The Day Ignorance Nearly Killed Me

On a sunny afternoon sometime in 2009, I used an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) at the defunct Oceanic bank at ENL Consortium, Apapa Wharf. After using the ATM, it was past banking hour, I asked the security man at the entrance if I could go into the bank to have a cup of water, he agreed. So I went in, I met just one man in the banking hall, a member of staff, seated by a table who I told I wanted some drinking water, he told me to open the lower part of the water dispenser machine to collect a disposable cup to fetch water from the dispenser. I checked but there was no disposable cup. In his benevolence, he offered me his mug to fetch water with. I took the mug and positioned it under one of the two taps, and then the confusion started; I didn’t know which of the taps to fetch from.

Don’t get it twisted, it is not as if I haven’t used a water dispenser in my life, the thing is: I haven’t used an electricity powered water dispenser. Funny, right? The first, ever, time I used a water dispenser was when I worked in a salt factory in 2008. In that factory, they provided water for us in a water dispenser, but the machine was never powered by electricity, so we just go there, pick any of the taps to get water from. But here was I, some months later, and didn’t know which tap to fetch from.

All the confusion happened in my head in seconds and I had to decide which tap to fetch from, in other to hide my ignorance from the man in the bank. So I chose one tap and fetch from. As I put the mug on my lips to drink the water, I violently removed it. Wheew! The man looked at me and asked what the problem was; I said “The water is too hot.” In shock and in a are-you-normal look, he asked me if I don’t know how to use a water dispenser, I gave no response other than a sorry look. He told me that the water dispenser has two taps, the blue tap for cold water, and the red tap for hot water; and if I wanted warm water I should take some cold water and more of hot water. Wow! I never knew this until that day. So I poured off the hot water and to practice what I had just been taught and it work. Wow! Each time I remember this scene I just laugh.

That experience taught me great lessons, one of which is: if you don’t know, always ask. My people say “He who asks the way to his destination never get lost.”