Hopeless

If anyone sees my daily actions, it would be as good as Mr. Beans’. On most days I have a tough time trying to set my window shutters to the proper height, and I tell you it’s not at all easy, with 3 strings, nothing to differentiate between, and each of them not only act differently on changing the azimuth and elevation of pulling but I am also starting to have the feeling that they act differently at different times of the day. I basically suck at this.

If it is not the window, then it is the key. It is very easy to lock yourself from outside at my apartment. And for a person of poor memory like me, it is easier. In such a case the procedure is to call the landlady who would give the duplicate key. Her name is Gail (she pronounces it ‘guile’) and I suppose the best word to describe her would be ‘bubbly’. Anyway, it is good that she was early to realize that I was a hopeless case, and from the 2nd time onwards she gave the duplicate key as well to hide somewhere else.

The action just beefs up when I am at the cooking table. Jumping up every now and then as I unmindfully touch something hot. One day a cooked Salmon in a can just won’t open. I brought out all my artillery, a set of 6 knives of different shapes, bottle openers, cork openers, and some others (I don’t know their names, neither do I know what they are for). It was a sort of a puzzle -trying to figure out when to use what or in which combination to break into the can without destroying its contents. The fight lasted 45 minutes, and then I somehow scraped through, battered and bruised.
One day, when I opened the oven after cooking meat, suddenly a strange high pitched beeping started. I looked around but couldn’t figure out the source or reason for sometime. It was the fire alarm, just a few puffs of smoke was sufficient to turn it on. One thing you can’t miss here is the number of warnings against fire and what to do such an emergency. The warning symbols were everywhere, in the university corridors, to the right and left of the entrance to my room, the apartment lobby… It was as if a fire was about to break out any moment. Fires are actually common here. And still it is beyond me why many of the walls of the houses were wooden. Even the roofs of the common man’s houses are tiled, no terrace.