jobberman, we had to pay N500 each to take the test.
Initially, it was going on smoothly, people were registering with one albino boy like that who am very sure had not passed his SSCE Exams, now registering graduates for jobs that were probably non-existent. Then suddenly, the boy had an altercation with one guy that claimed he flew from Port-Harcourt to take the test, thinking it was a company. The frustration was what got to the guy, he later said he just felt he should write the test as you never could tell, then this Albino said something to him about him being jobless.
I was already taking my own test with a seriousness that was more than me writing an MTS101 Exams in the University. If the job was real, then I must get it. When I heard something that sounded like thunder, I thought it was a sound from the kitchen, because it was so obvious that apartment was residential. But no, it was a terrible slap on the Albinos face, he just said to my Warri Guy that the reason he was still jobless was because he couldn't follow instructions. Well the guy then decided not to follow the instructions that everyone should be orderly and gave him the slap of his life.
He must have fallen from his desk, as a sound of clinging woods followed the slap action. Before you knew it, everyone had gotten excited and within a space of 5 minutes the whole place had been vandalised. Their computer system was broken, tables scattered. Some people even went into the other rooms and started looting the items therein. Then I knew Graduates were not smiling.
We never knew who called the Police. They came and whisked this man away in their Van. We were so sure the case would be swept under the carpet. It was when we were leaving that I realized we were still lucky as Lagos residents, people came from different parts of the country to take this fake test. What a pity.
That was just the beginning of my bitter experience of my advent into getting a job in Lagos. I would be writing the final part of the tale, which was the FAKE APPOINTMENT LETTER I GOT TO A TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANY. It wasn't funny at all.
...READ THE FINAL EPISODE HERE
...READ THE FINAL EPISODE HERE
