Thought Picnic: Prospects to a company

Exploring a prospect

The difference between mentors and protégé could not be starker as they were corporation men and he, a man in some corporation and many at that.

The regularity of the pay-check as the politics of the firm determined stagnation, promotion, ejection or resignation, the hope for a boss that did not set your blood pressure off to the wrong readings at the risk of shortening your life.

The irregularity of great rewards of risk as your great utility at onset diminishes in significance as problems fall to solutions you proffer and the absence of panic suddenly points you out as too luxurious – a wave of austere angst is the tide that sweeps you back onto the street which becomes the treadmill again.

The talk

Before the last sunset there was a talk, a discussion, a possibility and opportunity, maybe a change to the unusual with the prospect of the interesting.

A deposition like an interview, exchanges that speak of you and who you are, whether the change is good or not, one cannot tell but until explored that land remains undiscovered.

After another sunset one would know if the path is to corporation man or one remains a fireman good for emergencies but never in the garden.

Nigeria: One look at our Dutch website - Ewww!

Another website to cry about

I suppose by now I already have a reputation for being a nit-picking imperfectionist of sorts who has a penchant for finding errors and atrocious mistakes in official documents but almost always ends up with problems in my exposés.

As I have tried to make the keener observers understand, my blog and comments about websites are personal, but those websites under review are official, they are the public face of the institutions that commission them, someone gets paid to provide that service and at the least before publication somebody should proofread the stuff before it goes online.

I am beginning to think that the issue of attention to detail is systemic and endemic in Nigerian officialdom and it is not restricted to the confines of Nigeria’s borders. After Babcock University [1] and The Nigeria @ 50 website [2].

Nigeria showing in the Netherlands

I paid a visit to the website [3] of the embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in The Netherlands this morning and the first impressions could not be more amateurish, the site looked like the mock-up creation of a kindergarten school finger-painting class, it was appalling – but that is beside the point.

The home page had an important notice of an event that took place between the 5^th and 16^th of July, 2010, I think today is the 8^th of October, 2010. It was titled “e-Passport Intervention Exercise for Nigerians”, I am getting ahead of myself here, but what I have done is taken a snapshot of the page and presented it as graphic with the numbered parts being the particular issues I want to concentrate on.

Detailing the itemised points

Item 1; shows how addresses are written and spoken out in The Netherlands and usually in most of continental Europe, the street comes first and then the house number. Nothing wrong with this.

Item 2; “Intervention Exercise”, whilst I agree Nigerians are given to verbosity, myself included at times, giving verbosity vacuity such that context is implied from redundancy is just an excess. However, maybe the “Intervention” implies the normally smooth process of obtaining an e-Passport does not work for all sorts of reasons and the ambassador has decided to intervene.

Otherwise, it is just a registration or validation exercise, the use of intervention confers on the word irrelevance pretending to official importance.

Item 3; speaks for itself, the spelling checker on the author’s computer even if set to Dutch would have flagged that as incorrect. Any public relations department MUST ALWAYS have their copy spell-checked before publication, I dare say, it is a sin not to. Hereby, whack the miscreant across the knuckles.

Item 4; as I stated in Item 1, addresses are written in a particular way in The Netherlands, it helps the post get to its destination and even GPS systems ask for addresses in that order.

I will be as uncharitable as to suggest that some greenhorn who has just been brought over from Nigeria to probably lord it over those who have a clue about things here has thrown their weight about and come up with this nonsense. It might well be the Nigerian Embassy but it is located in The Netherlands, you promote Nigerian culture and values whilst adhering to Dutch standards of communication.

That address should have been The Embassy of Nigeria, Wagenaarweg 5, 2597 LL, The Hague. The use of Post Code No. is redundant but proves my point, a tyro wrote this.

Item 5; English, I believe is still the language for the dissemination of official documents in Nigeria. If that be the case, it is not too exacting to expect the usage of correct grammar and number agreement. Would “who have satisfied” be better than “who satisfied”?

In the same sentence, the indefinite article “a passport” would have been preferred to the definite article “the passport”, I suppose the excuse of English not being the author’s first language might suffice in Nigeria, but surely not in The Netherlands, relatively, Nigerians should and must be better speakers, writers and users of the English language than the Dutch.

Item 6; There might be some disagreement about the use of hyphens in this phrase, which means there would be no preferential treatment or reservations. It is a contraction of “the first to come is the first served”. Hence, it should be first-come first-serveD, not forgetting the essential “D” at the end. Phew!

Item 7; “The Her Excellency”, our pre-occupation with obsequiousness and predilection for titles can get us into serious trouble. Perish the thought that the ambassador is being addressed as such. I swoon with a backhand to my tilted forehead.

Going back to the caption that accompanies the photograph of Dr. (Mrs.) N. N. Akanbi – She is the Nigerian Ambassador to the Royal Kingdom of the Netherlands in The Hague if we are to follow with consistency the way the president has been addressed in the photograph to the left of the ambassador – maybe I am just being pedantic, but surely, it is not too much to ask for.

It is also my desire that all publications from the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria have a modicum of professionalism, attention to detail and show us all in better light than this.

Honestly, I am appalled.

Sources

[1] Akin: Nigeria: Ike follows the Babcock University cock-up too

[2] Akin: Nigeria: Reviewing the Nigeria @ 50 website

[3] the embassy of nigeria in the hague, the netherlands

Social Engineering: Appealing to my vanity

So much spam

The process of moving my blog to http://akinblog.nl has been slow and fraught but it is beginning to gain some traffic and recognition. Hopefully, with time it would become the primary reference point of searches that have usually gone to http://akin.blog-city.com

One thing I have noticed about hosting my new blog on Google’s Blogger facility is the amount of spam that comes round most of which seems to appeal to different aspects of one’s masculine vanity.

One good look in the folder of spam messages captured on my gmail email account shows about 75% of the emails recommending some augmentation to the male protuberance either for length or stamina to be able to as it were satisfy your partner.

Appealing to my physical vanity

Indeed erectile dysfunction can be an issue when pleasure is truncated by the premature incidence of orgasm just when you thought you could go on for longer, it probably dwells on many a mind and it could be frustrating.

For those who are otherwise blessed the receipt of such odious and unflattering emails is annoying but the spam filters seem to be putting in their hours.

On the blog front however, each comment logged each particular blog creates a notification which does not end up in the spam folder and incurs the additional work of management even though the blog commenting system might well recognise the comment as spam.

Appealing to my mental vanity

That is just one side of appealing to ones vanity, the other part came in a comment I received on my blog this morning.

As follows: Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Thought Picnic: Vulnerability offering opportunity...":

I usually do not leave a comment, but the ideas really rocks, also I have a few questions like to ask, what's your contact details?

-Johnson

Anonymous who has signed off as Johnson probably does not have a Google blog, nor does he (if a first name) or her (if a surname) have a website they are willing to publish as part of receiving feedback for the comments they have left.

Comments appealing to vanity

There is probably nothing to read from the comment but the basic compliment until one has a second or third reading and then it begins to matter a lot more than it seems. This is a generic comment can be left on any and every blog with one singular aim in mind.

Indeed, one of the signs of having a following comes from people commenting on your blogs and this supposed fan rarely leaves comments but now decides to do so in the quest for something other than the views expressed in the blog.

Given that the person does offer the passing opinion masquerading as praise that “the ideas really rocks”, I am really confused about the urban language with the apparent number confusion as to the idea and the context that the person is referring to.

Having appealed to my vanity with the notion of my rocking ideas, the person has a few questions to ask, fair enough and somehow expects me with the additional request to publish my contact details in response.

One can only wonder what questions that person has to ask that cannot be put in the comments or forwarded as an email, because those details are not that difficult to get if the person does try.

Generic comments as social engineering

Between you are me, this is another classic case of social engineering; having appealed to my vanity and flattered me in some way, just as the title of the blog goes, it has provided a window of vulnerability offering the opportunity to request my contact details which I am supposed to foolishly volunteer to some non-descript stranger to ask personal questions.

It was a good try but this will not work with me and it really should not work on anyone else too, if anyone wants to engage you on matters so personal the need for full-disclosure is paramount and it should be initiated by the enquirer and not by you.

Otherwise, this is just another case of Johnson probably leaving a similar generic comment on as many blogs as he/she can to harvest details for some nefarious activity beyond which the victim has little control.

Beware of the flattery that leaves you vulnerable to volunteering information you should best keep for your protection and safety.