Comedy of Errors

Oscar Wilde has very aptly quoted " Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative". May be we have taken this excerpt in right earnest and hence come up with exceptional and ingenious ways to do away with the humdrum that keeps sneaking in from time to time in our lives.

As i have narrated in my preceding posts, I have two room mates who share the residence. This arrangement has been there for the last few years and has worked perfectly fine without causing  any disquiet or anxiety. There is a tacit agreement with respect to our respective responsibilities which are taken care of more or less. This blog is about the "less" part of the aforesaid phrase.

It was in July that I was coerced into taking a leave by my office,  so spent  a quiet holiday in Delhi and was beginning to long for the pandemonium.  My whim was to be very soon awarded. July in Bangalore is a month of relentless rains, i managed to reach work albeit late and was completely drenched  when i left office for home. All i wanted at that hour was hot bath followed by a warm cup of coffee and then to snuggle into the bed with a book, but was forgetting that i had asked for ruckus and there was no reprieve now. This is what transpired.

I reached home, there was no power, nothing atypical in that, a very familiar scenario in Bangalore, however what was here deviant was that all of our neighbors had electricity, this called for some legwork and on inquiry it emerged that we had not paid the electricity bill and the lineman had disconnected our supply. Bill payments are my area of responsibility and in my absence apparently no one discharged it. The only recourse was to go out get the bill paid, find the line man get him to the home and reconnect, Easier said than done. Rain and I are anyways always daggers drawn, so it was foolish  to presume that it would abate, in fact it had now begun to pour with vengeance. Nevertheless i stepped out in the rain, the first task was to find where the BESCOM office was, some friendly neighbors explained the address, it could have well been in greek, i however noted whatever they said, the next Herculean task was to find a "tuktuk" that would take me to BESCOM in this rain. Bangalore auto drivers are notorious for their behavior( trust me when i say so they are worse than those in Chennai), painstakingly i found one, well he dropped me in the middle of nowhere and i found my way to the bescom office walking in 6 inches deep mud. I used the ATM machine there to pay the bill and was in the meanwhile joined by one of my room mates. By this time it was 1930 and no line man was then availble, as if this ordeal was not lavish enough, the local people there emphatically informed us that our area didn't come under their jurisdiction and gave another unintelligible address.

We had to undergo all of this vexation again but much to our wonderment, the lineman came with us and repaired the line.

Why do i write this blog today, i could have very well written it in July when this incident happened, or over the last two months when there was a genuine paucity of topics. It so happened that this month our supposed friendly neighbors failed to give us the electricity bill and as a consequence our line was disconnected yet again yesterday, this time however it was easier as we knew where to find the right people, and instead of the frowns we were exchanging sheepish grins.

We have now marked a date in all the months for the remaining year bill or no bill, i am optimistic it "might" work.

Gruß
Suyasha