AWOOF! TWICE BEATEN, ONCE SHY
Apart from my mother’s prayers, I cannot explain what kept me awake that night let alone what kept me awake till past 2 o’clock. There were nights when I stayed up to read or to write or to do some browsing online about things I consider relevant. And on the nights when I did, I was usually in bed already by 2 o’clock, sometimes 3 o’clock, but I was almost never close to my phone and even when I was, it always never caught my attention, there always so much more to do with my laptop that my phone never matched. This was not one of those nights. On this very night, I was just fooling around on the Internet with nothing particular in mind to achieve. I should have gone to bed much earlier, perhaps 2 hours earlier but I stayed awake for absolutely no reason whatsoever. By exactly 2:27AM my phone screen lightened up (my phone did not even vibrate; I usually left it on Do not disturb mode). Ordinarily I would have just ignored it. Notifications of all sort and of little relevance come up at odd hours throughout the day. My first thought was that this was one of them, perhaps even from almighty phone stalkers aka Network providers. I should have ignored it but then something pushed me to just have a look. It was an alert from my bank. $5 had been debited from my account. I was billed for some website subscription I made a month ago. I had no intention to pay. I had only subscribed so I could enjoy a month free trial. Apparently my free trial was expended and it was time to pay. The Bible passage that says “the Lord shall come like a thief in the night” suddenly became very clear to me.
The Glory of His Grace | The Time of His Coming is Like the Thief in the Night
At the time I made the subscription, I had recently withdrawn the greater sum of what was in my account and so what was left in it was very minimal. What was on my mind was that considering the pandemic, it was going to remain like that for quite a while, at least more than a month. So by the time I was to be billed, my card would be rejected and the website would automatically cancel my subscription from the plan, while in the meantime, I enjoyed their free trial offer for a month. Clever yeah?
Very foolish my dear. Within the month, some money was sent to me for keeps. A good sum it was. It wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t going to be mine, I was just supposed to keep it safe in my account. The owner of the money had some issues with her own account at the time and so had to keep it somewhere else. I was asked for help and I accepted to help.
I know you must be wondering why I’m making so much noise over $5. $5 dollars is indeed not much of a problem; it’s just a little below 2000 naira. My noise is not over the $5 I was billed. It is over the $183.99 I would have been billed. Do the math. The same night I subscribed for the $5 plan, I also subscribed for a $183.99 plan on another website. I encountered both websites on a virtual conference I attended 30 days earlier. And I made both subscriptions right about the same time, the latter only a few minutes later than the former.
My foolishness had cost me quite some money a few years ago. I had subscribed also for some other plan just so I could take advantage of the free trial offer. I kept postponing cancelling the subscription till I eventually forgot I had even subscribed. A month later I was debited. When I got the alert this time, the feelings from the previous occurrence just came rushing in like a river bursting its banks. Apparently one beating was not enough for me to be shy, let alone twice shy. Now I had been beaten a second time, and a third was looming.
Quickly I tried logging in into the latter website to cancel my subscription. I did but I could not cancel the subscription. Cancelling the subscription required one putting a phone call through to their customer care line in the US. But I couldn’t even possibly reach the customer care since their lines were closed on that day. Apart from that, honestly I wasn’t even willing to spend any extra money. I froze for 2 minutes. Within the 2-minute freeze my brain powered off, reset, and restarted. I was racing against time and without the advantage of knowing just how much time I had, I became really anxious. But then I thought, I could transfer as much as possible away from my account into another one so by the time the billing was to be done there wouldn’t be enough money in my account to make a successful transaction. I did exactly so. I transferred as much as I possibly could at once away from my account into my sister’s account.
2:44 AM of the same night I received an email from the website notifying me of a failed transaction, just as I had imagined it. Sleeping early that night, ignoring my phone’s screen light, failing to make the connection between both subscriptions, acting 14 minutes later from the first billing, or having possible bank network issues and I would have been telling a different story. The awoof blood in me would have stopped flowing, thickened and then lumped into a different type of blood agar. And I would have been thinking of ways to market the agar to cover the debt. I couldn’t even sleep till 6 in the morning.
Now that I’m shy, you want my candid advice? All right. I want my own advice too because I’m hoping that I’ll heed to it myself (remember the awoof blood still flows in me). Many a man is many a speaking but little the doing. It’s human to give an advice we never ourselves follow. It should not be surprising though, the mind muscles too fast for the muscles. In Norse’s myth of Thor’s journey into the land of the giants, we read of how Hugi, an ethereal looking giant summoned by Uthgard-Loki (the king of giants) easily outraced Thjalfi (Thor’s counterpart who could outrun anything in the wild) in a battle for speed. Uthgard-Loki made it clear to Thor later on that there was no way Thjalfi could have kept up with the speed of Hugi, since Hugi was in fact his own thought. But we don’t need a god to confirm that for us, do we? It is common sense. It is no hypocrisy to speak better than we act; we all fall short of our words. Only the dumb does not, and it is so because he says nothing. In the final analysis even the dumb falls short of his words because he says nothing yet does something. If the criterion to speak then were to do, who would dare speak? The world would be silent and as a consequence deedless. But words in and of themselves are deeds. Speaking is an act, words could be verbs (action words). And even so much so, words take a more active form. They yank at the hearts of men, lecture the willing, shove the hesitant, praise the worthy, condemn the culprit, comfort the broken, lead the lost and so on and so forth. Words do a lot of things; words are deeds. Isn’t that why it is said that “the pen is mightier than the sword?” But anyway, I have digressed too far. Here is my advice and it’s a simple one as you may have expected:
TedEd |The myth of Thor's journey to the land of giants - Scott A. Mellor |Time – 2:05
No matter how yanfuyanfu or berekete they are, avoid all awoofs as much as you can. You may get away with them often but remember like I realized that these things come like a thief in in the night, a time when you least expect. Now I know you may find it difficult to avoid all awoofs and to resist the temptations to free trials, I don’t blame you, it’s hard to go against your Nigerian nature. If so, be smart, smarter than I was that is. Cancel all subscriptions as soon as you can, and set reminders if you think you may forget. Even if you think you won’t, don’t take any chances, still set reminders. There is a 1% mischance that you will and you may just fall victim of that. A man be lucky 99 out of 100 times (which is very unlikely; 9 out of 10 is more realistic), but then the 100th time does come, and maybe sooner than the 21st. On the positive side, be optimistic. Have a positive outlook about the future. Our future reality can positively or negatively be influenced by our expectations because our expectations may cause us to behave in certain ways that make such expectations come to pass. The psychological literature on this is clear – and the fancy term for this is called the Pygmalion effect. So yes be optimistic. Unlike me, think you will (or rather your bank account) be better with time. Optimistic people always fair better than those who are not. Beware of the optimism bias though, sometimes you really just have to be as realistic as you can in weighing your options out. In any case it still pays better to be optimistic than to not be. And seriously, let’s even leave aside what even happened to me, never underestimate a mother’s prayer.
May you not be misfortunate.
By Ogunkoya Oluwamuyiwa
Member NIMELSSA EDITORIAL BOARD 19/20
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