Mega city life not bed of roses

I just washed off the pollution from my body after today's hectic day out on the town. I went to Agbara to reconcile my seventy-year-old uncle's electricity bill at Alaba before heading back towards Oshodi - sorry, I cannot divulge my exact location openly online.

The utility bill was perennially variable from the power company adopting the very unpopular method of estimation of usage - actual electricity usage is not factored in, even though the meter readings are taken religiously.

In fact, the latest power bill had other errors - apart from the inflated charges - like two different deadlines for payment and a November bill in the middle of November!

One part of the bill had 16th November 2003 and the other part of the tear away stub had 16th November 2009.

The customer service man said it was a printer's devil and I replied that it must be the mother of all printer's devils. Ha-ha...

Anyway, thank God it's Friday and all ended well in the end - the marketing manager involved retrieved the faulty bill and asked me to see him on Monday for the new bill, promising to 'do something' about the inflated bill by December.

However, in my attempt to get home early from that remote location, I hailed a commercial bike rider to get me quickly to the nearest bus stop - as night falls, public transportation fares are hiked by the operators, trailers cause bumper-to-bumper traffic hold-ups, and harried Policemen stopping-to-search and collecting 'illegal tolls' from each overloaded truck does not help matters at all.

In his frantic attempt to kick-start his old motorbike engine, he gave a karate-like kick to my trusty about-town sandals and a part of the leather upper got a bit stretched and bruised.

And i had to pay him sixty naira - that's my local currency - for the ride on top of the damage to my person. Anyway, I must thank God for not landing in a hospital with some injuries - then, he probably would have left me there with their usual parting words to thousands of other unfortunate souls in the orthopedic wards and emergency rooms, "Sorry... don't worry about the payment..."

That tortuous trip began at ten in the morning and ended for me at dusk about seven, when I finally got home to meet my entire family fast asleep after a hectic week of work and schooling.

Dirt and grime seem to fall freely from the air in most very big cities where I have lived in Nigeria, especially Lagos and Port-Harcourt.

The latter should be expected because of its proximity to oil production facilities - with their attendant gas flaring debris and other atmospheric discharges.

Lagos, my mega city, with numerous industries operating and the absence of steady and reliable power supply, is a prime candidate for pollution from heavy generator use and indiscriminate dumping of waste of all kinds - especially food packaging and paper waste, notably from transportation receipts to cellphone recharge cards.

Lagos is a mega city because it has an estimated population of over eighteen million people and reportedly has a population density second only to India's Bombay/Mumbai.

According to this, between 1800 and 2000, rural urban migration increased so much that city dwellers increased in population from three percent to over fifty percent of the total population.

I really would have loved to include photographs of my trips around town but I must be realistic about the dangers involved.

Honestly, apart from a gun toting officer in one of the security services mistaking me for their reputedly-public-enemy-number-one newspaper journalist, losing my camera to thieves in one of the traffic jams in some neighborhoods with an unsavoury reputation is definitely not one of my ideas of fun and excitement.

So, I will tell my stories-about-town in words - literally well painted, I hope. You be the judge...

Oddities clocking records

Have you heard of these things lately? By 'these' I am referring to the following strange things seen recently on the Net.

Would you believe that a South Korean woman passed her driving test after the 950th attempt? What I want to know is, "At 68, is she fit to drive around town, without experience, while selling vegetables?"

And then there is the innovation called a virus battery that can power a car! Yes, a working lithium-ion device for storing and releasing electric current that uses genetically engineered live but harmless viruses to form the cathode and the anode, separated by a polymer plate.

The oddest? How about a 1965 Volkswagen model that was stolen in 1974 but recovered in 2009 on its way back to Germany!

The insurance company paid the original owner hundreds of Dollars for his loss then but now the vehicle is worth $27,000 to the insurance company.

Do you multitask behind the wheel?

You do? Doing several things behind the wheel? Wow! Me too! But then perhaps we are not talking about the same thing?

The only multitasking that I do while driving is shifting gears, switching on the wipers and headlights, and making a fast but necessary cell phone call during a traffic snarl.

Contrast that with this picture of a teenager texting behind the wheel, while another takes over the wheel at 60 kmph! Can you picture that?

Yes, it has been proven that humans can not multitask very well; in fact, we are not built that way, so to speak. If you doubt me, take this test and see for yourself.

Losing concentration for even a split second can lead to a fatal crash - yours or someone else's, or both - and missing this innovative road sign of the future.

Perhaps, it is true that it is the governments - '....a problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has covered it up....' - and cab drivers - '...drivers who talk on cellphones are four times as likely to cause a crash....' - who are really driven to distraction.