Cold Days of Fumbling Incompetence
Mother of shitty death! What the hell is wrong with me? I am tumbling through canyons of ineptitude like a suicidal Wile E. Coyote, unable to function without bodging the job in hand. Give me a pair of Acme Jet-Powdered boots and I’ll launch into the air and explode like a firework... give me an elastic band and I’ll catapult myself into the nearest cactus.
Yes, this morning has been a doozy. On the way to work, I left the train a station early while changing lines on the Underground. The second I realised this, I turned round to discover every centimetre on the entire train had just been filled. Faces were in armpits. Children were drowning in the thighs of fat old women. And at least fifteen people were now unwittingly pregnant. Hell, you couldn’t have hammered a nail into that vile scrum. I looked around and tried to look noble in defeat, only to burst out laughing after hearing Peter Jones telling a joke on Just a Minute in my earphones. Beaten, I hid behind the chocolate machine and plotted against mankind.
Okay. It’s little things like that, and they are adding up by the minute. I am presently assembling a report, and in my newfound spirit of uselessness I have been telephoning the wrong people for information, whom I have attempted to ring back once I realised the error only to reach quite another set of wrong people who had no idea what I was banging on about.
The weekend was no better. An unwanted but essential trip to Ikea on the Friday evening ended with us missing the last direct train by an hour and a half. That is breathtakingly poor. We had to go on a bizarre and circuitous route that ended up with us tumbling into the tube station and practically having to lasso the last train of the day as it left the station. Whilst my flatmate decided to risk one last tube change, I took my chances on the buses. Almost inevitably, five minutes before I got to the stop an accident blocked the traffic for half an hour, meaning no buses could get through. Miserable and cold, I arrived home at 2.00am, forty five minutes after my flatmate.
The furniture was delivered on the Saturday and I went straight to B&Q and bought a hammer. Once home again I was drunk with power. The entire flat became perforated with nails leaving the front room looking like an S&M dungeon. So I hung up all the pictures, calendars and clocks I had been hoarding, and stepped back to admire my work.
Every single thing was in the wrong place. In my euphoric moments of hammering I had set back the cause of DIY by four hundred years; the clock was too high, the picture hooks were crooked, the calendar was fatally lopsided... And as I cursed myself for this attack of overconfidence, the picture over the fireplace fell off the wall. My flatmate came home and offered his fair and balanced opinion; the bile that splattered across the walls was an inch thick.
On the back of this badness, I turned my attention to the furniture and somehow managed to assemble the simpler items without incident. Well, I was more than happy. My toolbox had finally come good... but the next day these smug reflections were dashed. I decided to build the wardrobe on Sunday evening despite my tired hands and heart. With my head again filling up with stumbling insanity, I failed to notice there were two sets of instructions...one for assembly by one person, one for assembly by two people. Naturally, I followed the two person instructions and almost destroyed the damn thing for want of an assistant. Once I had put the walls up, I spent about fifteen minutes locked in a silent-movie comedy, madly dashing around the damn thing trying to stop it bursting open like the cabinet at the end of the magic trick in which the pretty woman reappears in a puff of smoke.
The wardrobe, which was twice the size I had imagined, was eventually complete, and to hell with the wonky doors and handles that wouldn’t screw in all the way. I spent half an hour shoving it across the room into the corner only to find the space was too small by a sizeable margin. So now this birch monolith was wedged in a corner with no obvious way of dragging it out again.
It’s still there. Occasionally at my desk here at work I fancy I can hear the doors flapping in the breeze, tapping out my name in Morse Code along with the promise of bodily harm. But in a confrontation, I feel confident...I have a hammer and this is Ikea furniture we’re talking about. Hell, strike that... that bastard would collapse if I coughed at the wrong moment.
Hmm. Ikea...Ikea...funny kind of word, really. The more you say it, the less sense it makes. Rather like the store’s floor plan, in fact. Ah, but this is a dull branch line of familiar abuse...enough people have thrown rocks at Ikea and I would refer you to them for a full criticism.
The question I now have to answer is simple: what the hell is going on in my head? Over the last few days there have been countless other tiny moments that have bathed me in the stark light of cack-handedness. This is not my normal state. I cannot chalk it up to stress since my job is not inclined that way. I have settled into the flat nicely and feel fairly good about it (except for that electrical hum that turned out to be a poorly functioning fridge in the flat upstairs...hopefully this should be sorted soon), so that cannot be the reason either. Hmm...I don’t know. Astrologers would put it down to some planetary movement but I know better. Hell, a dead dung beetle knows better. Perhaps I have become complacent now that I am settled here, and have begun to lose concentration in matters to which I am still fairly new. Like the learner driver who thinks he knows it all until the lollipop lady lies sprawling on the bonnet, I must be wary of such thoughts. Vigilance must be my watchword.
Jesus, now I can feel my hands shaking; I am now so useless that I even fear for this very text, and it is all I can do to stop my hands moving of their own volition towards the delete key, to accidentally destroy something I have been writing for the last hour. So I must press save, save, before it is too late... There, done.
But it’s not over yet. Doubtless I’ll hurl the floppy out of the window on the journey home, briefly and fatally having mistaken it for a disk full of images of Tessa Jowell in her underwear, or something. On this form, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Yes, this morning has been a doozy. On the way to work, I left the train a station early while changing lines on the Underground. The second I realised this, I turned round to discover every centimetre on the entire train had just been filled. Faces were in armpits. Children were drowning in the thighs of fat old women. And at least fifteen people were now unwittingly pregnant. Hell, you couldn’t have hammered a nail into that vile scrum. I looked around and tried to look noble in defeat, only to burst out laughing after hearing Peter Jones telling a joke on Just a Minute in my earphones. Beaten, I hid behind the chocolate machine and plotted against mankind.
Okay. It’s little things like that, and they are adding up by the minute. I am presently assembling a report, and in my newfound spirit of uselessness I have been telephoning the wrong people for information, whom I have attempted to ring back once I realised the error only to reach quite another set of wrong people who had no idea what I was banging on about.
The weekend was no better. An unwanted but essential trip to Ikea on the Friday evening ended with us missing the last direct train by an hour and a half. That is breathtakingly poor. We had to go on a bizarre and circuitous route that ended up with us tumbling into the tube station and practically having to lasso the last train of the day as it left the station. Whilst my flatmate decided to risk one last tube change, I took my chances on the buses. Almost inevitably, five minutes before I got to the stop an accident blocked the traffic for half an hour, meaning no buses could get through. Miserable and cold, I arrived home at 2.00am, forty five minutes after my flatmate.
The furniture was delivered on the Saturday and I went straight to B&Q and bought a hammer. Once home again I was drunk with power. The entire flat became perforated with nails leaving the front room looking like an S&M dungeon. So I hung up all the pictures, calendars and clocks I had been hoarding, and stepped back to admire my work.
Every single thing was in the wrong place. In my euphoric moments of hammering I had set back the cause of DIY by four hundred years; the clock was too high, the picture hooks were crooked, the calendar was fatally lopsided... And as I cursed myself for this attack of overconfidence, the picture over the fireplace fell off the wall. My flatmate came home and offered his fair and balanced opinion; the bile that splattered across the walls was an inch thick.
On the back of this badness, I turned my attention to the furniture and somehow managed to assemble the simpler items without incident. Well, I was more than happy. My toolbox had finally come good... but the next day these smug reflections were dashed. I decided to build the wardrobe on Sunday evening despite my tired hands and heart. With my head again filling up with stumbling insanity, I failed to notice there were two sets of instructions...one for assembly by one person, one for assembly by two people. Naturally, I followed the two person instructions and almost destroyed the damn thing for want of an assistant. Once I had put the walls up, I spent about fifteen minutes locked in a silent-movie comedy, madly dashing around the damn thing trying to stop it bursting open like the cabinet at the end of the magic trick in which the pretty woman reappears in a puff of smoke.
The wardrobe, which was twice the size I had imagined, was eventually complete, and to hell with the wonky doors and handles that wouldn’t screw in all the way. I spent half an hour shoving it across the room into the corner only to find the space was too small by a sizeable margin. So now this birch monolith was wedged in a corner with no obvious way of dragging it out again.
It’s still there. Occasionally at my desk here at work I fancy I can hear the doors flapping in the breeze, tapping out my name in Morse Code along with the promise of bodily harm. But in a confrontation, I feel confident...I have a hammer and this is Ikea furniture we’re talking about. Hell, strike that... that bastard would collapse if I coughed at the wrong moment.
Hmm. Ikea...Ikea...funny kind of word, really. The more you say it, the less sense it makes. Rather like the store’s floor plan, in fact. Ah, but this is a dull branch line of familiar abuse...enough people have thrown rocks at Ikea and I would refer you to them for a full criticism.
The question I now have to answer is simple: what the hell is going on in my head? Over the last few days there have been countless other tiny moments that have bathed me in the stark light of cack-handedness. This is not my normal state. I cannot chalk it up to stress since my job is not inclined that way. I have settled into the flat nicely and feel fairly good about it (except for that electrical hum that turned out to be a poorly functioning fridge in the flat upstairs...hopefully this should be sorted soon), so that cannot be the reason either. Hmm...I don’t know. Astrologers would put it down to some planetary movement but I know better. Hell, a dead dung beetle knows better. Perhaps I have become complacent now that I am settled here, and have begun to lose concentration in matters to which I am still fairly new. Like the learner driver who thinks he knows it all until the lollipop lady lies sprawling on the bonnet, I must be wary of such thoughts. Vigilance must be my watchword.
Jesus, now I can feel my hands shaking; I am now so useless that I even fear for this very text, and it is all I can do to stop my hands moving of their own volition towards the delete key, to accidentally destroy something I have been writing for the last hour. So I must press save, save, before it is too late... There, done.
But it’s not over yet. Doubtless I’ll hurl the floppy out of the window on the journey home, briefly and fatally having mistaken it for a disk full of images of Tessa Jowell in her underwear, or something. On this form, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
posted by Jamie at 7:05 PM
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