The Day My Boss Mistook a Goat for Our Biggest Client

The generator died at exactly 8:47 in the morning, and that was how I knew the day was going to ruin me.

I remember the time because I was staring at my phone when the office went from the hum of the AC to dead silence, the kind of silence that makes you hear your own heartbeat in a Yaba office building with peeling paint and a landlord who has never once fixed the lift.

My name is Chidi, and I have worked at Adigwe Creative Concepts for two years, long enough to know that the silence after a generator dies is the most dangerous sound in Lagos.

Three seconds later, Mrs. Adigwe came out of her office like she had been launched from something.

Who killed my generator? she shouted, even though nobody had touched the generator, even though the generator was simply old and tired like the rest of us.

Today of all days. Today, when Chief Falana is coming.

Chief Falana was not just a client. Chief Falana was the client, the one whose poultry feed company kept our small agency alive through two recessions and one currency devaluation that nearly finished us.

If we lost the Falana account, half the staff would be sent home before Christmas, and everybody in that office knew it, which was why the mention of his name made even Blessing from accounts drop her biscuit.

He’s coming by ten, Mrs. Adigwe said, fanning herself with a folder. To see the new campaign boards. The man that built this company from a wheelbarrow of chickens in Mushin. We cannot, cannot, embarrass ourselves.

I want to explain something about Lagos mornings, because if you have never lived through one, you will not understand what happened next. By 8:50, the heat in that office had already turned my shirt into something I could wring out.

By 9:00, Mrs. Adigwe had sent Emeka, our intern, running down four flights of broken stairs to find a mechanic, an electrician, a generator man, anybody with hands and a wrench, because the boards we needed to present were sitting unprinted on a dead computer with a battery at four percent.

By 9:20, Emeka returned not with a generator man but with a man who introduced himself as Engineer Promise, who looked at our Mikano set for exactly six seconds and announced, Ah, this one don die finish. Na new carburetor we need, but where I go find am for this Yaba this morning?

Mrs. Adigwe did not scream.

She went very quiet instead, which everyone in that office knows is far worse than screaming. She looked at the clock, looked at the dead boards, looked at Engineer Promise, and said, in the calmest voice I have ever heard a desperate woman use, Find one. I don’t care how. Steal one if you have to, just don’t tell me you stole it.

This is the part of the story where I should tell you that things calmed down, but they did not. At 9:40, the printer in the small studio behind the conference room finally came alive, sputtering through the boards page by page while Blessing stood over it like a woman watching a baby take its first steps.

At 9:55, with five minutes to Chief Falana’s arrival, we had eleven of the fourteen boards printed, mounted on foam board with double-sided tape that Tope from the design team was applying with the focus of a surgeon.

And then the gate man downstairs called up to say a car had arrived.

Mrs. Adigwe smoothed her wrapper, straightened the framed photo of her late husband that sits permanently crooked on her desk, and walked to the window to watch the famous Chief Falana step out of his Prado.

What she saw instead, according to her own account given loudly to the whole office afterward, was a man in a flowing white kaftan walking briskly toward our building entrance with two goats trailing behind him on a rope, the kind of goats people buy at Bariga market for parties or for sacrifice or sometimes just because the goats were cheap that day.

That cannot be Chief, she said, more to herself than to anyone, but loud enough that Tope heard and started laughing into a foam board.

It was not Chief Falana.

It was a tenant from the second floor, a man everyone in the building calls the “Alaye” guy because of his loud greetings, who was simply walking his goats up because he kept them in a small pen behind the building and was moving them before the landlord’s wife complained again.

Mrs. Adigwe had mistaken him for the biggest client our agency had ever had, in a kaftan, with goats, walking toward a meeting that did not exist.

She did not laugh immediately.

For one full minute, she stood at that window in complete silence while the rest of us tried very hard not to die from holding our laughter in, because you do not laugh at Mrs. Adigwe when she is stressed, not unless you want to spend the rest of the year being assigned every difficult client in Lagos.

Then, somehow, she laughed. It started small, a kind of disbelieving exhale, and then it became real laughter, the kind that bends a person at the waist, the kind that made her sit down on Blessing‘s desk because her legs could not hold her anymore.

Ah, Lagos, she said, wiping her eyes. This Lagos will finish me before any client does.

Chief Falana arrived nine minutes later in his actual Prado, in his actual agbada, no goats anywhere near him, and walked into a conference room with eleven mounted boards and three unmounted ones that Tope held up by hand like a human easel, grinning the whole time like it was part of the creative concept.

Chief Falana did not notice the missing generator hum, did not notice the sweat still drying on everyone’s foreheads, did not notice that the woman pitching him a million naira campaign had nearly had a heart attack over goats twenty minutes earlier.

He approved the campaign. He even laughed when Mrs. Adigwe, riding some strange post-panic confidence, told him the goat story herself, leaving out only the part where she had mistaken the man for him.

Lagos will always give you a story, Chief Falana said, shaking everyone’s hand on his way out, as long as you survive long enough to tell it.

By 4pm, the generator had a new carburetor, the AC was humming again, and Engineer Promise was paid in cash and in jollof rice from the canteen downstairs, which he said he preferred anyway.

Mrs. Adigwe called the whole staff into the conference room, not for another crisis, but to say thank you, her voice still carrying the leftover shake of the morning’s near disaster.

I left the office that evening and walked down to the bus stop on Herbert Macaulay Way, past the same man with his goats, now tied quietly to a lamppost while he negotiated with a buyer.

I looked at those goats for a long time, the actual cause of the longest twenty minutes of my professional life, chewing on nylon bags like nothing in the world was wrong.

Some people in Lagos lose accounts because of bad creative work, bad timing, bad luck.

We almost lost ours because of two goats and a kaftan that looked, from a fourth floor window with the sun in your eyes, exactly like prosperity walking toward you.