Rude, cantankerous, aggressive, disrespectful, unnecessarily argumentative, inclined to quarrelsomeness at the slightest provocation, unfriendly, impolite. In short, unwomanliness or mannerlessness, if there is any word in the Queen’s English like that. These, and some more, are some of the adjectives a member of my generation may use in describing girls of nowadays mothers now produce. It was, therefore, a truly breath of fresh air when at about 9. 21 am on Wednesday May 15, at the Ogoja, CRS office of the GLO telecommunication network, I had a very pleasant encounter with a GLO counter girl whose name I later found out is Victoria Bassey.
I had gone to the GLO office to recover my GLO line because my phone was stolen at a wedding ceremony I had attended on Saturday April 20. I had decided after this painful loss of yet another of my phone to practice some form of self-imposed isolation as a pointless protest against all stealers of phone for the sheer frustration and destabilization they cause to people. I also wanted to embark upon this pointless protest especially as I am in rural dwelling where very few means of communication are available to see how it feels like. And I can report now that it is not a very pleasant experience at all.
My first challenge was with members of my immediate family who, as the Africans that they are, worry endlessly about my frequent repair to the village where they think is a haven or original natural habitat or harbinger for witches and wizards! Two, since they do not like my engagement in agriculture in the first place, they worry also that I must have missed several appointment calls from the Tinubu government. Some of them say, if such a prestigious appointment they have in mind is not forthcoming from Tinubu, some international organizations who know my worth may be interested in head-hunting me and my being incommunicado may have thwarted a chance or two.
It surely feels so good to be thought of so highly by members of your family even if what they have at the back of their minds is something so substantial and so alluring that I will finally be persuaded to leave farming and the village and live in the big cities where they think witches and wizards do not dwell! They conveniently forget that a big city like Abuja is the village of the Gwaris.
Funny enough for me, when I reconnected with the Nigerian society and the world from my isolation, the only substantial thing I think I missed was development in the Nigerian football. I got from Channels Tv news bar the intelligence that the NFA was trying to hire former Nigerian international, Finidi George, as the head coach. What has become of Pseiro, the Technical Adviser from Christiano Ronaldo’s country? Is he still in place or is Finidi going to replace him? What is happening in our football house?
Whatever is my worry about what is happening in our house of football, the caressing marketing voice of Miss Victoria Bassey reminded me that I was in the GLO office to do ‘’a welcome back’’ as we say it here in Nigeria.
Victoria Bassey is a marketer may be by training but to me, a marketer by birth, which is why, I think, GLO hired her in the first place. She must have sufficiently displayed that potential or trait at her interview before a GLO headhunter noticed her and hired her before the organization got her natural potential honed to become the first class marketer I saw four days ago. As a marketer by birth and by training, Victoria also has several kilowatts of feminine charms. She is pretty, polite, cheerful, respectful and very, very friendly. Very, very different from the many girls and young women one sees these days some of whom are hired, as Victoria is, to do the same job she is doing. Many girls now think that if you are female and have that defining female part, it is a license to be insulting and disrespectful to especially men because they think every man wants that part of their body!
But Vicky was not like that to me and a young man she had attended to before me. She was professional and handled her clients with panache, especially in selling her company’s phone which was on display. She subtly and aggressively persuaded me to buy it but her pitch failed with me because I had already bought another phone before I met her.
The reason many girls of this generation cannot get married at the right ages does not have anything to do with jobless of the boys and the state of the Nigerian economy as held by many commentators. Rather, the matter has to do with the behavior of a good number of girls ripe for marriage. Their attitude puts off many desiring young men.
Unfortunately for me, there was one journalistic mistake I made that day: I could not use my skills to find out if Vicky was coupled or single in order to validate or disprove my assertion in the preceding paragraph. I could not because I did not want her to begin to think that my interest in her was becoming romantic. Whatever is the case, if Vicky is still single, it just means that there are some men who cannot recognize worthy things. And if she is coupled, it means that it is not only GLO that sees and values a valuable thing. I am not being a marketer to an expert marketer, I am only highlighting a kind of persons that is sorely going extinct in Nigeria but which need replicating. My salute to Ms Victoria Bassey. You made my day!
