Unbroken? Don’t Touch

The average price of a toothpaste in Nigeria is $1 (at bank rate of course). I pay so much attention to my mouth and its constituents, I don’t even know why, probably because I hate bad breath. Like if I was going for a meeting with a client worth a million dollars and your breath was stinking; I’d gladly forfeit that money. So I try so much to make sure my mouth is clean, I think that’s the part of my body that gulps so much money from me followed by my armpit of course.

My teeth has been awesome over the years, I’ve gotten compliments from all and sundry about how white my teeth are (are instead of “is” sounds so weird, but English says it’s correct), and how awesome my dentition is. Basically stuff like that. I mean, I use a mouthwash, I brush twice everyday (it’s like a religion, I never ever fail to do this, one time I fell asleep after a long day, I woke up by 12 in the middle of the night and unconsciously headed straight to the bathroom to brush my teeth). So I expect my teeth to be cool of course.

There’s this international toothpaste brand that keeps making brilliant ads on TV, I’d seen them for so long and somehow, they’d managed to convince me that their toothpaste was superior. Remember the average price of a toothpaste is $1, well these guys sell theirs for $3. I didn’t even mind, I bought it. Anything to make my already awesome teeth better! After using the first one, I didn’t see any difference, in fact, I think my teeth became worse. My teeth became rather sensitive to extremely cold things (unlike before), my teeth just became uncomfortable, and it was awful. But because I believe so much in their adverts, I decided to blame myself. I felt it was because I had gone for the wrong “flavor” (not exactly flavor but you understand what I mean, I ran out of adjectives), so I decided to buy another variant (oh! That’s the word I was looking for). It didn’t get better, the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the third variant I bought, they called it ”Gentle Whitening”, that stuff darkened my teeth instead of whitening it. Like what the hell? What did I get myself into? It’s been frustrating.

That’s the tale that has led me to this post. If it’s not broken; don’t fix it. I know there’s that constant natural desire to be better and stuff, but be careful what you wish for. My teeth was awesome, in perfect state, but I fell for a brilliant TV ad, now see where it has led me to. Quality sometimes can be disguised. Yeah, I said that. And funny enough, it doesn’t require quality to spot quality most times. It requires a simple survey.
After my horrible experience with these $3 toothpaste guys, I decided to do a simple twitter search about them (google is too mainstream), and I realized almost everyone had a complaint or two about them. Like people were experiencing the same problems I was; I must confess, that made me feel better. I wasn’t the only gullible one who fell for their trick at least. But imagine I did this survey before buying them, I would have avoided the whole brouhaha at first. Now I see why modern day Einsteins twisted the old maxim that “experience is the best teacher”. You know they now say “someone else’s experiences is the best teacher…don’t let it happen to you first”. I added the last part. But it makes perfect sense now.

Only a fool will jump from frying pan to fire just to show that he can jump.

Remember when we had just GPRS on our mobile phones? You know life was pretty much sane back then, with our “G”, we could do whatever we wanted, Facebook, Goal, Wapking, Waptrick, Sefan, and all the other stupid things we did on the internet back then with no complaints whatsoever. But just like my toothpaste story, someone somewhere came across a Nikola Tesla or Edison theory that said we could do more on the internet with double GPRS and decided to take the theory serious. Thanks to some crazy Billionaires who like that kinda stuff, the dude got funding and went into research, the result? The 2G internet was born. That guy ruined our lives! From 2G to 3G and now we’re at 4G (hey, in Africa of course, I know some of my American readers will quickly point out that they’ve got 4.5 or 5g over there, allow us shine in peace with our 4G at least).

I mean, faster internet shouldn’t be a bad thing yeah? But it is! That’s because you pretty much can’t do anything with G or 2G. I know this because the network reception in my house room (room because once I stand in front of my door or walk around my compound, I get good reception, but on my bed, my table, my toilet; pretty bad reception. As a matter of fact, to publish this post on the internet, I’d have to go stand in front of my door). Note that when I say bad reception I mean 2G. It’s crazy how I can’t open a web page with 2G, not even Facebook. Like freaking Facebook that required just G to open back in the day! This is treacherous! I’m furious! Why is this so? This will take us back to my toothpaste story. So when Facebook saw that there was now 3G, it decided to do some crazy stupid stuff behind the scene that meant 2G couldn’t open Facebook pages anymore.

Now this is what progress does to you, it gives you an illusion of something better. So Zuckerberg sees 3G, and rants in his garage about how the introduction of 3G means, Facebook can now stream live videos, post pictures without compressing it (remember when they used to do that?), and all the other stuff and boom! They added all those features and a little more. But in adding those features, they made Facebook heavier. This explains why my miserable 2G can’t open Facebook pages. It also explains why my teeth has become miserable. The $3 toothpaste guys probably added some chemical benzene-ethanoate-fluoride-chloro-II-methane compound bullshit which my teeth was unfamiliar too and it had messed up my teeth.

Were we not all happy when I was using the normal $1 toothpaste? Why are we now unhappy? Some guy decided to conduct an experiment and came up with that disaster of a toothpaste that has now become my nemesis. Don’t get me wrong, research is good. But research shouldn’t be done at the expense of efficiency. The fact that those guys at Volkswagen keep researching and bringing out new car models every year doesn’t mean my great grandfather’s 1969 Volkswagen Beetle can’t move. You should have brought out your 3G without making my 2G less efficient. And for this, I bear a grudge.

Stay True!

Miracle Roch.