Chapter 2: We are Friends

“Chale, you fool waa!!” was all he could manage to say as he laughed hysterically at the joke his friend Kwasi had cracked about the lady who tried to cross the road as if it belonged to her. James was a real speed junkie; he would drive anything that had wheels and could do zero to sixty in less than 10 seconds and he was pretty good at it too. People tell him that if Ghana had a proper F1 race track he’d probably be the next Michael Schumacher. He could do things that other drivers thought was mad crazy. To him, it was all about calculation and timing, gears and curves, roads and tires. His motto was “Speed doesn’t kill people, overconfidence does”. He could drive with his knee under the steering wheel and listen to Ray Charles’ famous “hit the road jack” song, doing a mega nineteen-eighty head-bob with his hands all up in the air synchronizing with the bass of the music, pass through a police checkpoint and wouldn’t even flinch. Apparently, the police got tired of stopping him and let him be.

Kwasi was his best-friend. They had not been friends for long but once they got to know each other they stuck like glue. They had both just finished university and had done their national service together. Kwasi was a programmer and a damn good one too. The company he worked for thought it unwise to let him go after his service so they gave him a contract to stay. James wasn’t so lucky, a programmer himself but he loved the media work so he was thrown out. Fortunately, anytime there were some odd jobs available Kwasi would let him know about it and he’d pick it up. To him it wasn’t that bad, at least it beat six months of staying at home with your thumb up your ass.

Kwasi’s company had just landed a deal with the ministry of information to provide software that could actually keep track of the citizens of Ghana without the horrendous task of hiring personnel who would have to go round and collect data from house to house. It sounded impossible but Kwasi thought of a brilliant idea. He came up with the theory that with all the social networks around one could list his family members as far back as he or she could, the software would cross-reference the names and compile them. By the time it was done one would practically have all the names and contacts of the citizens of this beloved country.

The tricky part was getting these social networks to actually allow this plug-in and make people believe that it was confidential at all levels and a matter of national interest. Kwasi had the solution; advertisement to the highest degree. If the Ministry could spend about five million Ghana cedis on archaic methods of information gathering, they could at least spend a quarter of it on advertisement.

Now the company needed someone to transport the computers for the staff training to the development site. He thought it was silly because you don’t really need training on how to use facebook. But hey, who is he to doubt the financial prowess of his company. How else were they gonna make money. Unfortunately for the company, they didn’t have the kind of vehicle that could transport the number of computers needed for the training thus they needed to rent one; Job opportunity.