And so i decided to pay yet another visit to the MTN friendship center located within Ikota Shopping Complex, next door to the high brow Victoria Garden City (VGC) in Ajah. It was with a bit of apprehension.

My first visit did not go too well. I had walked into a fairly sized crowd and the doorman handed me a tally number putting me at the end of the queue of 30 people. I paused for a few seconds and scurried out through the door. No way i was going to spend my lunch break hanging out with the folks in MTN.

It was with this mindset that i approached the friendship center again, with the hope of having my number ported from Globacom to Nigeria’s biggest network, MTN. This time around, I was in for a big shocker. Surprisingly, the place was almost empty with only one person in line! This was too good to be true, there has to be a catch somewhere. And indeed there was.

I was given a form to fill and i fished out my international passport which i presented to the pretty lady behind the counter, who i later got to know as Chinwe. She carefully explained to me that their network systems were down.

What?! How predictable! In my head, i was already composing a very nasty post i would publish about my experience. Unfortunately, that was not to be. Chinwe saved the day.

After explaining to me about the system downtime, she nevertheless took my details down, gave me a “Welcome Back” replacement SIM and I even got to register the SIM. I left the place with a special thank you to her. I had barely arrived back at my destination when i got a call from her. Apparently, their system was up. She asked for a few more details and finally asked me to send the magic word “PORT” to the shortcode 3232. Believe it or not, about 2 hours later when i checked my old SIM it was inactive. I inserted my new MTN SIM and Y’hello, i was locked on to the MTN network.

What a nice lady, Chinwe. That particular friendship center would be seeing my face very soon – as soon as i can think of a reason!