Gimme ya number

Progress in life may sometimes make us as primitive as Zinjathropus and the sad thing is that we do not realize it. We applaud every stupid thing that those of us who are looked up to as the geniuses of our race come up with. So when a country makes weapons that are used to obliterate their cousins, we cheer them. We are fighting to get on the cheerleaders’ team.

And we pick up every habit that is written about as the best. This phone number swapping thing, for example. What makes people think that just because Nokia says we should store each and every phone number that we come across, it is true and correct? But then, it doesn’t seem to register that we are going too far with this copying thing. That is why whenever we meet strangers; we think it is the civil thing for us to get their number even when we are never going to call them.

That cool ad on CNN shows this pretty lady leaving on the train and the dude who wanted to talk to her a bit too late. But not to worry, he pulls out his super slim gadget and by remote; he gets her number simply by pointing his in her direction. Cool, huh? I wish the world were that beautiful.

But then ads do not show you the after. We do not get to know if the guy called her up and she turned out to be one of those local babes who go like, “whaaati?” loudly in your ear. Maybe they met the next day and she turned out to be a former Jehovah’s Witness who suddenly decided that she wanted to try out Haitian voodoo. The possibilities are infinite. And we never get to know about all that. Just goes to show you the west has colonized the minds of every able minded person you know who claims to be an enlightened Ugandan.

One thing that is made fun of but which is actually true is that when the cell phone has too many numbers stored, it becomes heavy. I swear! Mine gets heavier every time I add a number. And the weight depends on the gender of the person whose number I am entering. I thought it was all in my head, just as most of you will think, but after carrying out a small research, I realized that it is a hundred percent true; when I enter numbers of men, my phone gets twice as heavy as when I enter female names. Call it kajanja or whatever. I call it new age technology.

Everyone should get such sets. There is a limit to the number of male names that should be in your phonebook. It is not good for your health when there are more than five. There should be space for your dad, your two brothers and your two cousins. Having more than two brothers is a sacrilege. You deserve to be banished to a far away land for trying to tip the scale of nature. Everyone knows that there are supposed to be more females than males in the world. There is a girl everywhere, even on the moon. Ask Lou Bega.

From now on, you must desist from picking up whatever lousy number you come across. Some of them are for lousy networks. There are networks that are an embarrassment to the cell phone owner. These will be the first to be chopped off. Any number that starts with 07… and whatever crazy number that follows will never enter your phone again. This is for your protection. It has been reported that these weak numbers have viruses that could affect your phone and even go further and get to you. Now you don’t want to have some parts of your body transferring to your face. Some things are better left unseen.

But all this could be avoided if you just stopped telling people on the roadside to give you their phone numbers. You would have cut off the menace of beepers and lost--sheep callers who call at midnight to ask for Muzamiru. The only thing that evil needs to thrive is for good men to do nothing.