Unemployment had visited me long enough so I had to chase her away from my home. Shouting my name and knocking on my door every morning had become a show. I couldn’t stand it anymore so I would leave my apartment early like the working class, and visit friends instead. Fortunately or unfortunately, I got a job in this really ugly office. When I went for the interview, they told me I could be the IT manager. The fact that they gave me that post so easily showed me just how shady the company was. Work came and the manager took me around the office. When I say ‘took me around’, you may think the office was really big but don’t be deceived. It was a very small house with three rooms and desks - I thought I was back in primary. Putting that aside, the computers these guys were using were overwhelmingly old. They used the first generation Pentium computers which would accommodate only up to a certain sized hard disk. Well, I had to pay my rent so for a moment I lay low and kept my pride down.One of the managers needed a hard drive upgrade and ended up purchasing the replacement drive herself.The new drive was far beyond what the PC could normally accommodate, but there was a way to use BIOS emulation software to trick the PC into accepting the drive. Of course, this software also slowed down the disk access, which meant that the job of replacing the hard disk, getting the machine to accept the new drive, and then copying all the data to the new drive took forever. As if that wasn’t enough, the PC had one of those cases with lots of sharp edges. By the end of the day, I was exhausted and my hands were covered in cuts.The next morning, she called me and asked to have an upgraded hard disk installed and I told her that it had already been done. Then she told me that this was a brand new work order. Confused, I went to the user to see what was going on.She had decided that she wanted her seven-year-old son to go into computers one day. So she had brought him into the office during the night and let him disassemble and reassemble her computer “for practice”.I just got my things and run out of the office. Besides, my salary was just Rwf 50,000 - which IT manager gets that? After about three weeks, the general manager texted me saying, “How is unemployment?” I then texted back saying, “I have another job and it’s paying me thrice as much.” At the time, my shoe was worn out and I carried an envelope with my senior six grades from door to door since I was still studying for my degree.
