A chance encounter with the Stutern twins at the Palms Lekki

A chance encounter with the Stutern twins at the Palms Lekki

By Hafiz Adewuyi   March 07, 2017   1 comment :

Good morning! It's Monday Tuesday, and if there's one thing I would like to tell you, it would be that last weekend was awesome for several reasons, one of which is the subject of this post.

On Saturday morning, I decided to stop by Shoprite at the Palms shopping mall, Lekki before heading to the office (no I don't work on weekends). Just as I made to leave the parking lot for the mall, I noticed the Stutern twins heading in my direction and towards the mall. I was trying to remove my debit card from my bag which I was going to leave behind in the car. I recognized them from the days when I used to visit CCHub regularly. But somehow, I managed to decide that I was not gonna say hello, just to avoid any social awkwardness. 

From L-R: Kehinde, Hafiz, a family of photobombing smileys and Taiwo

Alas! My evil anti-social plans would not survive the bigheartedness of the Stutern twins. As soon as they were within earshot of me, they stopped. Then one of them said something along the lines of, "it seems like I know you from somewhere". He was straining to remember where it was that he knew me from but I quickly came to the rescue. I told him of the days when I used to frequent ccHub, Yaba and how I have known them since their early days of starting Stutern. 

He was clearly surprised that I knew them in association with Stutern. So, I aptly went on to increase the surprise factor by mentioning how I knew about their partnership with Jobberman, as well as the recently launched JobPalava, a job review site for Nigerian employees. When I mentioned how cool I thought it was that they came up with JobPalava within a few weeks from when the idea was born on Twitter, I was told that one of them works on the back-end while the other does front-end development. The twins were beaming with smiles at this point. And I myself was grinning like a teenage groupie who ran into her number one pop-star crush.

We soon ran out out of small talk fodder and it was time to part ways. But just before we did, one twin gracefully asked for my name and what I do. I hope it didn't show in the way I said, "I work at ** check LinkedIn **; I'm a programmer there" that I'm not that excited about or proud of my work. Anyway, I think his response was: "wow, that's great", and he said it in a way that left me with no doubt about his sincerity.

Minutes later, as I walked into Shoprite, it occurred to me that writing about this encounter was a good blogging idea for the weekend. And in that instant, I regretted having not asked for a photo with the Stutern twins. I prayed in my heart that by a stroke of luck, I would run into them again before leaving the mall. Apparently, God was listening because as I walked towards the checkout aisle after buying mostly things that were not on my imaginary shopping list, I saw the Stutern twins standing side-by-side just ahead, with their backs at me. Yippee!

I walked quietly towards them and being the weirdo that I am, I stopped just behind them without as much as a sound to announce my presence. The twins were discussing with a friend whose birthday I later discovered was on that day. After like 7 seconds of being in stealth mode, perhaps due to some gesture from their friend who could see me all along, one twin finally turned around and blew my cover.

Without much ado, I told them of how seeing them again that day was a dream come true. The birthday girl was quickly recruited to be our photographer, even though she was meant to be the celeb of the day. I gave her my phone to take the pics but after a few seconds of trying to adjust for quality, she quickly found out how shitty the phone camera is. Thankfully, she announced this in the most polite way possible to the three men standing behind the camera with picture-perfect smiles. I agreed.

Fortunately, Kehinde quickly came to the rescue and offered to have the photos taken with his phone instead. Click, click, click and that was it. I was glad that I now had the most essential ingredient for a blog post about a random encounter with these admirable creators of Stutern. Now, there was no excuse for not writing it. Bitter-sweet stuff. 

Just before we finally parted ways, Kehinde collected my number so he could send me the pictures on Whatsapp. About thirty minutes later, when I had settled in the office, I picked up my phone and was happy to see that the pictures (3 or 4 of them) had been delivered to my phone. I thanked him for the pictures and used the opportunity to ask:  "is this Taiwo or Kehinde"? And the fact that Kehinde answered that question, dear reader, is the only reason why instead of 'Kehinde' in all the places where it occurs in this article, we don't have: "the twin in the grey polo".

Thanks for reading!

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Queuing into the new year at Genesis Deluxe Cinemas popcorn shop

Queuing into the new year at Genesis Deluxe Cinemas popcorn shop

By Hafiz Adewuyi   January 19, 2017   1 comment :

On the Friday before last New year's eve, I decided to drive all the way from Yaba to GDC at the Palms, Lekki, just to go see a movie. My hope was that by going that far away and for a slightly more expensive cinema than nearby Ozone, I would be able to boycott the razz crowd that often characterises the former. How wrong I was!

The Palms Shopping Mall, Lekki

Right from the parking lot, it was obvious that I had made a silly decision. It had been ages since I last went to the cinemas on a Friday night, so I didn't really know what to expect. My thoughts were that since it was a working day, the cinemas would not be highly populated. I failed to factor in the realities that apart from the fact that it was a Friday night when people like to let their hair down, it was also the holiday season and a lot of companies were on break.

Lucky enough, I did not have to drive a full-circle around the park before I located a parking spot which was barely enough to fit my car. I entered the mall to find that the number of people on the cinema floor was representative of the congestion in the car park. Everyone had come to see "The Wedding Party", Nigeria's highest grossing movie of 2016. Fortunately, that was not the movie I had in mind.

I proceeded to join the ticket queue which was about 15 persons long. On the bright side, it was moving pretty fast, all thanks to no one but the curt male attendant. From the look of things, he did not have a moment to spare empathising with anyone for anything. The items below nicely sum up his behavioural scripts for his duties that night:

• collect money and give tickets to those people who have cash and the movie they want to see is available

• redirect the ones who don't have cash matter-of-factly to the ATM's downstairs since as they can see, the POS is not working

• tell those who want to see exhausted movies matter-of-factly that they have to wait another hour or so for the next showing

I can honestly empathise with the guy, though. He was the only one serving the massive "Wedding Party" crowd, so he literally had no time to spare on niceties.

I happened to fall into the POS group as a cashless guy now. My former employer CEO did well to inspire in me, a conviction that a cashless society is a good thing for the economy; that all the monies hidden in soak-away holes and overhead Geepee tanks are partly responsible for the poverty in the country. That if only everyone was kind enough to put the money in a bank instead of a ghana-must-go bag under their beds, then the world would have enough money going around for the most important things.

So, I had to walk all the way down to get my last 2000 Naira from the ATM. So sad was my situation, I did not even have any money left to get a soft drink after paying for the movie which happened to be exactly 2000 Naira. At least, I was going to get free popcorn, and that would be good compensation for the trouble, or so I thought. 

I was way ahead of the time for my movie, so after buying my movie ticket, I went to kill time by roaming idly through the aisles of Shoprite. About ten minutes to movie time, I returned to the cinema floor.

I walked from one end of the humongous movie snack queue  - which I met on arrival - to the other, just to be sure it was actually one contiguous queue. The queue was about 40-person long and I'm not even exaggerating. I had my aha moment when a look at the popcorn stand revealed that only one of the 3 popcorn machines at the snack shop was working. Grrrr!!! That's exactly how my internals felt at this point.

To cope with frustrating situations like this one, the usual go-to for my brain is to go into problem-solving mode. You can imagine the kind of ridiculous business ideas my brain processes every day; there's a business idea in every corner you look when your country sucks this much. So I more or less just ask myself, "ok, what do we do about this now"? In a few seconds, I got the perfect idea for the management of the cinemas. 

"All they had to do to win in the battle of the cinemas was to up their customer care game by dedicating a couple of their staff to help movie-goers get stuff from the shop into the cinema halls. This way, no one has to lose part of their hard-earned fun time in the name of free popcorn which I never stop wishing would be without that inedible shaft at the bottom. Simple enough, innit"?

Please, snap me back and out of my daydream. In real life, I ended up going into the movie about 15 minutes late, and that was only because the cinema projector was turned on over 10 minutes after the scheduled movie time and they did not skip the ads o. At the end of the day, all I can tell myself is, "life is not a daydream brother. If you can't open your own cinema, then you can as well go and hug transformer".

Revisiting that day now, I find it poignant that despite the fact that the management of the cinemas extended no gestures of empathy for the plight of the movie-goers who had to queue for over half an hour for a free box of popcorn plus the ones who were paying for their stuff o, nobody threw a tantrum the entire time I was in the queue. Everyone was civil and polite. It's like we Nigerians "ti gba kamu", as my (Yoruba) people would say. We're resigned to our ill fate and we just can't be bothered to ask for more. 

"After all, everyone is just 'managing' in this recession, so where do you want the more to come from"?

P.S. 

So, the man who triggered me and thousands of other people to go on this 500-words-a-day-challenge (or a bot that acts on his behalf) sends me daily emails which contain prompts of what I should write about each today. Today is the first time that I will be following it simply because I think I have good enough content that matches the prompt.

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No more free weekend parking at the Palms, Lekki

No more free weekend parking at the Palms, Lekki

By Hafiz Adewuyi   May 07, 2016   No comments :

**crying face**

This is a follow up to my initial rant on the new parking fees being charged at the Palms shopping mall, Lekki.

I was at the mall this morning to get some stuff and was expecting to, as usual, just:

• Drive in
• Shop for less than thirty minutes
• Drive out for free with a cheapskate satisfied smirk on my face

Unfortunately, as I drove in today, this happened:

Damnation to whoever had the guts to name this daylight robbery a promo :@

This is just so unfair. So, this means I'll have to start parking outside the mall, whenever I just wanna grab something quick on a weekend day. Same trick I use at Jakande, if you know what I mean.

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Parking for free at The Palms Shopping Mall, Lekki

Parking for free at The Palms Shopping Mall, Lekki

By Hafiz Adewuyi   April 09, 2016   1 comment :

"Will you be leaving immediately", the cashier asks from behind the glass window of the paypoint with a subtle smile playing in her eyes. A smile quickly starts to form on my cheeks too. I can't resist blushing when interacting with a pretty girl whose body language is, ... welcoming. The delight sure must find a way out, don't you think? Behind my muffled smile, I respond in the affirmative.

She places the parking coin on some electronic device and with a smile, tells me that my parking fee is nil, since my car has not been parked for more than thirty minutes. I smile back in pleasure, the cheapskate center of my ego, having been properly massaged. If she is looking closely, she should see a sparkle in my eyes as I step away from her workplace and make for my car.

As I approach my car, Cheapskate Zifah takes center-stage and begins to ponder on the implication of the cashier asking: "Will you be leaving immediately". I'd like to think you already know how Cheapskate Zifah dissected this question.

The cashier's question betrays a possibility that I could have walked right back into the mall after my coin had been checked out, spent as much time as I wanted in there and driven out, after parting with only zero naira for parking. 

Except of course, they have a mechanism that sets a limit on how long after paying, you can remain in the lot, before your payment expires. Well, as much as I would like to imagine that their systems are not that sophisticated (bearing the cashier's question in mind), this mechanism might just be in place, as it honestly is not all that far-fetched to implement. 

Hey you daredevils out there, you can go ahead to test the sophistication of their e-parking systems. Let me know how this goes. Be warned though, the last time before today that I paid for parking at the Palms, I tarried for about 20 minutes after clearing my coin for 3 - 4 hours (300 naira). Guess what, when I got to the exit, the computer asked me to "go pay for parking". I escaped embarrassment, only because I had the payment receipt right beside me and was able to quickly present this for the attendant's inspection. He looked at it and then and only then did he manually trigger the boom barrier to open. One would wonder if this was a technical glitch or a direct consequence of my tarrying beyond post-payment limit. 

Because I'm a very generous guy (unlike Cheapskate Zifah), and as such, have a strong tendency to give tips, I will also tell you how on two different occassions, I have driven to the Circle mall (Jakande, Lekki, Lagos) and escaped paying for parking. Wait for it.......

Okay.. I can't stand teasing your fragile little heart for any long time. I just park at the abandoned filling station right beside the mall, step out of the car with a straight face and jug into the mall. Easy as pie!

Now, I can never deny how much of a cheapskate a.k.a akagum I am. No, not after exposing myself on this blog more times that I can count on the fingers of my left hand. Cheapskate Zifah just wants to make money and not let go of any kobo of it without a good enough justification for doing so. And when we talk about good enough, all that counts is his undiluted opinion.

P.S.
You might wonder what all of this fuss is about. Oh well. No one that I've spoken to about the new parking fee policy at the Palms, which was only introduced last month (March 2016) thinks it's justified to the patrons of the mall in any way. Except that in most other similar locations in Lagos, customers pay for parking (by the hour!!!).

Hope you see my point now...

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