Have you ever seen or heard of someone who made a mistake either with the wrong spelling of their name on an official document or their age being mistakenly entered? I'm sure you must have seen or heard of someone who faced or is facing problems that come from that kind of mistake.
I knew of these cases during my tertiary institution days, and I was extremely careful — yet I still found myself in that category. When the first semester exam of HND1 came, I saw that my Mat No. was wrongly entered on the list that was pasted, and that's actually the official list the school has in the database. After the exam, I went to lay a complaint and I was held responsible, with them saying I made a mistake when filling the numerous documents.
“Me? No way! It can never be me!” I refused to take the blame because the Mat No. I knew had a “9” instead of the “0” that appeared on their database. Luckily and unluckily for both me and the school, when they checked, there was no other person with that Mat No.
Let me explain:Mat Nos. are given accordingly without skipping any number. An example is …7780, …7781, …7782, and so on.
Finally, they saw that it was a mistake from the general database of the school and not the department alone, and they agreed to change it ASAP. Did that happen? No!
The second day of the exam, when the list of students was posted, my name still appeared with the wrong Mat No. And in each of those exams, I never failed to raise alarm to the posted invigilator — to the extent that once we entered the hall and were about to start the exam, everyone in the hall would start hailing my name as a reminder to make my usual complaint, which became a kind of way for the hall to get rowdy and “do their things.” Lol.
Meanwhile, some of my friends begged me to stop disturbing the departmental office every day because they assured me that they would fix it since it was just a mistake they already admitted to. But I didn’t adhere to their advice because if I gave them any chance, the wrong Mat No. would be uploaded to the NYSC portal, which would give me a lot of trouble when trying to process my enrollment.
Do you know the craziest thing? It was actually rectified in HND1, but the wrong Mat No. kept coming out like that till I finished school. When I finally believed it had been changed was when I got my NYSC deployment letter.
Hey! I don’t joke with silly mistakes in official documents.
Thanks for reading.
