Act 1 Scene 1: Automated Teller Machine site at a branch of a new generation bank.
Location: Lagos, Nigeria. 23 kilometers from the sun.
General Feeling: Heat. Impatience. Heat. Irritation. Heat. Anger. Heat.
Three ATMs are on site. The middle one has a note written in bold fonts – ‘THIS ATM IS OUT OF SERVICE’. The other two ATMs are available for the thirty-something angry Lagosians on the queue.
A middle-aged woman gets to the front of the queue. She has been waiting for almost 20 minutes. She inserts her debit card into the slot. Her hands are full. She is holding her handbag, her black and yellow striped nylon bag and her wallet. She adjusts her scarf which keeps falling off her shoulders. She is looking in her wallet for the worn piece of paper where she wrote down her 4-digit PIN. The voice prompt on the ATM tells her to punch in her PIN. ‘I put it here’, she tells no one in particular as she struggles with everything she is holding. Three beeps from the ATM and it withholds her card – she took too long. ‘Temporarily Unable to Dispense Cash’ appears on the screen. A loud long hiss from the young girl behind her. The girl has her debit card in hand, eager to withdraw some money. She is in a hurry, shuffling back and forth. Her Okadaman has left, he couldn’t wait.
That singular action has doubled everybody’s wait time. More hisses and sighs. The middle-aged woman gathers up her belongings and heads towards the bank’s security doors. She needs to speak to the fair skinned lady at the Customer Service desk. ‘She can’t even say sorry’, another woman complains. ‘Na so dem dey do, all these agbalagba, if pesin talk nau, dem go say you no get respect’.
A man makes to leave the queue, the queue inside the bank cannot be this bad. ‘Bros, if you comot you don comot be dat o’. He looks at the young man, arms folded across his chest, black dirty fingernails, grease on his clothes – mechanic probably. He retains his space. No point leaving the known for the unknown.
People are grumbling, the sun seems to be getting hotter. A well-dressed man says to the bank’s security man stationed at the doors, ‘Please go inside and tell them to come and fix the ATM, we can’t all wait to use one machine’. ‘I can’t go in, don’t worry someone will come out soon. They know it is down’, the security man replies.
One of my colleagues steps out, he is dressed in a suit. ‘Oga banker, you people cannot leave your customers outside here like this, we are the ones paying your salary o, tell somebody to come and fix the ATM nau’, the mechanic tells him. My colleague walks past him. ‘Please I don’t work in this bank’, he responds and speeds up looking straight ahead, he doesn’t make eye contact. I chuckle and look away. He walks past me and goes to wait in the air conditioned car. I have been sitting in the shade, watching the people on the queue, waiting for my other colleagues. We have a marketing call. No one wants to deal with angry customers, especially him. One threatened to slap him last Friday. It was payday, end of the month and the bank’s system was down.
A woman joins the queue, she has a scarf tied around her head. No makeup, no earrings, no wedding band, no jewelry. She’s wearing a long skirt and a long-sleeved shirt with ruffles. In this heat? I can’t help but wonder. She has a stern look, she is not smiling, the sun is too hot.
A few minutes later, two young boys join the queue, they are laughing at their private joke. They look like they are from the University down the road, you could always tell from their backpacks, hip clothes and sagged jeans. ‘Aunty’, one asks her, ‘Are you the last on the queue?’
‘I am not the last in Jesus’ name!’ she yells at him. ‘The Bible says I will be the head and not the tail’.
He is taken aback, he certainly didn’t see that coming. Neither did anybody there. Everyone bursts into laughter. We all need a little comic relief every once in a while. We can’t come and go and die nau abi?
Kech
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