Welcome to my world

My work partner and I spent the better part of this afternoon and evening filling out his application to a leadership program in the US. He wrote all the responses; I just explained the things that got lost in cultural translation: that the month comes before the day in American dates, how to write an address when you come from a country where those don’t exist, what a “work environment” means.

For two hours, we worked until tragedy struck.

I went to click the “save and continue” button after a particularly difficult short-answer section. The internet sat for a while before the wheel in the corner of the tab on Google Chrome starting turning backward. After a few moments of me trying to remember the shortcut to screen grab on a Mac before his responses disappeared, his responses disappeared.

We sat staring at the ever-loathed “DNS look-up fail” message that is uncommon on US internet, less uncommon when you’re using a USB-key hooked to a Beninese cellphone tower.

My colleague made a high-pitched noise of exclamation.

He’d just experienced his first first-world problem.