Operation: Smartphone Acquisition

The insistent buzzing, a sound Chinedu hadn't heard in years, jolted him awake. Not the familiar, comforting rumble of his Nokia 3310, but a tinny, high-pitched squawk that grated on his nerves. He fumbled for the source, his hand landing on a smooth, cold rectangle beside his pillow. A smartphone. Amina’s smartphone, left behind after their late-night discussion, now a glaring symbol of everything he resisted.

“Operation: Smartphone Acquisition,” he muttered, the phrase echoing Amina’s exasperated sigh from the previous evening. She had laid it all out, her frustration a palpable thing in the air between them. “Chinedu, for goodness sake, it’s 2026! I can’t keep sending you voice notes you can’t open, or expecting you to bookmark a link that’s just a blur of characters on your screen.”

Mama Chinedu, bless her perpetually worried heart, had chimed in too, her voice a worried tremor over their video call yesterday. “Chinedu, my son, this your phone… it’s not good for your future. How will you see good wife? How will you find good business? Even prayer points, you cannot ‘Google’ them. This Nokia, it is like carrying cutlass to a knife fight.”