Sunday, May 10, 2009

Egypt-anomics

Writing about ones great adventures can bring a tingly sensation of joy to the body. In my case, its brought to me in little electric zaps to my forearms by my mac book pro.

I couldn't figure out at first why my hair was poofing up. It looked like someone blew air into a rubber balloon and rubbed it on top of my asian afro (for some reason i was born with yakusa style permed hair).

Every once in while when I rested my hands on my keyboard in pensive thought, I would feel a slight pinch in my left forearm. Bzzzz! Strange.. I thought. The edges where the case joins together must be pinching me. Bzzz! Thats funny. My forearms are red. Bzzz! OK.. maybe I should google this.

What I found is .. damnit! Shocked again. OK, I continue. What I found is that the electrical wiring in my posh apartment is not so dependable and is sending small surges of electricity to my computer and through my arms.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5812465

Besides the electricity issue, you then have the water issue. You really don't realise how much you survive off of water until it shuts off on you. Well, it happened to us. Right in the middle of doing the dishes the water pressure just got weaker and weaker until finally it stopped to a dribble. No water in the sinks, showers, or the toilets. Nothing.

Big problem evidently because I had just finished a big mug of coffee and had to drain the lizard real bad. I eventually had to borrow the neighbors bathroom to take a pee. I do have a big balcony full of plants that I could have watered, but directly opposite of my balcony are about a dozen egyptians building the roof on the apartments next door and they would all be wondering when the day would come again when they would see a chinese guy walking around and taking a piss on his plants.

Ibrahim, the egyptian handyman that lives in a dark windowless basement of the building came up when I called him in a panic. "The building water is no more" he said. OK. Panic. "You have to use the pump for an hour" and he walked away. OK. Good. There's a solution. Wait. What pump? I suddenly had hallucinations of me with a bike pump contraption bending up and down and pumping water with a bunch of villagers standing around and watching. Not the case however as there exists a more modern solution.

I did however appear like the village idiot when Ibrahim looked at me incredulously like 'Did you grow up on a FARM???'(rolling his eyes). "When no Water, use pump for water underground." So evidently this type of thing happens every week in the spring and summer time. The building runs out of water supplied every tuesday, and when that runs out you pull from the reserves down below. So what you do then is turn on a switch to a pump and it draws water to your basin of water up on the roof.

So I turned on the pump. Watched Oprah with arabic translations for an hour. Still no water. Ibrahiiiiiim! I looked like a helpless wussy that grew up in a barn and did not understand modern mechanics or other such manly things. Shit. Blocked water pipe. We went up to the roof. Wait. Ibrahim had a solution. Open up the pipe and remove the blockage.

I stood by and watched Ibrahim take a puff from his cigarette, grab the open end of the pipe, put his mouth to the hose and SUCK HARD on that pipe. Dayam, Ibrahim was sucking that pipe hard! Suddenly water started gushing out and Ibrahim was covered in water! I had to laugh as yet, here we go again with another gay theme to my stories.

These are all small, isolated incidents of course. But then again, there are a lot of small isolated incidents all over the place. Not life threatening of course, but it all is beginning to add up to what I call Egypt-anomics (with the support of the Chinese empire). Everything falls apart in a few years and when things suddenly stop working, you then desperately need an Egyptian guy to fix it for you. I think its a conspiracy to keep the Egyptian machine going. The good thing is that having the services of a good maintenance guy in the building is worth its weight in gold, yet cost you the price of a seafood dinner for two.

So finally, I have water in the house. I have put a power strip between the wall plug and the power adaptor for my laptop. What else could go wrong?

Boom, Boom, Boom! Oh shit. The 100 pound central heating pipe just blew off the roof and landed three stories down in the neighbors garden.

IBRAHIIIIIIIIIMM!!!!!!!

(Click on the link to enlarge. You can't see it well, but its lying underneath the tree to the left of the two grey containers. )