Woke up this morning with Alhamdulilahi and mixed feelings. It’s my third year workiversary at a company I wanted to quit in 6 months! I have written on my first year in and the lessons learnt and my second year and how I intend to rebrand myself moving forward. And voila it is year three!

So much to unpack!

Comfort is great at a workplace but it feels like in certain comforts lies where dreams go to die, and if you are not careful you will be 10 years in and wonder where the time went. I recollect Philomena and I mulling about being ready to break our backs and put in the work needed to excel if we are fortunate to get opportunities in companies I would refrain from naming. Because the truth is, as we have realized, no job is easy, but certain jobs would pay you enough to commensurate for the unease. The same way I always say, when it gets down to it, I can lick ass if I know for sure that is the best ass to lick and it would yield me guaranteed rewards. I will lick, slurp and eat it like a happy meal.

This year I am not sharing any lessons learnt kankan, I am looking for money!

Fine, I got promoted early in the year and some token was added to my salary, alhamdulilahi, but I am tiyad! I wanna be a baller. God, I wanna be a big boy not big girl, because a big girl’s salary can still be affected by misogyny. I want to be where I get stretched mentally in a way that challenges me and makes me better than I currently am. I do not want to be small anymore, I wanna be a big FELLA!

Faffing around and beating the bush about lessons learnt is a waste of time because if I see any opportunity, I kidnap it asap! I am tired!

And in the midst of trying to keep my head above the water, I have people who are quick to run into me and ask why I am still in the country. Their sigh of disappointment when I tell them I am trying to survive the day before thinking of how to survive out of Nigeria. What am I to do? I am trying my best, really. Very often, I find myself fighting the urge to put myself in a position to just die!

Nobody knows the mental toil it takes when you see your hopes get crushed and flattened to disappointment over and over again. I am trying!

I am also bereft of many people who were my work friends. They keep leaving. They keep traveling. It hurts. It goes beyond feeling stuck, but knowing the very people who were a ray of sunshine on cloudy days are gone! Even the fine man who was eye candy to me, and I always found a way to stray to his floor just to smile at him and boost my mood, has relocated to CANADA! Tinubuku keeps taking everything from me! Now I have no hot man to look at again, just potbellied daddies and the Covenant University corpers and interns filing around the corridors.

I keep trying to leave but my applications keep getting responses that make me urgh in frustration. I do not expect to get recruited as soon as I started applying but there is this mindfuck I internalized after hearing snippets of conversation about how, if you are super good at what you do leaving a company is never a problem. LMAO. Aside applying and interviewing, the folks I know who are quick to name drop all the people they know suddenly become helpless when I ask to reap the dividends of nepotism via them.

“Ehm, you know how these things are.’’

No, I don’t Mr Ogedengbe! You told me unprovoked about the big boys and girls in Nigeria that you know. Which of their COYs is recruiting? Like can we all be serious here?!

Meanwhile, real selflessness when it comes to job hunting is not extinct, I have seen it before. One of such people was my grandpa, selfless when it came to aiding those in dire need. But when it got to my turn, I do not know what happened, it never materialized. And so I sit with this mix of admiration and slight irritation: marvelling at how he got loads of people gainful employment, while pissed that my own situation never got the same urgency. I wish he had thrown his weight and used his influence to plant me firmly in one of those mega federal parastatals. Doing the work and getting compensated for it with hefty allowances. I would probably be chunky as heck too! And tweeting with my stubby fingers, bedazzled with multiple Dubai gold rings, about how the people complaining about the economy are just lazy. Maybe my grandpa saw a vision of me becoming a rotund monster from access to excess money.

Maybe I should have held on to our billionaire chairman when he came to the office on Wednesday. I should have grabbed him by the legs and wrap myself around his calves as I yell loudly and plead for him to please help my life.

I sha know that I do not want to collect December rice in this company. I do not mind collecting it elsewhere but I do not want the rice and oil package this year. I would love to miss my current colleagues and wistfully remember our good times together. 20 project managers cannot write a Project Plan together for 20 years or what is the saying again? Wo, I am sha fed up!

Till next year folks. By then, I would probably be ranting about this and that at my workplace but also referencing my juicy salary, how great life has gotten, the new things I have learnt and the vacation I just returned from.

PS: If your COY is hiring for Project Management, Branding, Marketing, Communications position. I am available! CV is at the ready.