by Ugochukwu Nnamdi Ukamba

Today I had that weird and strange feeling again.

That feeling that life is changing at a break-neck speed. That feeling that if one is not paying attention one would be left behind. The feeling that expecting things to remain normal and comfortable is an illusion that can only lead to misery.‎

Every time, recently, that I have had to walk into a banking hall to make a transaction I feel very strange and weird. Strange because, despite the quantity of financial transactions I conduct regularly, I can conveniently commence and conclude about 90% of those transactions without having to speak with a teller or walk into the bank’s hall. Strange because 16 years ago I could only carry out banking transactions in a banking hall -most often the particular branch that the account was opened.‎

While in the hall today, I had a flashback to the first bank account I ever owned. This was in the year 2000 and it was a Union Bank account opened at the Calabar branch. It is an understatement to say that running the account was a nightmare. First, if you needed to access cash quickly you had to get to the bank before resumption at 8.00am to book your space on the queue. When the bank finally opened, the bulk of the operations were not automated so you had to deal with the sluggishness of the staff.

I recall that whenever I travelled out of Calabar, the nightmare of running the account was multiplied as, most times, I was told that I could only withdraw from the branch where I opened the account. When money was paid into the account, I could not access it same day owing to some internal checks that had to be concluded before the money became available.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was one fateful morning when I got to the bank at 7.30am, as usual, in the expectation that when the bank opened at 8.00am I would be one of the lucky ones to be attended to expeditiously so I could conclude my transaction and make it back to school for my 9.00am lecture. Alas, the bank had other plans! It turned out that this was the era that banks were computerizing their operations and bank officials who had, before now, run manual operations were forced to work with computers.

Guess what happened? The only staff who had a grasp of how the computers worked was nowhere to be found when the bank opened at 8.00am. We all had to wait until he finally showed up at about 10.00am. By this time the banking hall was filled to the brim with angry customers who could not be pacified. When it got to my turn to be attended to, I ‘jejely’ told them that I wanted to close my account. They said I needed to write a formal letter to close my account. I asked for a sheet of paper, wrote the application in the hall, submitted same and took every last penny of my small change in that account. ‎

I marched across the road to Standard Trust Bank that had just commenced operation in Calabar and opened a new account.

If anyone had told me that there would be a time when I can conclude a bank transaction with just my telephone, I would never have believed. Heck, I didn’t even own a phone then! We have become comfortable with the ease of banking today that it is a struggle to remember the days of tally number, the days of no ATM, the days of no Internet banking.

Ironically, that’s how change happens in every other facet of life -stealthily and surreptitiously! I have tried to imagine how we were surviving in the days that all correspondences were through the post; how people moved from one location to the other when aircrafts and trains did not exist; how people survived when there was no electricity or electric bulb.

16 years from now we are going to have more remarkable changes in the way we live, interact, transact businesses and every other conceivable area. It is up to us to tune in our minds, accept that these changes are inevitable and adjust to it. In the alternative, we may whine about the ‘good ol’ days’ and how ‘modernisation is destroying everything’. We need to understand that those who get ahead in life are those who understand that the only constant thing in life is change!‎

 

---

Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Ugochukwu Nnamdi Ukamba is a Legal Practitioner based in Lagos. He tweets @NnamdiUkamba