...is not right. Period.
Being served my own pie of the preposterous act reminds me of the story of a woman who had to re-tell a story about her that went viral on social media.
To be frank, the woman has massive hooters, which got the attention of many perverts on the streets of Lagos. As if embarrassing her by crowding her is not enough, some took their stupidity further by taking her pictures (without her consent, of course) and attached different stories to it. Some, unbelievable; some outright ridiculous.
As the woman recanted, it was her friend that informed her of the stories circulating the media with her pictures strategically illustrating the different tales. And guess what, it is a different story entirely.
Maybe I should tell you this one, too. It's about (me and) some of my classmates:
We were at night class preparing for an exam scheduled for the next morning. But towards the middle of the night, many guys started drifting off and some of the others guys that weren't sleeping when others were, started taking pictures of those sleeping. The annoying part is that they took the pictures when “boys” were enjoying it deep, adjusting to the most humorous postures ever. Unfortunately, none of us (even as I wasn't sleeping) knew when all of these was happening. We only got to know of it when those pictures were all over WhatsApp with different captions. So embarrassing.
Now to my own story
I have an exam the next day, so I took almost all the hours the night before off sleeping—jacking (hey, it's reading; not street robbery), as we call it. The next morning, the sleepy me continued reading but with intermittent yawn. More hours into it (reading), my eyes became heavy; couldn't hold the sleep back any longer. But hey, I will be writing a paper in few hours, so I continued reading even as apparent I couldn't assimilate jack. At that point in time, sleeping is the costliest thing on earth. Bet.
As I enjoyed my sleep-reading, yawning with my mouth so wide it could give passage for two apples at a time. I leered, surveying around with the corner of the eyes, trying to see if everyone is concentrating on their books and not on me.
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What a relief — nobody noticed, even if they did, it was covert. But just as I was about turning the pupils of my eyes back to my book, I saw the camera of a 5.5" phone turned directly towards me. Huh! “what the hell is he doing?”
In a flash, I challenged the person holding the phone; even as it is unlike of me.
The following ensured:
“Boss, I see you're snapping me.”
“No,” he said with a head-shaking gesture.
Not minding his reply, I said “Can I see your phone?”
He didn't hand me his phone, though, but I watched carefully as he swiped through the recently taken pictures and behold … selfies! He was taking selfies, but because he was using the front camera, his phone's rear camera has to point at me. (:
“No vex, bro. As I see your camera facing me, I think say you dey snap me.”
“But,” he said, “you're handsome now.”
He is not the first, and most likely will not be the last, to tell me that. But this is not about looks; it is about what happens to the picture afterwards – what they do with it and how far it travels.
“No vex,” I apologized as I dragged myself back to where I was sitting.
God forbid I log on to Facebook, or worse, Nairaland someday and see a meme featuring me and my buccal cavity widely open like a lidless bucket and a book before me with jump-into-lagoon captions. Ah!
End of story.
If you take pictures of people in postures they're are not proud of, or without their permission, please stop it. It's a terrible thing seeing one's picture being used for rather unspeakable things.
Stop it; it's not right. It may even haunt them.
Just stop it, abeg.
______
Lights out.
Quick add: There's another picture of a guy reading on the ATM queue. Mehn! the captions are hilarious. I pity the guy though.
Testing the comments.
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