Jerome had just graduated from the university, and it was time to look for a job. He didn’t want to work in Nigeria, he wanted to work abroad. At the same time, he didn’t want to leave his girlfriend, Diana, in Nigeria. Jerome was excessively in love with Diana, so much that she occupied his memory for most part of the day. His friends said she had him in a cage. If they did something wrong, his reaction would be as fierce as a tiger, but if she did something wrong, he would pretend to be unaware. Who would blame him? Diana had terrific beauty, the type of beauty that played tricks on the minds of men. Everyone wanted her. Jerome knew that, so there was no way he would let go of her. His ultimate goal was for them to exchange rings, on the altar of Saint Peter’s cathedral, while the congregation watched in admiration.



And so when he got the job offer email from Hudder Ltd in California, offering him a full-time job worth £50,000 every year, he was dazed. It seemed the carrots he had just finished eating transmogrified into a psychedelic drug and he was hallucinating, except the image in his hallucinations was Diana. It was 10 p.m. at night. Who sends a job offer email by that time, he wondered. In his Diana-induced hallucinating state, he forgot that California was over 7,500 miles away from Lagos and that the two cities had different time zones. He shut down his laptop like it was some random electrical appliance – holding down the power button under the screen went off instead of clicking the power icon on the screen and allowing the device to actually shut down.



As he stood up from his chair, his phone rang and the caller was Diana. As usual, he didn’t hesitate to answer the call. “I was just about to call you love,” he started, “can you believe…” He was cut short because the voice on the other end wasn’t Diana’s, and whoever it was didn’t want to waste time in delivering their message. “Hello, are you a relative? The owner of this phone just had an accident and didn’t make it.” The voice was vivid, but to Jerome, it felt like Sub Zero’s brutality. He froze. Two years later, while working in California for Hudder Ltd, he told me this story, and I asked, “how did you survive that night?” “I don’t know, I really don’t know,” was his reply.