General Archives - Page 20 of 68

5 things you don’t know about Nigerian ATMs

Just a few years ago, we practically begged people to use ATMs instead of queuing up at the banking counters, but that brought its own set of odd questions. Here are some answers to those random ATM inquiries that have been lingering in your mind.

Just a few years ago, we practically begged people to use ATMs instead of queuing up at the banking counters but at least that has changed. But then the change came with friends, family and other random people asking me random questions why they can’t brew a nice cup of coffee at the ATM.
Some of the oddities are explained here.

#1 Why doesn’t the ATM retract cash?
If you forget to take your cash abroad (places where the snow falls in January) the ATM simply takes it back and then reverses the amount. Sounds convenient and nifty for forgetful souls like me.

Why doesn’t it do that in Nigeria?

Well, it started that way until some dudes figured out that they could take out a bit of the cash and trick the ATM to withdraw everything back, crediting the full amount.

Warri no dey carry last!

#2 Why doesn’t the ATM accept cash?
I remember walking into a NatWest Bank when I was in school and feeling funky with myself, deposited some scraggy notes into the ATM instead of bothering with the dour looking cashier. It went smoothly and I got my credit almost immediately.

Some random banks tried it in Nigeria but the experiment reminded me of Icarus. Icarus thought he could fly, strapped on some wings and jumped. It was his last jump.

Cash accepting ATMs have to count the cash, scan the notes and determine the currency by staring at it. Unfortunately, the cash notes in Nigeria have been to more places than I could safely describe on the Internet without getting my HR to invite me for a serious conversation. NSFW!

The ATMs choked on the cash and the experiments went south. Simply put, we mangle our cash in Nigeria and no ATM made of man has been able to overcome that. A few banks are still struggling with these devices, but I know as long as we still roll up our notes, write things on them like jotters or stuff them inside sostén then cash accepting ATMs will never work.

#3 Why do I have to input my PIN for another transaction even when I haven’t removed my card?
There is something funny that happens in countries like Nigeria where you need lots of notes from the ATMs for even the simplest purchase. In the US, usually maximum withdrawal is $300 and nobody apart from Nigerians take that much cash.

Equivalent of that amount here is N84,000, that depends on who you ask though. Since ATM cannot just open its guts for you to point and select your cash, it can only push out at most 40 notes. So an average transaction in Nigeria needs multiple withdrawals.

What if you forget your card and it doesn’t require PIN for the next transactions? Actually that’s the way it was and suddenly forgetful people, who have taken their cash and gone, are separated from the rest of the money in their accounts by the next dude on the queue.

Their wailing and gnashing of teeth made banks to reconfigure the terminals. The wailing stopped but not the gnashing of teeth.

#4 Why does the ATM have blue background and yellow text by default?
The engineers who configured the first set of ATMs in Nigeria have no taste. Next!

Fortunately some banks have since seen the light and have gone on to do graphical interface designs. Nothing impressive at this time though. One of these days when I have less to do, I may wander around comparing screens.

#5 Who is the girl that talks on the ATM?
I don’t know her! I swear, she ain’t my cousin.

While she loves to say “Thank you for banking with us”, I know she’s saying exactly the same at other banks; she’s probably promiscuous and has no loyalty.

Nota Bene
You can ask me other random question on anything you want to know about ATMs and I will do my best to answer them. I’m not an expert so don’t scream blue murder if I try to pull the wool over your eyes.

The Body Count Conundrum

Everyone seeks experienced candidates who’ll stay, but too many job changes raise red flags. Think before resigning and spin your diverse experience positively during interviews to ease recruiter concerns.

Everyone wants someone who’s got experience and can do a lot of amazing things, but then we don’t want someone who’s been around everywhere and will probably leave in a jiffy, stomping out into the late evening. To find that perfect balance is more of an art than anything else.

Wait, what do you think I was talking about?
Recently I helped a friend review a resume for a vacancy. It was quite impressive; and having spoken to the candidate previously, I was half assured of the quality. But, the resume said a bit more than the exciting background – candidate has worked at five different companies but never spent more than 2 years at any of them.

The person recruiting wanted a solid performer. But most importantly someone he could build a team around – someone who would stay for a decent number of years. For those of us out there who know the pain of building a good team, stability is as important as skills.
My friend never followed up on the lead as he was very concerned about the candidate’s stability on the job. I have seen this play out many times over.
Is it right to judge someone based on the number of places they have worked.

Experience is key but too much of everything is bad
When recruiting experienced hires, recruiters welcome diversity as we believe, sometimes erroneously though, that if you have been around, you probably have learned a number of important contexts which should bring the richness of your experience to bear.
However, if you have worked in too many places and it seems you frequently change jobs, then we are very worried you won’t stay long in the new role, fracturing the team and making a mess, especially if you are senior and lead a large team.

Think before you resign
Forget what you read on the Internet, including this one – every job will be annoying at one time or the other. The grass is greener on the other side, until you scale the fence and discover it was just an optical illusion.
Careers, just like relationships, aren’t inconsequential to get into – the history stays with you for a very long time.

Therefore, don’t leave your job on a whim or because your boss pissed you off, or because you missed that promotion. Unless there is a threat to your life, stay until you find a solid career move worth the hassle and increase in body count.
When you leave a job too fast or too soon, your resume stops talking about your experience but about your person. Recruiters and others start to think you have a commitment phobia, can’t work in a team, get bored easily like a teenager or some other random problems. We are probably wrong about you, but the bad part is we won’t even discuss it with you; we just form a bias in our little minds and move on.

Don’t hate us, we have a mountain of resumes and LinkedIn profiles to wade through with not enough time pull a Sherlock Holmes.

Spin out the positives
When you finally get to have a chat about a new role and you have a career record longer than a street whore, you can still spin a positive tale around it.
Always have a good story to say about each place you have worked. When you say nice things about others, it makes people think highly of you, feel you are a team player and a grateful soul. Even if you aren’t any of this, stick to the script.
There is a limit to this though, if your ex-company was involved in salacious things, just say you had a good time but would rather not discuss what happened as many of the things you know are confidential. When you don’t run your mouth at interviews, we believe that you will keep our own secrets if you are brought on board.

Talk about the diversity of experience and how it has made you a more rounded person with a world-view…whatever that means. After all an interview is more like a solo theatrics performance.
Talk about other areas of your life that has been stable so nobody thinks you are a rocket on a mission. For example, you could talk about how you have been using the same dry cleaners for 150 years or that you love your old perfume.
Okay, so now that I’ve told you about why you should stay loyal, what’s your body count?

The stone the builders rejected – RIP Mohammed Ali

My grandmother, an Ali admirer, always taught me this legend’s resilience: stick to your beliefs, and talent will prevail. Rest in peace, Ali.

As a kid, I used to have a t-shirt with Mohammed Ali on it and I loved it so much until my rotund stomach couldn’t fit in anymore.
Growing up, I was regaled with different stories of Ali by my grandmother who felt there wasn’t any greater boxer than he was. Even when Mike Tyson came on the scene, his erratic behaviors ensured that he never amounted to anything important with my grandmother. I’m happy he’s cleaned up though.

But Ali wasn’t always the greatest. He was hated by his country and his life made miserable just because he wouldn’t want to be drafted into a war that is ranked as one of the worst ever. He fought for his conviction much more than he fought in the rings.

The lessons from him are very simple:
Never give up on your conviction even when it’s not popular.
If you are good in what you do, the world will come around to appreciate it – Psalm 118:22.
Rest in peace Mohammed Ali – you will always be remembered and send my regards to grandma up there if you ever happen to bump into her.

Ladies, please stand up!

Women face struggles in managing careers and societal expectations, particularly after marriage, where they often sacrifice their ambitions due to pressure to conform to traditional roles. Adedeji is urging women to reclaim their dreams, make informed decisions before marriage, understand their worth, and not let societal norms dictate their happiness.

I have known too many women over my professional career and have more than a fair share of female friends. In fact out of the 100 friends I have, 120 of them are womenfolk.

This unfortunately makes me a bit of a backyard authority on issues they face especially career related annoyances. I have heard so much gripe, my otorhinolaryngologist warned that the next time I come over for tinnitus treatment she’s going to seal the damn ears with wax. Ok, that was an exaggeration.

Back to more serious issues.

Gender inequality is over flogged everywhere; it’s more of a theory to the average Omobinrin on the street. But when that reality confronts them it’s clothed as something personal – career decisions, societal pressure, I need to have kids, I’m getting old, I’m a chic, what will my family say, bla bla bla.

Nature already stacked the table against every girl from birth (who said nature is nice?) – period, pregnancy, mishmash of hormones and Telemundo. But here’s the strange thing, despite these natural challenges, why do women still allow men and society to add to their pains?

This isn’t a blame-the-victim tripe. Far from it. This is a call to action to my beautiful friends although I don’t have the guts to give them this holier-than-thou lecture in person as I could end up with scratches from poorly fixed nails.

Call me a chicken in pinstripe if you like, na you sabi.

The girl is good, maybe not all the time!

Some of the most amazing and talented people I ever worked with are women. They work hard, they are super smart and extremely ambitious. Not only that, they have empathy and solid emotional intelligence which the most sensitive of men can only dream off. I also know a few “Up NEPA” ones that make a dull office look pretty awesome on a rainy Monday morning.

Then they get married and most often than not their ambition, performance and sometimes some body parts go south. They become a shadow of their former selves. Ten years go by and countless missed promotions, they become bitter and angry.

It’s extremely confusing for me. Their brains are still there; their knowledge, and competence gained over the years, are not lost, what happened?

My male friends come back from honeymoon smoking hot and still productive for years. In fact studies have shown that quite a lot of men have career boosts post marriage. Why not the average working class woman?

I did a back-of-the-napkin study and found out that they never really lost the dreams or ambition. They just got their backs against the wall….and not in the sense that you think of.

Usually a woman goes into a marriage, especially in my part of the world, and she’s expected to be the one to compromise. In fact if she’s a high flyer and unmarried her parents, the same ones who paid for the expensive education, are the first to fire the first salvo “Rolake, you are too career minded, no man will marry you!”

She will be advised to chill out, scale down, and underplay her progress so she can be attractive to some dude with very low esteem. Post wedding she’s the one to get home on time to cook, the one to take care of the kids, and worst of it if they both work in same organization without family friendly policies, she’s the one to resign to stay at home or look for another job.

If kids are ill she takes time off work. She can’t work away from home or abroad because it won’t speak well of her but nothing is wrong if her spouse is posted out of station to Kathmandu. If the idiotic husband loves to pound her instead of fufu, her parents will be the one to tell her to chill, pray, endure or whatever random rubbish anyone could think of.

There is nothing wrong with marriage (for those hung up on it) or having kids (they are fun when not annoying) but like everything you do, you have to know what you want and go for it. In fact good relationships are beneficial, they provide synergy and support not available to lone rangers.

However if you enter into any contract or relationship without knowing what you really want or deserve then you are a loser from day one.

So what’s a girl to do?

Men and women are EQUAL but not necessarily the same (I don’t want to be a girl, duh). As simple as that sounds, it’s fundamental to everything! If you sincerely believe that your life as woman, hope, aspirations, etc. is as worthy as that of any man’s then you have taken the right steps in the right direction. Please repeat that ten times!

Find your dreams again. What did you want to become? How do you want to reap the years and countless millions you have invested on/for your life so far? Think about this; the degrees, certifications or even professional experiences you have aren’t required to be a good mum but to be a build a good career, then make good use of them. However if you are already married you are going to need a ton of diplomacy and compromise to get a decent traction. Learn it!

Marriage is fun and relationships are beneficial but there is absolutely nothing wrong if you aren’t married. It isn’t a failure as much as every man not being a millionaire a failure. Next time someone tells you that you are not complete without a man, let the person know he’s a failure for not being a Bill Gate. Case closed.

Look before you leap – things have to be clarified before you let him put a ring on it. Like a contract, if isn’t well defined before you go into it, you can’t change it to favor you once you are in it. Remember, it’s difficult to fix an airplane’s engine while in flight!

Don’t have more kids than you can manage and that means also projecting into the future; school fees go everywhere except downwards. Space them if you can so it doesn’t put stress on your career progression and you can even have one for the road later, I heard it’s fun! By the way, there is something called family planning, don’t depend on men to do the right thing at the right time; they won’t and the burden of their mistakes will be yours forever. #BorrowWisdom

Choose your friends carefully as you won’t be better than them. If you hang out with the type who have lost their sense of self-worth to their other partners or those who feel women were born to serve men, how will you do better? Their negative claptrap will corrode you and make your life miserable forever.

Learn to keep your cool as many will surely try to get a rise out of you because of your decisions. Just keep calm and keep your mouth shut – you can’t win an argument with any of them. Don’t let anyone make you feel guilty or unhappy about your final decisions, don’t live your life for them.

What’s a girl not to do?

Don’t take this as an excuse to be a bitch at home if you are married, hey, if you got tossed out because of it, I ain’t got no spare room!

Don’t take a hardline on everything – your way or your way – life isn’t that way. A compromise is probably one nonviolent means to end any domestic warfare but make sure you never get the short end of the stick.

Don’t blame men, boys, grandpas, etc. for everything that goes wrong with you. Remember you take the ultimate responsibility for your life, careers and aspirations. The faster you know the buck stops on the stool next to you, the better for you and your sanity

Be careful of things you read on the internet, including this! Take what resonates with you and junk the rest as quickly as a bad habit (wait, ain’t bad habits difficult to stop?)

Before you form that conclusion

I’m just a simple guy with an honest belief that everyone is equal but same but I’m not a feminist. While I believe that those in positions of responsibility should ensure level playing ground for everyone irrespective of gender, women everywhere also have to standup for themselves.

Do You Want A Job or a Career?

I was recently giving a career pep talk to my colleagues when one ambitious fellow pulled me aside to ask for the difference between a job and a career. In my usual sarcastic way (I swear, I’m gonna get beaten up one of these days), I wanted to remind him that Google isn’t connected to PHCN (if you ain’t a Nigerian, that’s probably lost on you).

But then I thought deeply about it and found that I didn’t have a ready answer. So that evening, while nursing a tumbler of Vedka, ice and Coke, I sat to dimension it from my own perspective.

The internet is chuck full of different meanings but since jobs and especially careers are deeply personal things, maybe it would be better to look at it from that intimate angle. My definitions are definitely mine and I ain’t making any attempt to be politically correct.

A job is something you do to stay alive while a career is something you stay alive to do.
I’m already having a headache digesting that.

The Job
A job is what you do to earn money for its own sake. You don’t, necessarily, have to like it or even want to stay longer than required. As far as you are concerned, a job puts bread on the table and shirt on your back. You may or may not like your boss. You could even be like some people I know, when bored, you fantasize about beating your supervisor up. Trust me, while it’s a bad thought, it can be satisfying.

You get into a job out of necessity unless you are greedy lass where the perks and the money is what drives you. Jobs can be stressful as you do it for survival; you practically have to drag yourself out of bed each morning just to be there.
If you find someone who is cranky, hardly smiling, drives like a maniac and it’s evening – he’s coming back from a job.

Most jobs are dead-end; but if, and I mean a big if, you can find a light at the end of that job’s tunnel and which isn’t a train, it could become a career.

A Career
If you’ve dated a very cute girl before, you would understand what a career is. You just want to do it. It may or may not pay as much but it makes you satisfied and happy. It’s usually a lifelong obsession.

You make a lot of stupid and irrational decisions about a career – get certifications or additional degrees with the hope that it gets better. You spend long hours toiling away and most often than not a career turns into something successful because when you put in that much passion and energy, you are almost guaranteed to succeed. I know people who have taken pay cuts to drive a career. Careerists and entrepreneurs are cousins – they devote their lives, savings, relationships and everything to something they truly believe in.

How did I find myself in a job?
It’s never a fair world and the fight between job and career isn’t fair either. We all usually start with a job.

You get out of school with a good degree, exaggerated view of yourself and a taller-than-life rosy picture of a career in investment banking or petroleum. In this pictured life, you have a Ferrari at 27 and a private island by 35.

The first thing life does to you is make sure you comb the whole streets of Lagos until you are better than the latest version of Google Maps and can do better traffic update than Tsaboin Traffic talk. A thousand iterations of your résumé (CV) later you land your first job, usually a lowly contact center agent at a telco.
That’s a job.

I know a lot of people who marry people they don’t like but because of the goodness of their hearts, end up loving them. It happens with a job too.
You could start with a job but you make something good out of it. You become good at it and as you progress, people realize you are an expert and treat you as one.
A career is born.

What to do in a job/Upgrading to a career
Having a job isn’t bad. I mean, what’s the alternative? Even pimping is a job; it’s also a career for some… but that’s by the way.
Instead of fretting about how dreadful your job is, you could do the following to move from being in a job to having a satisfying career:

Be grateful for that job. No matter how terrible you think a job is, as long as it puts money on the table, it’s something to be happy about. Remember, it could be worse if you find your backside on the curb without any means of livelihood. While being grateful though, remember what it is, it’s just a job, don’t sell your soul, whatever it’s worth, for it.
Go for a very long walk to meditate and ask yourself what you want to do with your life. Don’t do less than 5 kilometers. It’s so simple to know what your career should be – if a genie assured you of success in whatever you do, what would you rather do?
Be reasonable in your expectations before your wife kicks you out of the house. Or how do you think she will react if you suddenly came up with the idea of a career in medicine when you lately spent N1M doing your 40th birthday?
If you think you can get joy out of your current job, then ask what you need to turn it into a career. You could have anchor role models and find out what they did to get to where they are or what set them apart in their fields.
Once you’ve decided on that career then act! Nothing kills a career faster than procrastination. The best time to start a good career was yesterday but the next best time is right now. Do you need some certifications to be able to practice? Go for it now. How much do you know about these career field? Read like a mad man! Does anyone know you and your capabilities? Go to industry events, network, play, mingle!
The journey to a career nirvana is narrow and full of blistering thorns but you can’t pull back. Long after the enthusiasm of being a CFA has died, you must have enough resolve in your reservoir to pull you to the next level.
A career is like a mahogany tree, it takes years and lorry loads of attention, affection and money for it to grow and blossom into something beautiful. Don’t play with fire while at it.
A career is a demanding mistress, it will take all of you. It can also be a bitch, it doesn’t care how much effort you have put in previously, if you don’t keep at it, you could lose it on a whim.

A Nice Job vs. Career, who wins?
I have discussed the easy part, here’s something to drive you crazy: You are sometimes unfortunate to be faced with a superbly paying job and just a career, which would you choose?

This article has also been published at www.bellanaija.com.