APPLICATION? MORE LIKE
TORTURE.
I looked askance at the online application form.
These people were actual nutters. They wanted a passport photo that was Xcm by
Ycm by Gcircumference by argghhhhhh! I had been cropping and editing for about
fifteen minutes and it still didn’t fit. I rang a friend of mine who was also
going to be in law school with me.
‘Arese, am I thick or is this photo thing on the NLS
website complete bollocks?’ I asked immediately she picked up the phone.
I heard her snort as she tried to stifle her
sniggers. We were both at our respective workplaces so we had to be quiet.
‘Nwando, I don’t know for this school oh. I spent
the whole night last night cropping it. It was a terrible ordeal.’ She replied.
‘Ugh,’ I groaned. The whole night? I wanted to sort
this application form out asap and move on to the other stuff I had to do. Like
contact my university for a transcript, get a notary public to sign and seal
the form and the medical bit of the form; what on earth?
‘I don’t understand this medical bit. They want us
to go to a government owned hospital to get our blood, pee and shit tested? And
x-ray? Why? Are they mad?’ I asked in frustration.
This time Arese could not stifle her laugh
successfully, ‘Babe, that’s not for here. We’re to do the tests in Nigeria in
one of those state hospitals.’
‘Wonderful. I was even alright with NHS here. Now I
have to do it there and probably get rabies while I’m at it.’
‘Ah ah, now. It’s not that bad. Anyway, we can
always pay someone to do it for us.’
I nodded at this. Ahhh, the advantages of Nigeria.
Granted, it’s terrible that the country is so corrupt and I had had very heated
arguments with friends over bottles of plonk berating our corrupt motherland
but at this point, I was in love with this rotten nature of ours. (Quick aside, when I got back to Nigeria and
asked around for who I could pay to sort out the medical form, a mate of mine
told me that he did not even leave his house to get it done. He paid a sum of
money to a man and the next day he had everything ready. The blood, the pee,
the poop, the xray…maybe they had got a dog or goat to do it because it had all
looked dodgy. But hey, the form was accepted by the school!)
After twenty more minutes of groaning, cursing and
cropping, I finally had the right photo up. One hurdle scaled, time for the
rest. Suffice to say, it took me the whole day to get the application form
filled properly especially as the day had been extremely hectic. I worked in a
property law firm and someone was always trying to get a mortgage or rent or
lease or buy a flat/house outrightly. As I was a paralegal, I was stuck with
drafting and fielding calls and it was unbelievably stressful. I thrived on
stress though so I did not particularly mind.
On this day, this stress was not being thrived upon.
I was livid and short with the other paralegal I was training. I had not told
the partners that I would be leaving soon and I did not know how to go about
it. Further, I was thinking of how much money I was going to waste, I mean
spend, on sending the completed application form by DHL to the law school in
the back of beyond. And let’s not forget the numerous calls I was getting from
the parents. Mother calling to remind me about the form (which I replied
increasingly angrily that I was FILLING), father calling to tell me not to be
rude to my mum and not paying attention when I explained that she was
deliberately being obtuse, friends calling in shock because they did not
believe that I was finally moving back. Me? Oyibo
like me? How would I cope?
I did not need all of that and I switched off my
phone for the rest of the day. A little bit of sanity.
I continued the next day. This time, I emailed my
university for my transcript and wrote down more expenses I had to spend from
MY money on something I did not want to do (oh, and this included getting the
transcript dhled to law school separately. And academic references too). I called
the dhl office and gulped to myself when I heard the cost. I googled round for
notary public officers and massaged my temples when I heard the cost for that
as well. This was going to be fun.
When everything was finally sorted out, I breathed a
huge sigh of relief that that was done. I did not have to hear from my mother
and cry and curse and hang up because she was clueless as to what it all
entailed.
Or so I thought.
2 weeks later, round about a week before the
deadline for submission of application forms, I got a call from one of my
mother’s contacts at the law school that my forms had not arrived.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidicous! I had to go
through the whole process again? I can honestly admit that I locked myself in
the loo and cried for a good ten minutes. I had not yet begun law school and
their incompetence had commenced.
Great.
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