By TONY MASIKONDE

KENYA: There is a time tested advice that one should not wash his or her dirty linen in public. Those who break that handed down rule are refrained upon by right thinking members of the society, as the lawyers would put it when preparing to fire a demand letter.

But in this digital era, we have a young pool of people who are not only concerned about such societal restrictions, but are also washing their dirty linen online.

A couple of months back; Frao introduced me to a workmate he referred to as Joyce. Well, from experience, Frao never introduces girls with the right names and neither is the association quoted ever correct.

So when Joyce was introduced, while we were whiling away the hours on a Friday evening, she seemed to warm up to my raunchy jokes, and I noticed Frao getting abit nervous. He was always fidgeting with his phone while watching our every move. Having noticed that a brother was anxious, I made the only reasonable conclusion; Joyce was not a workmate, as introduced, but Frao’s another mpango wa kitu. Yes, I hear nowadays mpango wa kando is several years old and it’s time we got a bit explicit, hence the mpango wa kitu clarion.

Nudging

Not wanting to waste friendship cultivated delicately over a couple of years, I decided to go easy because I feared I could go for months without a drink since I was in bad shape, financially speaking, and I could not afford the small bottle of soda. But the girl kept nudging me and asking for more jokes.

“Tony, aki you got jokes, please make me laugh once more?” she went on.

A couple of times I tried to integrate Frao into the conversation, but the brother can, at times, suffer a serious bout of anxiety.

So I shut my mouth, and let Frao soar into the sky talking about the supposedly new state-of-the-art traffic lights that comes complete with camera. 

That night, I was glad it turned out just okay.

And a few days later, after I asked Frao whether Joyce was actually a workmate, he laughed it off and intimated that the girl was an intern in a Nairobi office. I have never revisited that day again until Frao called me on Thursday evening.

“Tony, I urgently need a computer programmer!” He gasped into the earpiece.

“What…?” are you guys hiring urgently or what? Have you now moved to Human Resources division? I asked him.

“Shut up and listen,” he hissed. That’s when I knew we had a situation on our hands.

“Do you remember Joyce?” Frao asked, almost breathless.

“Yap. I remember her. The girl you thought I would run off  with some months back”

“Enough!” he shouted again.

“What could have happened?” I loudly wondered, as I changed my phone to the next ear, having already started feeling the heat.

“Guess what, she has bared it all?”

“What do you mean bared it all? I yelled. Where is she, I go and get a glimpse?”

“Idiot” barked Frao.

Before I could even protest to his expletives, he continued.

“Just imagine she has uploaded explicit photos about us on the Internet,” he went on.

Cheating

The news got me dizzy, but this was not the time to show weakness, especially when a brother needed my help.

“Why did she do it?” I managed to ask.

“She thinks she is my girlfriend and that I’m cheating on her,” Frao explained.

Then screamed, “Get me a hacker ASAP”

It took the hacker two days wage to wage ‘anti-missile’ and contain the situation and, of course, a considerable drinking budget as we get into the jolly month of December. Damn!

That is the digital approach to relationship.