photo by Christina Langford-Miller
In the past, I may or may not have written on manner of approach (I honestly don't remember) but something happened today that has prompted me to write on the topic.
You see, like I've said here in the past, every Saturday is usually the day where we all come out in our hostel to perform general sanitation. It's the one time we all get to clean our surrounding and make it look a bit conducive for the next seven days, then we clean it up again.
And over here at my hostel, we take this clean up pretty serious, and would always penalize those who choose not to participate in this activity. So just like every Saturday, I had woken up early this morning to play my role in the sanitation, and after I was done, I had gone back to my room to continue my sleep from where I left off.
I was just about to really doze off when I started to hear some noise downstairs, so I had gone down to investigate, to know if it was a situation that required me intervening or running for my life.
When I got downstairs, it turned out that my hotel's task force were enforcing the hostel law on a lady who had refused to participate in the clean-up due to the fact that she said she was ill. And according to the hostel laws, you're expected to inform one of the excos or the president whenever you feel like you won't be able to attend the clean-up for whatever reason, an instruction she clearly didn't follow.
Also, failure to participate in the clean-up meant you were to pay a five hundred naira fine or you would submit one of your properties (most likely your gas cylinder), pending when you make the payment.
Well this particular lady wasn't only rude, she had also refused to pay or hand over her gas, and that provoked the president of the hostel who ended up forcing his way into her room to grab the gas cylinder. And it was while he and the other task-force members were forcing their way into the room that the lady had sustained a minor injury.
As if that wasn't enough, she had gone ahead to bite him, almost peeling off his skin and then slapped him.
It was a crazy day this morning, one that I haven't seen in a long while. But myself and some of the guys at the hostel had managed to calm the president down to avoid him hitting the lady (because he probably would have killed her).
And after all of that was over, it turned out the president still had more tricks under his sleeve, as I just found out that he had gone ahead to arrest the lady. And what's sad about this whole stuff is that getting arrested on a weekend means you will have to remain in the station until Tuesday, because the police doesn't accept bails on weekends and Mondays.
Sadly, I feel all of this could easily have been avoided if this lady had spoken softly and respectfully to the task-force team in the first place, rather than choosing to be rude when she clearly was at fault.
Manner of approach.