One evening, two job seekers were discussing their experiences in their efforts to get jobs. They were not happy at all. One of them showed his legs which were covered with dust and his pair of slippers which had holes in them to his partner.        

    ‘See, Aliu, this will make the fifteenth pair of slippers I’ve bought this month,’ he said to his partner.        

    ‘Come to think of it, this pair you can see on my leg is the eleventh this week,’ the other man replied, raising his leg up for his partner to see. ‘Shouldn’t you learn to give thanks to God for a lesser figure?’ The other man was called Ibro.        

    So they both agreed to set out the following day in a job-searching competition trying to determine the first man to get a job. As arranged, they left very early in the morning and walked round the town looking for employment. It was Ibro who first got a job. He had walked up to the front of a house where he saw an advertisement requiring a hardworking young man to apply for some cleaning job within the house.           

    Without asking to know all about the job, Ibro went into the house and told a man he saw that he wanted to work. The man, who wanted to be sure if Ibro really needed the job, asked him to go and think about it very well before he started. But before the man finished talking, Ibro said,

    'I’m ready for the job now, even if it means do and die.’           

    The man gave a little smile and asked Ibro to follow him to where he would work. In a short time, they walked through a small passage and came to a large room at the back of the building. Ibro had noticed that as they approached the room, he was not comfortable in himself. Now as soon as the man opened the door of the room Ibro saw large shrouds covering some stiff objects. The man then turned round, facing him and holding the hem of one of the shrouds closest to him.        

    ‘You’re to work here. Your job will be to clean these objects, as you can see,’ the man said pulling the shroud.        

    Ibro stood watching for about ten minutes and he was as hardened as the objects he was shown at the moment. When he finally picked up his consciousness he left the room with his back fleeing and all along the road telling everyone he saw that he saw death and that some corpses were chasing him.        

    Later in the evening of that day, when Ibro and his partner met, they shared their experiences of the afternoon. Aliu told of how he was given employment to wash the rotten teeth in the mouth of an old woman.        

    ‘It was a very stupid job indeed,’ said Aliu.        

    ‘Why didn’t you accept it?’ His friend told him.        

    ‘Nobody ever washes the teeth clean, l learnt from some neighbours. So you never get paid in the end.’           

    ‘It was in fact as bad as not having a job at to all,’ Ibro hissed and they switched over to other discussions that night.

Nigerian, born in 1979 and hails from Ede in Osun State. Graduate of English Language (B.A. Edu). Loves writing and reading. Has written a volume of poems titled Whips and Lashes, a collection of short stories titled The Foliage and a collection of short amusing tales titled The World Is Too Serious with Us. Above story from The World Is Too Serious with Us.