By Uwem Umana
One of the targets given to Osteen was to replace inappropriate vocabulary (insert vulgar words here) with inoffensive words like “sugar”. Osteen was literarily struggling with his new target. Sometimes he would remember it, sometimes he would lose the plot completely.
It was very odd to meet somebody at work being put in the special needs register. In order to support him, that needed to be done.
Osteen was a very likeable fellow especially amongst the women folks. He was a very smooth talker and stalker as well. His belly looked like four months old pregnancy and he smoked like a chimney. He was single and quaffed a lot. He loved partying and had oodles of cash to spend on himself. He was such a good cook and could entertain you with a constant flow of conversation 24/7. This is what most of the ladies prefer in a man – a single guy without any weight.
Osteen loved the company of good women, they fell for him and he made himself fall for them. He was always on one case or the other.
By some chance we were posted to the same work site. He is very ICT literate and could do some few stunts with the machine which made our line manager find him of high utility value. What would take most people ages to figure out, it took him couple of seconds. I am also aware that he wrote and developed softwares before, on how to hack into websites and people’s data bases. He was jailed for two years and released from prison in 2006 for offences related to hacking into his previous company’s data base and stealing data.
Being in the same work site meant we had to work along as team mates. This was ok with me. We strung along quite nicely and we worked well. But if you were not careful you would get infected by his bad language. Incidentally I was the one to oversee that he met his targets on a day to day basis. This made me and him to form some sort of alliance that I find hard to explain. A kind of bond that when the person is around you are ok and when the person is not around you don’t miss him or her.
One time he requested me to do him a favour. It was to take him to the airport to fetch his girlfriend who was visiting from the UK. I asked him “so you have a girlfriend, why do you mess around with all these ladies?” He replied “I am a ladies man”.
Osteen always reminded me of the character Whit in ‘Of Mice and Men’. Whit was a very rare character. He had such a sense of pride, dignity and integrity. Though he was a farm hand, he would always dress very impeccably after work and set down and read and keep himself very busy with scholarly matters. Even on Sundays when there is no work, he would wake up and after his breakfast, have a bath and dress up with a neck tie, sit down and read a book.
On the said date I arrived Osteen’s apartment on time. He came out wearing a nice suit and smelling very nice. You would think that he was going to receive the Queen of Spain. I thought within myself ‘this guy means business’. Which girl would not go crazy seeing a guy attach such importance to coming to fetch her from the airport like she was an important dignitary. Of course she is, that is the message the guy is giving. Not quite fifteen minutes afterwards, Osteen came out from the arrival hall to inform me that the flight has been delayed for five hours and he would hang around till the flight arrived. He thanked me ever so much and bade me goodbye.
At work, the next day I asked him how the previous day went. He told me it was a fiasco. “Why?”
“Janet arrived with her ten year old daughter”
“So, what’s wrong with that? Things can always be maneuvered, couldn’t they?”
“No, no no! That little daughter of hers is a er r erm…”
