Running at night – part 3
“This is messed up!,” I almost shouted at the lady at the check-in counter at Bole.
She had just delivered the shattering blow to my otherwise well-planned day. One minute prior to this particular feeling, she had asked, “What’s your flight?”
“KQ to Nairobi”
“The flight be delay to nan-tati”
This meant an extra two-unplanned-hours at the airport… doing nothing! What I hated was not the ‘at the airport’ part. What got me was the ‘doing nothing’ part. And let no one cheat you – airports are the most boring of places that you ever want to spend your time.
“This is messed up!,” I finally said to myself after the very fast processing through immigration. There was zero person on any queue. Nobody nowhere. It was deserted. I then proceeded to seat at the first floor lounge, to wait for my five hours of doing nothing.
It would however become worse. As I sat to start my five hours of nothingness, I noted that the ‘free’ wifi was showing that dreaded ‘no internet’ message. It took a few tweaks to force it to open a browser page for me to accept their terms and condition before I could finally connect. I just clicked the checkbox next to, “Please tick box to confirm you read and agree with our Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy” and then clicked ‘Connect’.
Talking of these T&C, who reads them? That is exactly why they are there – not to be read. And that is by design. In that long, small font text of the T&Cs are those illegal forced consent to the collection, processing and use of personal information and browsing history. But who cares – the cyberworld is already messed up as it is. An additional continuation of what they do best (take our info and use it for whatever they do) won’t make a difference, will it?. I however have free advice if you want to make a difference – stop using anything that connects to any network. Don’t we all just love free advice!
I reflected on my last few hours and it was quite a day. I remembered reading and re-reading those boring hotel rules on the folder placed on the table of the hotel room. My boredom was temporary turned to some interest when I saw the special consideration for weekends. It was clear than on weekends breakfast was served from 7.00am to 11.00am. That was quite something. I had to re-read that part and internalize.
That would mean that even if I woke up at eleven-ish, I could still make it for breakfast. I had had a busy week in Addis and just wanted to have a one-long night rest that should culminate into a late waking up at eleven-ish. Thank you hotel management for knowing that weekends are special. I gave them a ‘like’ with a thumbs up. I wish there was a feedback form. Maybe it was there, in the maze of many papers in that folder.
But the Saturday morning started with a mind of its own. My intended wake-up-late morning did not happen. I lost my sleep at eight and flipped through the boring TV programmes. The signal reception was poor – those grainy analogue signals. The choice of programmes was equally limited – just ten channels. Six grainy, two news channels, a movie channel and some other channel that was difficult-to-understand-what-it-was-all-about. It is the only channel where you could be watching an edge-of-the-seat movie at one moment, only to be interrupted by a long display of channel listing. Before long, you could see the cursor moving live on screen, in a manner of flipping through the channels, only for the channel to be changed to something else – like cartoons – just like that!
I therefore decided to keep flipping through the bouquet of ten, looking for nothing in particular, until I stumbled upon the channel with the soap opera for men. I was starting to sympathize with myself over how I have been cheated for so long over what goes on in our view. I infact was now knowledgeable of all the ‘lies’ that I now could spot them live on screen. I recognized that trash talk as fake. I knew that those apparent ‘painful’ kicks and high falls were made to ‘sound’ painful than the real pain. I was now even enjoying the moments, with truth on my side, when the screen just went off! The room become dark and life came to a standstill. It was hardly nine and we were having a power fail.
I was confident that this would be short lived, after all no hotel can be worth its star-rating if it did not have a power-backup right? Wrong! It would take almost an hour before the power was back. I struggled to get something to do in the sixty-minutes, but nothing could keep me contained. I tried sleeping, I could not. I tried pacing, I got tired after a look through the window of the second-floor balcony. I tried doing something on the phone but the wifi was off. I tried packing – that seemed to work, but I was through pushing stuff in my one hand luggage in the shortest of time. It was now just over five minutes since the power fail and I had exhausted my arsenal of ‘doing nothing’.
The men’s soap resumed with the power around ten. By then I had bathed, thanks to the centralized heating instead of an instant heating which would have meant no hot water. I had read and re-read that notice in the washroom….
“Think of the tonnes of towels being laundered unnecessarily in hotels throughout the world. And of the huge quantities of detergent polluting our water. Please decide for yourself…”
Below this heading were four options. The first one was that if you put a towel on the floor then it shall go for laundry, any other placement meant that it shall not be touched. The third bullet point was that a green card placed on the bed meant no change of linen, a red card gives those linen a red to the laundry. It was my last day here. I was meant to check out. I was to ‘decide for myself’. What to do?
But this was not my first room. I had ‘nomaded’ over three places during my one-week stay. I started at the employer’s operated hostels. Those were just in a different world. I big room in a secure premise. A kitchenette with fridge, albeit empty, an electric kettle, a bowl of sugar and eight sachets of tea bags. Two bottles of water topped it all up. These consumables were on daily replenishment. The screen had a dedicated decoder for one to flip through and watch anything in full HD on an equally gigantic screen.
I only stayed there two nights. I was then moved to this hotel, but to a fourth-floor room. The room was ‘OK’, until I took a bath and the bathwater overflowed out of the shower cubicle due to blocked drainage. This wastewater would soon flood most of the bathroom cubicle and start flowing towards the living room. I had to arrest the situation with a towel. The towel remained soaked through the night. My visits to the washroom in the night brought a sobering moment every time I stepped on that wet cold towel.
On the next day, Thursday morning, I had asked for a repair of the blockage. I came back in the evening to get an offer for a change of room instead. My interpretation was that they must have known that the situation in 408 was incorrigible. The second-floor room 204 was better. The TV was newish and bigger. The bathroom had a tub, unlike the previous room. The room felt hot when I first stepped in. However, an air-conditioning unit was standing on top of the archway to the main room, just past the entrance, and past the washrooms. The TV programmes of course turned out to be a big let down and more was to come.
After opening the water tap and waiting for three-to-four minutes for the shower water to finally be warm enough, I stood in the tub and started to absorb the volume of water from the giant square showerhead on the ceiling. It could have been a good shower had it not been for the water that started soaking my feet in the tub.
“What is going on here?”
The bathtub also had a blocked drainage and the wastewater was starting to fill up with every flow of the shower waters. Not wishing to continue standing in the waste water, I had to cut short my otherwise enjoyable shower.
Nonetheless, I managed to stay two nights on the second floor and made do with the room condition. After all, what do you need in a sleeping room? Just a bed – and it had one. Everything else was a bonus to use or not.
I had survived my two nights and it was now time to check out. I had already experienced that one-hour blackout. I had already been subjected to ‘’decide for yourself’ moments… twice! I had already watched the men’s soap. If anything, I was just enjoying the last moment of the ‘big lie’ on screen. I still went along. It would be rude to burst anybody’s bubble, even if they are on screen. Just play along… or at least pretend. When the soap ended with a predictable result, with commentators screaming “What a surprise!”, and the ref knocked out ‘unconscious’ for one minute only to come to after a minute, to do a 1-2-3 count, then you can imagine why I had to play along.
It was now just 10.30am. I wanted to stretch this breakfast thing to its very limit. A heavy breakfast around eleven would brunch me for the day so that I just await my evening travel back home. But I had nothing else to do at this moment, and so I walked downstairs for breakfast at ten-thirty. You can imagine my surprise when I got to the breakfast diner only to find the attendants clearing the last bits of serving plates from the buffet serving area.
“Where is breakfast?,” I asked, assuming that maybe the venue had been changed.
“We close breakfast!”
“But why? It is not yet eleven.”
“Today not eleven. Eleven be weekend only.”
“But it is Saturday!?”
“No, eleven be weekend only. Tomorrow it be eleven.”
“But the information in the hotel room clearly indicates that you serve breakfast until eleven on weekends! Today is a weekend, right?”
“That be no true. Eleven be weekend only. Only tomorrow”
The lady then just left me standing and joined her crew in clearing. She did not seem bothered that one of their paying customers was about to miss breakfast. She did not want to bother about thinking of an alternative. She was just about to retreat to the kitchen when someone seated at the diner, to my left, next to our exchange intervened.
“Serve him,” he told the lady who was retreating to the kitchen. He added some other utterances in Amharic, then continued his own breakfast with a colleague.
He looked at me, still affixed, “Just take a seat there. They serve you.”
I sat and waited. However, it was not long before I got an ‘anything goes’ conglomerate described as breakfast, served by the same person, egg on her face! I did not care. It had all ingredients that can make up for a missed breakfast. I only missed the injera, the meats, the sausages, the flakes, the rice, the fruits – Eish – I did not know that I missed a lot! But toast, egg and tea is just OK. However, if you promise breakfast until eleven, then please deliver breakfast until eleven. If Saturday is a weekend, then let Saturday be a weekend.
Before I could put this matter to rest, I actually had to go back to my room and re-read those hotel rules, specifically the issue of when breakfast shall be served. As sure as the sun rises from the East, it was still there, in black and white…
“Breakfast time
From Monday to Friday from 6:A.m to 10.00A.m
Saturday and Sunday from 7:A.m To11:00Am
Room check out time @ 12:00pm”
I am even surprised that the concept of ‘weekend’ that we were arguing about so passionately was not even mentioned at all in that notice!
Lost
Back to the moment, I identified a secluded spot at Bole and took a seat. The ‘secluded’ place was more by design than by choice. I needed a power socket and one of those pillars turned out to be the ideal place to seat and get connected to the juice. I decided to MYOB and covered my ears with the giant muffs of the headphone.
I was seated just next to the clear glass window facing the airport tarmac below. I could see the runway about half a kilometer in front of my view, with planes touching down and taking off. I had nothing to do but massacre the four hours of waiting. It was hardly six, despite imagining that I must have been waiting for hours. I had just finished an hour of waiting, with another three to go.
Despite my muffed ears, I was quite alert to all the going ons near gate A7 where I was seated alone, twenty of so other seats were empty on this section. As I said, by design. I then noted this guy who came and sat two seats from where I had sat. He seemed a bit restless, as I gauged him from the corner of my left eye. My specs were fixed straight to my laptop. My head did not move an inch, but my eye took in his every restless move on that seat to my left. I kept gazing on the screen.
He kept being jumpy. He stood up. Walked around. Came back. Sat down. Stood up again. Held the rail of the structure holding the large windows in front of our sitting place. He sat down again. He momentarily left, only to come back and take the same seat once more. I guessed that it must have been the fatigue of a flight or the apprehension of the next or just the stress of travel. Traveling ain’t easy.
I kept pounding on the keyboard. My left eye doings its corner thing. Absorbing every moment. I later got used to his restlessness and continued with MYOBing.
I kept pounding on the keyboard. My left eye doings its corner thing. Absorbing every moment. I later got used to his restlessness and continued with MYOBing.
“Excuse me!”
It did not come as a surprise. I acted surprised. I looked up.
“Yes!”
“It is Sunday right?”
What is it with today and Sunday? First the hotel and now this?
“No. It is Saturday.”
“You sure?, which date?”
“December seven. Saturday.”
I started doubting whether it was a Saturday myself. Maybe it has been a Sunday all along! I started having that panic attack. Could it be true?
“See,” I clicked the lower right part of the laptop screen, where the clock was displaying 6:30 PM. Momentarily, the popup showed up as “Saturday, December 7, 2019.”
“So, tomorrow is Sunday…,” he said almost in deep thought. He then went ahead to count loudly, “Then Monday nine, Tuesday ten and Wednesday eleven, so I get there twelve.”
I had stopped typing. He was just standing and gazing over the vast tarmac ahead. He went back to his seat, two seats away.
I had hardly resumed my typing before he was back, “Can I borrow your laptop? I need to send email, urgent.”
I started weighing my options. A few what-ifs ran through my mind. I started disconnecting the USB cables ready to hand over the machine. I was just about to unplug the power and give him the laptop when he continued, “I lost my phone today, and I must send an urgent message to my people in India, before I fly at eight.”
I hurried the process of handing over the laptop. He resumed his seat, two seats from where I was seated. He pounded on the keyboard. It did not take long before he asked me to get him a clean Gmail logging webpage to enable him access his email. I walked to his sitting position, logged out my accounts and handed back the machine.
He started his work. He worked in full concentration. I was taking a break, just pretending to listen to something on the muffs, which were now off. It did not take more than ten minutes before he handed back the laptop.
“Thanks. Imagine losing a phone! It had my everything!”
“Bad things happen,” I found myself saying, for lack of a better consolation.
Mmmhhh, so that was the issue! That was bad!
“What do you think can happen?”
“It is likely that the phone shall be erased and sold,” I told him.
“That would be good. That phone had everything!”
“It is unlikely that something shall use it for ulterior motive like ransom or identity theft,” I reassured his dejected physique.
“I hope so. I had put a lock. I sure hope so. The phone had everything!”
I had never known that a phone can be so dear. When I lost my Infinix in August, my only thought was the resale value for the big 128GB SD card. Now I was getting a whole new perspective about phones. This particular episode got me thinking about phones.
My thoughts must have been for long, since I now realized that I still had two and a half more hours before I left. Reducing the waiting time from three hour to two point five hours was a small reduction in waiting time… but a reduction in time nonetheless.
It was now almost eight-thirty. Instead of preparing to land at Nairobi at this particular time, I was now just about to board, in one hour, then start my night run to NBO. Just another day when I have to face another night run. The runs that I am now so much accustomed to.
But no one would have prepared me for ‘the flight is further delayed’ message that showed up on the screen at Gate C2 from 2100hrs when we should have been boarding. The delay persisted even at 2145hrs when we should have been taking off! This run in the night would be longer than I imagined!
But no one would have prepared me for ‘the flight is further delayed’ message that showed up on the screen at Gate C2 from 2100hrs when we should have been boarding. The delay persisted even at 2145hrs when we should have been taking off! This run in the night would be longer than I imagined!
WWB, the Coach, Addis Ababa, Dec. 7, 2019
