How I met your mother (Vision 2040)

I had been working on a project for which my employer needed external funding. For this purpose we had to make a presentation to a panel from our intended financier, a bank. Just as I was the youngest chap on my team there was a beautiful young lady on the banks’. Didn’t quite get her name during introductions, not that I cared then. A few visits to the bank followed and that’s when the interest built. She had a pleasant personality, beautiful in every sense, brilliant, her voice heavenly.  I thought she must be taken, as every good one usually is but my heart urged on. I managed to get a name and yes a phone number. I tried it severally but it was either off or my calls would go unpicked. Very frustrating, dehumanilizingly so. I started to doubt the number so I needed to meet her in person. The next time I went to the bank someone else was stationed at her desk, he was new and didn’t have an idea whether she had left the bank or just moved. Strangely her former boss offered some information, she had been moved to the head office and yes the name she gave was her real one. I walked out like I had just deposited a million shillings in my account.

With her first name and her itinerary confirmed I had some bricks to build with but how do I walk to a bank HQ with almost 200 staff to ask for an employee newly moved here by her first name, especially when it was a common one?  I needed to get the full name, a surname in the very least. A light bulb just went off in my mind, if I sent her some money through the ingenious mobile cash transfer service that was MPesa I would get the names for 200 bob. Bingo! I not only got her surname but her maiden one as well. I wove my way around the bank and a fortnight later I was seated at her desk, not for business but pleading for a date. She would think about it (a yes by my definition), another “happy bank client” moment.  A few coffee’s, skiing, picnics at a dinner at InterCon she asked bluntly; “what took you so long?” Twenty years later, what can I say.