Flat Broke, No Fuel, and a Struggling Startup: How I Bought 5 Litres of Petrol on Credit from Lagos "Area Boys" Using the Currency of Respect.
Tayo SolagbadeFormat: Short Story Manuscript
The heat of a Lagos afternoon does not just sit in the air; it heavy-presses itself against your skin like a damp, wool blanket. On this particular Tuesday, the city was vibrating at a dangerously high frequency. Fuel scarcity had gripped the metropolis by the throat.
Outside the locked gates of the Total filling station on the main artery, a queue of vehicles stretched for kilometers—an angry, motionless serpent of steel, exhaust fumes, and frayed tempers. Horns blared in a useless chorus of frustration.
Inside my rented 2 bedroom bungalow, there was still no electricity from PHCN and my generator outside had just gone silent, its tank bone-dry. Before midnight, I needed to put finishing touches to a 10 page PDF White Paper I was writing for a client, which needed to be uploaded to their website for launching the new Web Marketing System I was developing for them. The CEO had called me few hours earlier, to reconfirm that everything was on track and I had assured him it was so.
What skipped my mind was that I’d emptied the last 5 liter keg of petrol into the generator, a day earlier, while working on an Excel-Visual Basic coding Pay slip Generator project for a long time Lagos based hospital client!
I needed petrol. Specifically, I needed five liters of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS). But I had absolutely no cash. No money at all on hand. It was around 2004 or 2005, and I was a broke, struggling startup entrepreneur just trying to keep my head above water.
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NB: The PDF also contains a Corporate Team Role-Play Exercise
Exercise Title: The Pipeline Lever Negotiation
Objective: To train professional sales, procurement, and accounts teams on how to leverage a verified, uncollected pipeline asset to secure immediate resources when facing completely frozen cash flows or zero immediate budgets.
Click www.tinyurl.com/faction-areaboys to download it.
