A chance encounter with the Stutern twins at the Palms Lekki

Good morning! It's Monday Tuesday, and if there's one thing I would like to tell you, it would be that last weekend was awesome for several reasons, one of which is the subject of this post.

On Saturday morning, I decided to stop by Shoprite at the Palms shopping mall, Lekki before heading to the office (no I don't work on weekends). Just as I made to leave the parking lot for the mall, I noticed the Stutern twins heading in my direction and towards the mall. I was trying to remove my debit card from my bag which I was going to leave behind in the car. I recognized them from the days when I used to visit CCHub regularly. But somehow, I managed to decide that I was not gonna say hello, just to avoid any social awkwardness. 

From L-R: Kehinde, Hafiz, a family of photobombing smileys and Taiwo

Alas! My evil anti-social plans would not survive the bigheartedness of the Stutern twins. As soon as they were within earshot of me, they stopped. Then one of them said something along the lines of, "it seems like I know you from somewhere". He was straining to remember where it was that he knew me from but I quickly came to the rescue. I told him of the days when I used to frequent ccHub, Yaba and how I have known them since their early days of starting Stutern. 

He was clearly surprised that I knew them in association with Stutern. So, I aptly went on to increase the surprise factor by mentioning how I knew about their partnership with Jobberman, as well as the recently launched JobPalava, a job review site for Nigerian employees. When I mentioned how cool I thought it was that they came up with JobPalava within a few weeks from when the idea was born on Twitter, I was told that one of them works on the back-end while the other does front-end development. The twins were beaming with smiles at this point. And I myself was grinning like a teenage groupie who ran into her number one pop-star crush.

We soon ran out out of small talk fodder and it was time to part ways. But just before we did, one twin gracefully asked for my name and what I do. I hope it didn't show in the way I said, "I work at ** check LinkedIn **; I'm a programmer there" that I'm not that excited about or proud of my work. Anyway, I think his response was: "wow, that's great", and he said it in a way that left me with no doubt about his sincerity.

Minutes later, as I walked into Shoprite, it occurred to me that writing about this encounter was a good blogging idea for the weekend. And in that instant, I regretted having not asked for a photo with the Stutern twins. I prayed in my heart that by a stroke of luck, I would run into them again before leaving the mall. Apparently, God was listening because as I walked towards the checkout aisle after buying mostly things that were not on my imaginary shopping list, I saw the Stutern twins standing side-by-side just ahead, with their backs at me. Yippee!

I walked quietly towards them and being the weirdo that I am, I stopped just behind them without as much as a sound to announce my presence. The twins were discussing with a friend whose birthday I later discovered was on that day. After like 7 seconds of being in stealth mode, perhaps due to some gesture from their friend who could see me all along, one twin finally turned around and blew my cover.

Without much ado, I told them of how seeing them again that day was a dream come true. The birthday girl was quickly recruited to be our photographer, even though she was meant to be the celeb of the day. I gave her my phone to take the pics but after a few seconds of trying to adjust for quality, she quickly found out how shitty the phone camera is. Thankfully, she announced this in the most polite way possible to the three men standing behind the camera with picture-perfect smiles. I agreed.

Fortunately, Kehinde quickly came to the rescue and offered to have the photos taken with his phone instead. Click, click, click and that was it. I was glad that I now had the most essential ingredient for a blog post about a random encounter with these admirable creators of Stutern. Now, there was no excuse for not writing it. Bitter-sweet stuff. 

Just before we finally parted ways, Kehinde collected my number so he could send me the pictures on Whatsapp. About thirty minutes later, when I had settled in the office, I picked up my phone and was happy to see that the pictures (3 or 4 of them) had been delivered to my phone. I thanked him for the pictures and used the opportunity to ask:  "is this Taiwo or Kehinde"? And the fact that Kehinde answered that question, dear reader, is the only reason why instead of 'Kehinde' in all the places where it occurs in this article, we don't have: "the twin in the grey polo".

Thanks for reading!