Someone once said there are three things in the world you cannot do anything about: death, airlines and taxes. I have since added a fourth: cybercaf�s. Many writers here don�t own computers and rely entirely on caf�s. Even for those of us who own PCs, Internet connection is for God, so we still need the caf�s. Ninety percent of the caf�s in Lagos are shut half the time and render poor services almost all the time they are open. The remaining ten percent render poor services half the time. �Our server is down� is something you often hear at caf�s. Most of them operate more stations than the broadband services they pay for is meant to cover and this makes the system slow. Some default in payment and are promptly cut off by their US-based providers. For some this is due to difficulty in remitting money as it is extremely difficult to use credit cards from Nigeria. Sometimes the problem is double power failure; that is, from the electricity company and from caf� generator. I once spent an entire evening trying in vain to submit a story to an editor meant to submit it to another editor. It was two days to the day the final editor was meant to receive it.
A problem often faced is caf�s not accepting diskettes because someone told them their systems would catch a virus. For caf�s which have no such rules, the one or two systems designated for diskette users are usually inadequate. Even those of us that now have flash sticks sometimes get ambushed by some caf�s running Windows� 98 which is incompatible.
Once at my favourite caf�, I found that the six systems designated for floppy disk users were taken up. I sat down and waited. You learn to wait in this business. When someone finally got up, another man jumped in front of me, saying he had been waiting for that system. He said not to worry, that he won�t be five minutes. Five minutes became forty minutes as be browsed away at pornography and sent erotic mails. By the time I sat on the PC, it was ten minutes to the caf�s closing time.
The PC had no Microsoft Word. WordPad usually reads MS Word files, but not today. That one said it could not convert certain graphics in the file. A few minutes later, three other systems became vacant. But none of them would accept my diskette. By now the caf� attendant was standing behind me, telling me they were locking up. I left for home � to return the following day.
For writers who have no access to computers at home and in the office and rely entirely on cybercaf�s to do their writing, there is the problem of cost. Caf�s charge between N100 and N150 an hour. This may not be much but it comes to a lot if you spend several hours at the caf�. This is unsustainable if you are what is called �a poor struggling writer�. Many of us have since discovered that typing keeps much faster pace with your thought process than the use of pens. But faced with this kind of problem, many go back to writing in ink. If they cannot afford to take this out for typing, they may chuck them in their cupboards and forget about writing.
