04/08/2025
My parents have a provision store in our house. Back then, when cellphones were not rampant like they are now, my father, being someone who likes buying and selling, decided to add a phone booth to our provision store business.
He bought a Samsung R220 for that particular business. I had just finished writing WAEC and was doing nothing at home, so he handed over that call business to me. I had a book where I recorded the minutes when someone made a call. At the end of the day, he would check the airtime left in the phone and the number of calls made that day. Sometimes, I would use the business phone to make personal calls to my friends, and my father would still find out. So, I decided to buy a personal SIM card, which I bought for 1,000 naira in 2005. I still use that number till today. Once we were closed for the day, I would remove the business SIM card and insert mine to call my friends who had phones. This continued until my late cousin, Daa Ihuoma, gave me her old Alcatel phone. That was how I got my first phone. I used that phone until I got admission to the university in 2007.
We came to the conclusion that our children will not have personal phones till they get to 18 years, they know this and they agreed to the plan, so they make use of my phone whenever they need to google something, do their homework or call their classmates through their parents' phones. There's also a general phone at home with no internet connection which I use to check up on them when I'm not at home.
NB: This is my personal decision and you don’t have to agree with me.