The Stamp

_{Photo by Markus Spiske}

There was a time in my life when I felt someone in my village had laid a curse on me. It was during my first year in school.

The reason why I felt that way was because of how almost everything I was doing was backfiring at me. I even almost lost my admission a week to my first ever university exam. It was the help of my elder brother’s friend (Frank) that stopped that from happening. And then, when I thought I had gone through enough and it was finally time for me to relax and really focus on my studies, I got hit with another problem that threatened my admission.

You see, after our first year in school, we’re required to go do a four months Industrial Training on whatever course we were studying. So seeing how I am an engineering student, I had to go look for an engineering company that would agree to take me in for four months. And if the company do agree to take us in, there’s a logbook given to us by our school which we were to give to the company so that everyday that we come to work, the company will sign and put their company stamp on it.

But you see, due to the strike the school had in the past, the school calendar was messed up at the time and the school was trying its best to return everything back to normal so instead of giving us four months which was the required time, we were given two months.

Now that wouldn’t have been a problem if we were submitting the logbook given to us back to the school, but we weren’t. The country has an Industrial Training Organization whose job are to collect the logbooks of student from every state in the country and then go through it to make sure all of the four months was filled.

Of course the school didn’t care about that, we the student were to sort ourselves out and that was what I did. I decided not to go for the training at all, instead I got myself a paying job and gave someone my logbook to fill for me. I felt that was the easiest way and there wasn’t anyway they were going to know I never went for the training.

I was wrong.

Fast forward to two months later and it was time for us to go submit the logbook at the Industrial Training office, that was where I met my doom. The dude who I gave to fill the logbook must have made a mistake or something because the moment I handed the logbook to the guys at the office, it was seized. I asked them why they weren’t giving it back and they told me that it was because I never did my training. Of course I argued with them that I did and when they started to show me all the evidence that I didn’t, I started to beg.

I had taken the logbook to their office because we needed their official stamp before taking it back to the school for the defense (we were required to defend everything written on our logbook).

I pleaded with the men throughout the whole day but they refused. They said the only way they were going to stamp it and give it back to me was if I went and brought the company fake stamp I used in stamping mine.

There was no way the company was going to give me their stamp because they had no idea I did any of this in the first place, so I did the only thing I knew I could do, I went and paid a guy to make an exact replica of the stamp for me. It took him some hours to do it and when he did, I made sure to rob enough ink on it and let it dry in other to make them believe it’s an old stamp.

I remember holding my breath that morning as the man at the industrial training office collected the stamp from me, placed it in ink and stamped it on a plain piece of paper while trying to compare the stamp on my logbook and the one on the plain piece of paper to know if they were the same. Luckily for me, they both looked alike so the man seized the stamp and gave me back my logbook.

After that experience, I made sure never to go through any shortcut ever again. I’m done doing things that could jeopardize my admission.