Why I reported back to work late this year

Today is my first working day of the year and the events of the last three days have jolted me rather harshly into the New Year. I left the village last Saturday all set to return to the Coast on Sunday evening. Initially, one of my cousins (his name is Bob) had volunteered to give me a ride back to the city. We even agreed that we would leave the village at about 7 am so that we would be in the city by lunchtime. Come 7 am, my cousin sent me a text saying that we leave at 11 am since he had a hangover. I didn’t want to complain too much since I was a ‘beggar’ in this situation.

Imagine when at 11 am, my cousin told me to find him at the nearest shopping centre with my luggage. I had to ‘bribe’ my young nephews and nieces to help me transport all the goodies (vegetables and chicken), hat my mother had insisted that I take for my use at the Coast.

When I got to the shopping centre, I found Bob holding court in the company of a group of men and women. His audience was in rapt attention listening to his tales about being always up and about on company travel. It did not hurt that he was throwing rounds of beer to his audience- a fact which must have helped the listening process. He told me to make myself at home and sit in the middle of two ladies who had also ‘begged’ him to give them a ride.

He whispered to me, “ one chick for you, and one for me!” and then gave me a leery wink. Initially, I was very reluctant to the whole idea of delaying our travel, but after a few drinks my reluctance melted away. By 2 p.m, we were having our second round of roast meat as the drinks kept flowing.

I had even managed to banish my earlier fears about having another “Peris, of last year Xmas” situation and was seriously tuning the girl seated next to me (she told me her name is Wambo). We finally managed to leave the village at about 4 pm and by then we were tipsy and I had invited Wambo over to Mombasa for a nice weekend in my ‘spacious bachelor pad.”

After an hour of driving, I had to ask Bob to surrender the driving to me. My cousin Bob was clearly showing off to ‘his chick”(her name was Terry), and pulling very strange stunts. He also kept using every corner and bend as an opportunity to pat her thighs, or to lean over and whisper in her ear. We stopped for a short call after one hour, and I persuaded my cousin to let me drive so that he could ‘zero in’ on the girl from the back seat.

My strategy where Wambo was concerned was to portray myself as the more sober-minded and more careful driver who was not in a rush to do a thing. I must say that Bob has a super machine that moves fast and easily and we ended up in the city at 8 pm. Bob made the logical suggestion that we should go out for a meal.

The meal became ‘the drinks’ which naturally became ‘the dancing’. Let us just say that I missed my Sunday flight because I could not summon the energy to wake up and be at the airport by 3 pm. Luckily for me, my ticket allowed for one free change, so I moved my flight to Monday evening.

This time the jam caused by the matatu strike caused me to miss my departure time altogether. The airline was not as gracious and I had to pay an extra 10k for a new passport. By this time, the vegetables that had been given to me had rotten in the boot of Bob’s car. In our quest to have fun with Wambo and Terry, we had totally forgotten about the veggies.

So, I missed my official start date by three days and now I have to deal with influx of emails and things to do that need my attention. What a start to the year!

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