I have a bit of a story to tell today, I had completed the original post I intended for today and something happened and I decided I needed to share that instead.
For about 2 days, I wasn’t able to make calls on my phone, I kept getting a “call failed” message each time I tried. I could receive though. The only way I could make the calls was through WhatsApp.
After asking people that use the same network if they were experiencing the same issues and all said no, I was planning on going to the network provider’s office to find out what the issue was. I had ruled out NIN (National Identification Number) relation since I had mine( not having an NIN which might have been a plausible reason for my phone to be disconnected).
I even got a colleague to call a friend of his that works with the network provider hoping to save myself the trip. The guy said I might have to come in to find out what the problem was.
Then something happened, I sent an SMS and it failed to deliver. The first SMS I had sent in this period. I was wondering what the odds were that SMS wasn’t delivering too.
I decided to recharge my phone, and the SMS went. I was like “hmmm”. I was already getting that weird feeling you get when you know you had “messed up”. I said let me try and make another call and viola the call went through.
So for 2 days, the problem had been the most basic reason why calls won’t through, no credit.
This was me when I realised.
When I called my kids to tell them what the problem had been, my son screamed “God forbid for you mummy “ 😀😀😀.
When I told my colleague, that had “wasted” his time, credit and social capital to call his friend that works at the network provider what the problem was he was speechless. 😀.
Everyone was laughing at me. Please feel free to laugh too. I’m very deserving.
But after you have finished laughing, this is what threw me off. While I take most of the blame, the network provider is not innocent too 🙄🙄🙄.
Normally, when one is low on credit or doesn’t have credit, they(network provider) will very rudely tell you “you have insufficient credit to make this call”. But in this case, all I was getting was a call failed message. How was I now supposed to know it was a credit issue eh?
Oh, by the way, I’m not also alone in my gross misdiagnosis of the situation. After I found out what the problem was, I asked all the people that knew I was having this issue to guess what the problem was, none of them. No, not one guessed that it was because I didn’t have credit.
This reminds me of how we always think of high falutin reasons or solutions whenever something happens. We are always quick to think the worst.
Small headache we think it’s a brain tumour. When we haven’t heard from a loved one we immediately assume the person has gotten into an accident. More common everyday realities like not being close to their phone, no network, battery dying etc won’t cross out minds first. Sigh.
Our brains are just wired to think worst-case scenarios.
“Common things occur commonly”. I remember in medical school, when we over-enthusiastic students, after taking a history and examining a patient and then presenting to the consultant, just to flex our knowledge will in stating our list of potential diagnoses begin with some terrifying sounding diseases. The consultants will say “common things occurs commonly” meaning that the likelihood of the diagnoses being malaria, typhoid etc was much higher than these strange names we were calling.
That had an instant humbling effect. Who doesn’t want to be the student or house officer that has diagnosed some “great” ailment to the detriment of the patient 😂.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this. As parents, business people etc we must first check off simple solutions to problems before we bring out “grenades” in pursuit of big problems because most often than not, solutions to most issues that we have on a day-to-day basis are simple.
A hospital was recording high death rates after surgical procedures and decided to get the help of a consultant to find out what the cause was. After going through every process related to surgeries, the problem was that they didn’t wash their hands properly before surgeries. Something as basic as that had caused them to lose a lot of lives.
Leonardo Da Vinci was onto something when he said, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Our lives would be so much “simpler” if we kept things simple.
First Principles Thinking Always!!!
Keep going,
Ije.
This reminds me of when I was doing my clinical rotations. I recommended that we treated a patient’s bacterial infection with vancomycin hoping that my response would impress my preceptor. He responded “ if you are going to kill a fly perched on your windshield do you go with a piece of paper or with a baseball bat?” At the moment I knew that I had f*cked up.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication!" love it Ije. Thanks for the reminder