{"id":36,"date":"2016-10-20T15:08:21","date_gmt":"2016-10-20T12:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thoughtsbywiza.wordpress.com\/2016\/10\/20\/life-sucks-in-africa\/"},"modified":"2023-11-23T00:25:46","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T22:25:46","slug":"life-sucks-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/life-sucks-in-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Sucks in Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 5<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

\u2026 my typical day in tech on the “dark” continent.<\/p>\n

Most days I wake up pretty late. 8am on a good day. The first thing I do is reach out for my phone. I check the time, and scroll through a series of notifications to find out whether or not a server just exploded, or more realistically, if a Russian bot finally discovered the SSH port of my production server and client emails have been down for 6 hours.<\/p>\n

Home Sweet\u00a0HomeI passively run a web hosting business in my spare time for extra income. It\u2019s not fun and it means I can rarely ever be offline, but it helps to pay the bills. UptimeRobot says all the monitors are up, so it\u2019s safe to start my day.<\/p>\n

Sysadmin for breakfast?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I head across to my bedside work desk, and hit play on the keyboard. Spotify continues the third song from my \u201cFeel Good\u201d playlist and interrupts with an ad after. I\u2019m annoyed. Spotify doesn\u2019t officially work in Kenya, but I have Unlocator<\/a> (a nifty little service that makes me appear to be connecting from the United States\u200a\u2014\u200asort of like a VPN but with what appears to be a DNS implementation? I don\u2019t know, but it works like a charm).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great, because then I can unblock all these fancy<\/strong> US services but it annoys me that Spotify still needs a US-issued card for subscribing to premium.<\/p>\n

<rant>If you\u2019re reading this, Spotify, I am a lead that you can\u2019t convert into a customer even though I love your services and have the capacity to pay for them. Fix it? I know there\u2019s probably a legal\/business issue about this that I don\u2019t know about, but still.<\/rant><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s terrible. If I were elsewhere in the world, I\u2019d have been able to pay for this incredible music service that I already access for free anyway.<\/p>\n

Not much of a breakfast guy either, so most mornings I catch up on the latest news or stream last night\u2019s episode of the Daily Show. My man Trevor made it<\/a> so you know we gotta show support.<\/p>\n

The stream buffers for half a second before it presents a crisp full HD (1080p) image. I\u2019m infuriated by the speed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis would never happen in South\u00a0Korea.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s absolutely incredible that Zuku charges the equivalent of $57\/month for a reliable, unlimited 30Mbps fibre-optic connection. Ridiculous really. And to think their technical staff respond within hours of a reported issue! Incredibly inefficient.<\/p>\n

Trevor\u2019s having a go at Trump. It\u2019s brilliant. This year American politics has been just as entertaining as African politics. The experts say there\u2019s no chance Trump will win, and I trust them. After all, they were spot on about Brexit.<\/p>\n

I get a notification from Uber. My scheduled ride is 3 minutes away. There are always Ubers <5 mins away from where I live. I wish they were closer. I\u2019d settle for 45 seconds.<\/p>\n

I call Ian and Calvin and they confirm we\u2019re splitting the ride and will be ready to go in 5 minutes. They live right down the road and we all work in the same place. The Uber arrives promptly and we get on board. The commute to work is a 45-minute air-conditioned nightmare through some of the worst traffic on the continent and the dusty village road that is Thika Road. The government calls it a superhighway but, camaan, really<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Thika Road\u200a\u2014\u200aPhoto credit:\u00a0Dilemaxx<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We discuss the day\u2019s events in the Uber ride. I sense I\u2019m going to be hungry soon so I open up the Jumia Food app and place an order for a single rack of ribs from Big Square. Jumia Food guarantees delivery within 1 hour for most restaurants or your next meal free. It\u2019s ridiculous, so much for fast food!<\/p>\n

My order processes smoothly and one MPESA transaction later, my meal is on my way to me. It\u2019ll probably arrive a few minutes after I get to the office.<\/p>\n

I spend most of the day fighting to get a decent WiFi connection to finish up my tasks for the day. Our office collaborates on Google Docs so it\u2019s a pain to work without Internet. So backwards. If only there were less active WiFi access points around the office, getting a stable connection wouldn\u2019t be a problem.<\/p>\n

The workday proceeds smoothly and I manage to finish up by 6pm. Ian, Calvin and I discuss the plan for the evening. Brew Bistro? Probably. It\u2019s a rooftop bar and lounge in the middle of a village called Westlands.<\/p>\n

Photo credit: BarsKenya.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We relax and discuss the proposals we should write to USAid to fund our technology ideas. After all, they\u2019re here to help and we should utilise that altruistic American spirit to develop our continent. We have such a long way to go.<\/p>\n

The night proceeds and quickly devolves into drum-beating and ululation as a crowd of imbibers join the\u00a0fray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s after midnight and I\u2019m exhausted. A quick stop at the KFC nearby for some Zinger Wings before bed. I know it\u2019s unhealthy, but life is short. I take the last Uber ride home and settle down on the couch.<\/p>\n

I find a Netflix documentary on corruption and poverty in Africa and listen to it as I fall asleep, somewhat bemused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 5<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\u2026 my typical day in tech on the “dark” continent. Most days I wake up pretty late. 8am on a good day. The first thing I do is reach out for my phone. I check the time, and scroll through a series of notifications to find out whether or not a server just exploded, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"templates\/template-full-width.php","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[3,15,21,24,25],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-africa","tag-life","tag-satire","tag-startup","tag-tech"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiza.jalaka.si\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}