What’s your BB pin?”, she asked conceitedly, raising her BlackBerry screen-glazed eyes. Her fake Yankee accent was drowned by rancorous voices and the din of the heavy metal music blaring from the Hi-fi speakers of the high-end nightclub in the heart of Victoria Island, Lagos. Even when she was just sitting across the table as we both share a drink, I could barely hear her.
Just as I could not make any sense out of our conversation in the entire time we spent together that evening. To add to my misery even now as I reflect on my experience that night, it is difficult to tell if my inability to understand my young female guest was due to her contrived foreign accent or the frequent interruptions from her “pinging” and the instant messages that kept coming into her BlackBerry phone.
Her obsessive romance with her phone, which repeatedly came in the way of our acquaintance, can be likened to having a conversation with the deaf. So, I had proceeded to ignore this new question; one of the many she had asked, while she took intermittent pauses, with the usual vacant look, from her dialogue with her imaginary phone character, intent on ruining my evening.
I was going to treat her new enquiry like a rhetorical question; but leaning close to me, she asked the question again, insisting on an answer. Her persistent question about my BlackBerry status threw me off balance for a moment.
