Up Nigeria

The man sitting next to me kept a serious and tense expression. He would barely move his face muscles, rarely close his eyebrows, and never, ever, move his eyes off of the TV screen.

I asked him for the score, and he answered me one null, like a machine and without moving his lips like a ventriloquist. My next question made all sense to me: "and who's winning?", but he almost got offended, just spiting "Nigeria is loosing". Such an answer almost made me loose all motivation and I seriously considered asking Paulo to go back to the office. After all, we had decided to take a break to see the match with the line operators so that we could establish, right from the first days, a close and equal relationship with them. We thought that the match could be a moment when they would be more relaxed and that they could for a moment forget about our condition of "coming from headquarters", thus creating with us an unconscious empathy. And us with them, once after all we'll be working together for the next five months, and we don't want to have to stand a bad working environment. But as we saw it at that stage, things weren't going according to our plans.

Paulo insisted more. He spoke to the fellow at his right about the Nigerian players he knew of, but the guy paid little attention. He turned his words to the left and tried to make analogies with Mexican football, but they didn't even blink. There were only fifteen minutes for the game to end, and Paulo suggested that we went back, and that we left those attempts to some other day. For some strange reason, and even going against my feeling of fatigue that was internally trying to get me out of there, I refused and I proposed that we stayed a bit longer.

Thirty seconds later, the right Nigerian player manages to penetrate de Senegalese defence and make the ball fly in front of the goal. The goal-keeper hits the ball away badly, placing it perfectly available to the Nigerian attacker, that couldn't do anything else than placing the ball inside the goal.

The man next to me jumped off of his chair and started screaming with all his strength, clapping hands and jumping out of explosive contentment. The others around us also got up as an infernal crowd, hugging each other and transforming the wooden tables into loud drums. Thirty seconds later, all instantaneously sat, returning back again to the impenetrable pose. We hadn't had time to react, and they were already closed again. Not even our "great goal, hein?" could get them back to relaxation. Paulo wanted once again to return, but now there was little time until the end and we could stand there for a bit more.

I was still talking to my colleague when I saw that the man by my side was standing again, this time performing a strange dance that I can only identify with the chicken kind. When I turned may eyes towards the TV screen I could just see the replay: the ball had again entered the Senegalese goal. The party required now double the energy, once it meant victory and not just a mere draw.

The game was over a few minutes afterwards, and the personnel retuned to the productions lines walking in an ordered line, and in a whispering silence, but this time without that tense expression of a few moments before. Now they were relaxed: they didn't have in their faces the stress of the game, they just carried the lightness of going to work. When turning around the corner, the whispering silence was broken: one of the operators screamed at us from far "up Nigeria". It was the sign of the empathy that we had been looking for. We screamed the same back.