IFB – Washing Machine from Hell

How did you spend Dussehra?

I got up and did the laundry …….. manually.  Yes it means that I woke up at seven and was washing clothes till 12 noon.  My laundry list consisted of 5 double bed sheets, 2 double bed covers, 7 towels apart from small itsy bitsy stuff.

About 3 weeks ago my machine went kaput.  I have an AMC for the machine.  So I did not panic and just rang up the call centre.  They were efficient and sent me the complaint number by sms.  I was cool and thought they would come within 48 hours.  After a couple of days I again rang up.  They told me they have no record.  Huh, then how did they sms me a complaint number?  The person had no idea.  So I was given another complaint number and assured that they would attend to the complaint within 24 hours.  Well that did not happen either.  I again rang up and they kept assuring me that this would be attended the very next day.

One interesting thing I noticed was that every call centre guy or woman I talked to had a South Indian accent.  Do they have a North Indian call centre for South Indian complaints?  After much persuasion I was given the cell number of their Manager in Delhi – who never picks up his phone.  Three days ago one of their service engineers rang me up and told me he would be at my residence by 5 p.m.  I believed him – yes I do have blonde bimbette moments.

I am aching all over and looking like death warmed up.  Guess what, I should have taken the IFB service centre, call centre, Area Manager and who-ever else I could bundle up, stood them up instead of Ravan effigies and burnt them down.

This is not the first time this has happened.  My sons are telling me to take them to Consumer Court.  I would much prefer burning the bastards alive.  Needless to say I will never ever buy a fully automatic washing machine from IFB

Ditches

I have a history with ditches … the bad kind.  When I was a kid, one of our neighbours grew a whole lot of baingan in her kitchen garden, and then distributed to harvest to all the families unlucky enough to live near her house (rather generously I might add!)  It did not go down well with us kids – who wants to eat baingan in various forms every single day.  So the entire tribe of kids got together one sleepy afternoon and we plucked all the damn brinjals and threw them into a small pond a largish ditch full of water and ran off to our various homes.  Of course our crime did not go unpunished.  The damn brinjals floated to the surface, and we got royally spanked.  Yeah, I hate ditches.

Recently, while I was getting our home constructed, I made a habit of driving early in the morning to the site and bullying the contractor and the builder.  Soon both of them made a point of disappearing as soon as they spotted my car.  The poor labourers did not have that option, and had to bear the brunt of my anger.  Soon they had their revenge.  Right in the front, where now we have our front lawn, they had dug a huge area, which was full of wet soil.  To avoid the muddy water, they had placed planks and bricks.  I walked into the house, and blew my top.  Those idiots had used cracked floor tiles and it looked ugly!  I raved and I ranted and walked out in a queenly huff…. ….. Yeah you guessed it, ……….. right into the muddy ditch – fully clothed, with my mobile phone, etc etc.  The labourers hauled me out, and while I was spluttering and trying to recover, they picked up a pipe and hosed me down.  Somehow, while blushing with embarassment, I stuttered my thanks and slunked off to my car, desperately hoping to avoid notice.  But there was no escape. The contractor, who I had not seen on the site for the entire week, suddenly materialised,  followed me to the car with a huge bundle of old newspapers, and said in (I am sure totally false sympathy) Madamji, the seat will get dirty, please sit on these papers!  Speechless, I just accepted the darn newspapers, dumped them on the seat, parked my ass on them and fled.  Damn ditches!!

The ditches have struck once more.  My office net is not working.  The authorities have woken up to the fact that we do not have adequate stormwater drainage – so the roads are all dug up, and somewhere in the damn ditches is my office internet connection.  I am suffering major withdrawal symptoms and its all because of the ditches!

I think I should get a pooja organised, to appease the Lord of the Ditches.  Some divine intervention is desperately needed

Welcome to my world

As a family, we have a full house. Moi, yours truly, the Lady of the House (also nicknamed Tantrum by her ungrateful spawn), the elder boy nicknamed Changez Khan by his younger sibling whom he bullies constantly , and who in turn has nicknamed the younger one Dustbin (since he is always hungry and can eat just about anything. There is The DIL (also nicknamed Jhansi Ki Rani) for the strength of her tantrums by her loving husband and mother in law. If this wasn’t full house, we have our pet brats/fur babies, two dogs, Jeannie, the German Shepherd aged 1 year and Piper, the dachshund, just 5 months old. Well, you get the picture? It is insanity 101. Added to this very interesting mix is our full time domestic help, a Nepali boy, who speaks Hindi with a generous dose of Punjabi, and insists that he does not know Punjabi. He assures us that he can only speak Hindi

In the background are DIL and the Nepali househelp

The dogs are wonderful. I was not much of a dog person until my sons started bringing home strays. I was quite a cat person. My ex once said in a nasty mood … “that is because you are catty!” … Oh big deal, he hated animals. I have a theory, people who cant relate to animals are incapable of love …. but I digress. There is no animal as selfless and loving as a dog. I can remember a time when my boys were clingy and wanted to feed me their half eaten soggy biscuits and candy. Dogs are born like that and they never outgrow that stage. Jeannie was about four months old when Kid#1 got Piper home. They took to each other at first sight. I think Piper thought Jeannie was his mother or something. Jeannie was amazingly patient with him.  Now its changed somewhat.  Jeannie is quite possessive and doesn’t like the competition, and since she is huge in comparision, she intercepts your petting. When any of us bend down to pet the dogs, she stands on top of Piper so that she gets all the caresses, and if he whines, she growls at him. That is true vintage sibling rivalry. Reminds me of my days as bratty elder sister as I described here.

They are a handful, and thank heavens our live in Nepali-who-speaks-Punjabi loves them to bits. Otherwise it would have been difficult.

Yes it is Kid#2's bed, and no I dont allow that, but who listens?

The most priceless thing Jeannie did was … no not her lovely gift to me of a half chewed body part of some indetermined animal … but her desperate attempts at not letting us go out of home on Diwali with an expression which said “You Loons, the world outside is going crazy. Just stay home and safe!!” while she kept pulling at our new grand diwali clothes.

Doggie bonding

Mortgages and Mid Life Crisis

Something has totally happened to me. I distinctly remember a few years ago that I would recoil at the mere mention of buying and owning a home for myself. I thought that once you owned one of these things, you really could not have a life. Every thing you earned went into repairs, renovations, furniture, broken plumbing, and paint jobs. My god, the commitment!. Any way, owning a house was what stodgy regular staid sane people did. I could not be tied down. That was then and this is now …

Well, I took a plunge and did the unthinkable (it must have been right when I was zoned out and thinking about what kind of legacy I would leave the kids … hmmm … too much marijuana in my smokes, what?) Needless to say I took the plunge and got myself a home in the rural pastures wonderful suburbia. It is spacious, away from the urban mess, but most importantly, it is a rite of passage into growing roots. I am one of the crazy people who can work for the same company for the last twenty years and live in the same town for the last 30 and still think of myself as a free bird who could pack and move out if things became unpleasant. Now I don’t have that option. I have committed the next 10 years of my life to living in this town and also to working my tail off to pay the loan. Now I will be thinking in terms of growing curry patta, tulsi and nimbu in my pocket kerchief garden. Hello domesticity ….

The point is that I have this image of myself as the global gypsy …. Wandering from place to place, free …. Unencumbered by baggage or kids. Me with a backyard and plants??? Oh wow!!! Funny how age changes a person ……