April 2008 has been the worst month ever, since I joined Makerere University in 2005. A lot of problems hit me like volleys from left, right and center. My thoughts hit the danmest low that April.
First of all, my cousin Cindy's laptop gets stolen from my hall of residence room (B6) at campus. I had borrowed it from her to work on my projects. The pressure of courseworks and deadlines was surging up on me.
Before I could get over that, my mobile phone gets snatched by a thief riding on a bodaboda bike. It was crazy timing. Around 9 pm in the night, I was getting into campus from the small gate, around University hall, from getting fast food from Wandegeya. The thug came up behind me riding on a bike, me thinking he is as a normal bodaboda rider. He slowed down as he approached me from the back. I am walking slowly, busy texting a message to Alex, a guy who had refused to pick. The thug reached for it when he got within arm-range, snatched my phone and speeds off; that was the last I saw of that phone.
Alex Atwiine is a guy who had upset me the whole evening, I'd been trying to get him on the phone but he was not answering. He had sold me his laptop a week earlier, in my efforts to replace Cindy's, [ a Gateway brand at 900,000 UGX which i had paid in cash in the Stanbic banking hall at Garden City] . But the laptop was full of his material when I took it -so we had agreed he had to come with a portable hard drive the very next day of the sale to take the 80GB stuff off. He didn't come for a week. Now, on the day my phone is to be stolen, he calls me to take his data of the laptop; it turns out he wanted us to go to a friend of his who works at The Independent magazine, so we went to his friend's office on Kanjokya street in Kamwokya.
When we reached there, they failed to put the data onto the friend's workplace computer. Apparently this required networking the two machines (which quite a simple process) but apparently it would take a long time and the battery on the laptop would go out before transferring the 80 GB data, [the battery had atleast 1 hour to go out]. So I had to go back to campus to pick the laptop charger, and leave them doing whatever they had to do.
That, my dear became the last I saw of the laptop. I called Alex from campus to know whether they were transfering and he told me that it would not be possible because they were closing at work and so we should do this tomorrow. I ask him to stay there and I pick the laptop since I had coursework on it to be handed in the next day and I had to finish it tonite.
He told me he was leaving for Entebbe to pick up a friend but the laptop is with the friend at office. So I took a bodaboda fast to the workplace and found the friend there, who told me that Alex had taken the laptop.
I knew then that Alex was turning a crook. I called him up, to know exactly where he was so I could get there by all means and pick the laptop from him, but he told me lie after lie until he stopped answering the phone altogether. I therefore went to use the faculty lab computers to re-do the coursework from scratch that evening. This went on from like 7 pm till like 9 pm. I realised it was getting late and that i had missed dinner served at my hall of residence. Thats how I went to get fast food from wandegeya.
So, when I was texting him a message to be sure he wasnt running away with a laptop he had already sold me, my phone was snatched by a petty thief. I cursed that evening. In a flash moment I had just lost all contact numbers, including Alex's on that phone. What the thief didn't know was that i wasn't only losing the phone to him but also the 900,000 UGX to Alex.
Pissed off is not the exact way to describe me that evening.
I went in my campus room and ate the take away, which was supposed to be an escape from the bad hall food. But even it tasted like crap.
The next morning I went to town first thing and bought a new (similar) phone from a Simba Telecom shop on Kampala road, and passed by MTN Wandegeya to get a simcard replacement. Then I began on the process of finding Alex's number again through the contacts I had known him in the first place. I gave them the story of Alex running away with the laptop, which they had signed to as witnesses during the sale. I told them I would hold them accountable. Some how they managed to get a hold of Alex before he flew back to school abroad and he returned the money.
That is how the month of April became the worst in my days at MUK.
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