#ndilate!

You are late for work!…
 
I know y’all can attest to this, at least most of you. Keep hitting the snooze button and stealing “just a few more minutes, just a few more minutes.” Then you jerk awake and.. voilà! its daytime!
 
This nightmare came true for me one morning during my radio days when I did the early bird news shift.
My phone alarm was stuck at 4:30am on all days because the office driver would pick me at 5am or thereabouts and then we would go on the morning pickup for other early birds.
I slept soundly that night, not like a baby though. As usual, the alarm went off at 4:30am but I did not stick to my regular ritual of leaping out of bed. I hit snooze. “Just for today, “ I said. Five minutes later, my faithful alarm reminded me that I needed to get up. I reached out and “snoozed” it. “I can do without a bath today,” was my next excuse.
 
I think the devil must have been working overtime that morning because in my haste to snooze, I “dismissed”.

Five minutes became 10, then 15, 20, 25, 30, and graduated into an hour, one hour and thirty minutes and more. I even dreamt that I had woken up, had a bath, dressed up and walked out of the house, and into the office shuttle, and even reached work and started doing the bulletin. However, I couldn’t read the words on the teleprompter. And that’s when the struggle became really real!

Next thing I knew was that I had jerked awake. It was light outside. “Hoo! Today!”

I fumbled under my pillow for my old faithful blue Nokia ka-torchi phone and pressed the “on” button- the green one. It had gone off. Battery.
 
“Nfuddeeeeee!” I screamed, throwing aside the covers and leaping out of bed like a ninja.
 
I ran to the sitting room like a bat out of hell, tripping on my slippers and nearly falling headlong into the sofa. The wall clock showed 10 minutes to 7am. I was cooked! T-O-T-A-L-L-Y cooked and ready to serve. My first bulletin was in 10 minutes time!!
 
I dashed back to my bedroom and switched on the light. Just a click. No electricity. Damn!!! Luckily I had non-iron clothes in my wardrobe-(all women need to have a copy). There would be no bath today. Just get into the clothes and—— run! With the skirt on, I dashed back to the sitting room. 6:53am. Back to the bedroom, pulled on my blouse, buttoned up. Back to the clock, 6:54am. Back to the bedroom, “The shoes, oh the shoes where are these shoes,” my shriek became a mean grunt, as I knelt on the floor and groped wildly into the space where I had kicked the flats some days before.
 
All the while, I was yelling, “Nfuddeeee! nfudddeeee, yaaayyeeeee, maaaaama nze!!”, as I sprinted from room to room, into room, out of room, back to room and in room in one shoe.
 
The clock had ticked itself into 6:57am. “I’m not gonna make it!,” I wailed desperately, not knowing what explanation I was going to give my boss who I was certain, was going to make it clear that I knew, and understood “just how much money the station had lost!”.
I rushed to the bathroom, threw water on my face, grabbed the hand-towel, wiped my face, threw the towel in the sink. I would Vaseline my face on the boda-boda. My legs- that would be a story for another day.
 
Handbag, keys, opened the door, locked the door, keys in bag. The driver must have called and called until he gave up.
 
Then I stopped in my tracks. My neighbors’ cars were still parked outside their houses. Their curtains were drawn. The place was eerily quiet. I started hyperventilating.
 
It was Sunday.
You know how when you don’t work on Sunday?