Real life is stranger than fiction
1st March, 2008
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The manager of our apartment block nodded and paused as I passed him in the underground carpark.
"We've installed a second sensor in the garage gates just for you," he said.
My ill-fated attempt to drive through the gates while they were closing and being crunched between them has become part of body corporate folklore in our building and to protect me from myself, a special "Marc" sensor has now been installed. Thanks, guys. Aware of my responsibility to provide entertainment for my fellow tenants, a few nights before we moved out I turned in one of my better performances on the building's closed circuit TV system. On this evening God, at a loss for something to do, decided that for a joke he would cause my key to become jammed in the gate lock. It would be really amusing, he decided, to do this when I arrived home late from work, when my only thoughts were of bed and sleep. So it was that I put the key in the lock, turned it and pushed the gate. Neither the key nor the gate would budge and the former was now jammed firmly in the latter. After several minutes of fruitless gate rattling, I threw a Force 10 tantrum, shrieked abuse at the lock, pointed at the key and looked up at the camera. After performing a passable imitation of a seriously deranged person for at least ten minutes, I was finally let in by another resident. This was fortunate as, had I continued to rant, there'd have been every chance someone would have called the police and reported the maniac standing on the footpath conducting an abusive conversation with a block of 72 apartments. Once inside the gate it took another five minutes to extricate the key from the lock and when I finally crawled into bed I was so cranked up I couldn't sleep and spent several hours staring at the ceiling. The next day I asked if anyone else had complained about the lock on the gate. Predictably, the answer was in the negative. Apart from entry and egress, telecommunication problems continue to be a challenge. I lost another mobile phone last month but this loss was balanced by the discovery of my wallet lying in the middle of the footpath outside my house. In it was a wad of cash and all my credit cards. Apparently it had slipped out of my pocket as I climbed out of one of those detested maxi taxis the previous evening. I was so grateful that I all but fell to my knees. It made up for losing another mobile phone in broad daylight and, if you were wondering, in a state of absolute sobriety. The problem now lies not with mobiles but with my landline for we have three phones in our home, not one of which, at the time of writing, is functional. To be precise, they work insofar as they ring. But when you pick up one handset, they all keep on ringing ... and ringing and ringing and ringing. This, as you might imagine, can be irritating. It matters not how many buttons you press or how many times you replace the handset in its cradle, it just keep on ringing. So I sit there in the evenings and listen while all three phones ring at once and it is steadily driving my wife and I insane. Our four-month-old son, on the other hand, loves it. When they finally stop ringing, we try to work out who was calling by contacting friends and family on my new mobile. These conversations tend to follow a pattern:
"Hi, it's me. Did you just call me?"
After you've phoned half-a-dozen people, none of whom has expressed the slightest interest in speaking to you, a body can begin to feel just a little bit unloved. I suppose I could always drive back to my former apartment building and have a chat with my old mate the gate. |
