Tag: interesting happening

Egged!

I was happy because I had handed in that assignment. I was going to a cocktail party to celebrate. My outfit was new and I felt good.

It was 9 PM. I was riding as fast as I could; I was more than an hour late. But that’s expected at these sorts of things.

As I sped down the last stretch of road, I paid no special attention to a car coming towards me. That is, until someone in the car threw something at me. It hit my chest at full speed. I yanked my brakes as the car flew by.

It hurt, it did. Was it rock? I felt my chest and it was wet. Carefully, I unwrapped my scarf and examined it in the rapidly fading daylight. Immediately, I saw the fragments of egg shell. I had been egged.

Luckily, the scarf took the brunt of the attack. I wiped some wetness off my neck with a tissue and began wheeling my bike. Every now and then, I came across the shattered remains of more eggs. I wonder how many others got hit?

Ice cream friend

We were walking towards the York Minster when someone called, ‘Do you want ice-cream?’

Without breaking stride, I detoured to stand in front of Frankie’s Real Dairy Ice Cream cart.

‘Hmm…’ I considered the sign that said that I could have two scoops for the price of one. ‘Is it nice ice cream? I’ve had Italian ice cream before, you know.’ I was warning of him of my standards.

Frankie’s friend was a lanky redhead with quirky purple glasses. She was leaning against the cart. ‘Oh, yes!’ she said, nodding enthusiastically. ‘It’s the best! Look! He has raspberry ripple. Not many people have raspberry ripple.’

‘Hmm…’ I repeated. I peered into the ice cream buckets. ‘And how much is it for ice cream?’

‘One pound forty,’ said Frankie. ‘You get an extra scoop for free. You can choose any flavour!’

I thought about it. ‘I don’t really feel like ice cream, though,’ I murmured to myself. And £1.40 was not the bargain they made it out to be.

I stood there for another ten seconds before taking a step back. ‘Sorry. Thanks for the selling effort, though.’ I had disappointed them.

An hour later, after visiting the Minster and the Shambles, I found myself back within five metres of Frankie’s cart.

‘Mum, dad, I’m going to get some ice cream,’ I said.

‘Whatever you want,’ they said indulgently.

I trotted up to the cart and announced, ‘I feel like ice cream now.’ I walked back to my parents with a double scoop of raspberry ripple and mint choc chip.

‘They were so excited to see you,’ mum laughed. ‘They must be happy to get a customer.’

I nodded gravely. ‘Half the reason I bought the ice cream was that I knew they would be happy.’ I licked the ice cream. It was yummy, although no ice cream in England — even the famous Cornwall ice cream — has been as good as Trampoline gelato in Melbourne.

Much later in the day, as we were walking towards dinner, I walked by the ice cream cart again. Frankie must have recognised my furry hat because he waved to me from across the courtyard. I waved back to my ice cream friend.

Furry hat!

My reward

I was walking home with a bag full of groceries from Sainsbury’s. I was in a good mood.

‘Scuze me,’ came a voice.

‘Hmm?’ I said, slowly pulling myself out of my pondering. I focused on a young man dressed in a grey hooded jumper.

‘Sorry to bother you, but do you have [mumble] [mumble]…’

‘Pardon?’ I was still thinking too slowly to interact with a real person.

‘Do you have 97 pence? You see, I need to buy a bus ticket.’ He ducked his head down, waiting for rejection.

I was in a great mood. I put my shopping down and reached unzipped my backpack to get my wallet. Today, I could afford a pound.

‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, ah, I have to ask for money for the bus…’

‘That’s all right,’ I replied. I looked in my coin compartment. There was no gold one pound coin. There was only copper two pence and one pence coins. ‘Oh, I don’t know if I have anything,’ I said, feeling truly sorry. I looked in the notes compartment and found only £20 notes. If I had a £5 note, I probably would have given it to him. I was in such a good mood.

‘No, no, that’s okay, whatever you have,’ he assured me.

‘I’m really sorry, this is all I’ve got, honestly.’ I gave him five pence in coins.

Although a tiny amount, he must have been warmed by my absent-minded glowing smile. ‘Thank you… What’s your name?’

‘I’m Joan. How about you?’

‘Daniel.’

He stuck his hand out. I reached forward and he shook my hand. Then he raised it up and kissed it.

‘Thank you. Have a good day!’ And he darted off.

Bundle of pink

“Those things are cool,” Dom commented. We turned to look at a man in our tube carriage carrying a baby in a sling around his front. The baby was dressed in pink and crinkled its eyes at us in a smile.

“Oh, I love babies!” Toria agreed.

“No! I meant the sling!” Dom quickly corrected. “They used to only have them at the back…”

We laughed. Dom was clearly trying to defend his masculinity. The baby cooed and waved its tiny hands at us. It was the cutest thing in pink.

“Flirt,” Dom muttered, smiling.

It’s for a good cause

We were looking for a place to eat dinner and walked into a nice looking Spanish tapas restaurant.

“What’s with the Britney Spears outfits?” Jon exclaimed. All the waitresses were wearing white shirts, short skirts and pigtails.

“It’s for the BBC Save the Children fundraiser tonight,” our waitress explained. “We’re dressed for a ‘school’ theme.”

“I guess Britney was going for the schoolgirl theme too,” I said.

While we were looking at the menu, our waitress came around with a book of raffle tickets.

“Can I interest you in the raffle? The proceeds go to the fundraiser and the prizes are all from local businesses. It’s £2 per strip and will be drawn at 9 PM.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I never win anything in raffles,” Jon commented.

“Well, I don’t expect to win. I think of it as a donation, you know, a sunk cost,” I replied. Britney gave me a strip of six orange tickets, numbers 171 to 176.

Dinner was nice. A celebrity chef cooked a giant seafood paella in a pan of about one metre diameter. We donated £5 each to eat half-servings of it.

Just as we were paying the bill, they announced the raffle draw. We stuck around as the emcee call out number after number. We didn’t really listen, although every now and then, I would be distracted from our conversation enough to comment, “Oh, I need a haircut!” when a hairdressing package was raffled off, or “I don’t need that,” when the carwash was awarded.

And suddenly, I heard, “Joan? Is Joan here?”

I stood up slowly. “Yes,” I called uncertainly. Britney, who was standing next to the emcee, pointed up to where our table was. I wondered what I had won.

I walked down the steps and emcee handed me a large bottle of golden liquid. “Congratulations! You’ve won a bottle of whisky from CamTax.”

“That’s amazing!” Jon marvelled when I showed him my prize.

“I don’t really know what to do with it,” I admitted. I am definitely the person least likely to want a bottle of hard spirits.

Suffice to say, I was very popular with my housemates when I got home that night.

Internationally roaming while half asleep

I have two phones: one has my SIM card from Australia and one has my English SIM. I used to keep both of these on because I thought people back home might want to send me a message.

One morning, at 3 AM, I was jolted out of sleep by my mobile ring. I fumbled around my bedside table until I found the vibrating, flashing, squalling thing.

“Hello,” I said blearily.

The lady on the phone said something.

“Huh?”

She repeated it. “This is Marion from the optometrist. I wanted to let you know that you can pick up your glasses now.”

“Wha?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“This is Marion from the optometrist on High Street Road.”

In my daze, I recognised the name of a street back home in Melbourne. I started getting annoyed. “Do you know you’ve reached a number in England? England overseas?”

“Can I speak to Jason?” Marion asked.

Jason is my brother. “Oh, um… let me give you his mobile number… It’s…” I recited the first seven numbers, then stopped. I had forgotten my brother’s phone number. I guessed the last three numbers. “I think that’s it. Yeah.” The numbers didn’t sound quite right but it was the best I could do at three in the morning.

Marion seemed to realise that this was the most she would get out of me so she said thank you and hung up.

I took the phone away from my ear and looked at it. Only now did I realise I had my Australian phone in my hand. I remembered that the phone number used to belong to my dad, who must have registered the number with the optometrist. No wonder Marion was confused.

I turned the phone off and went back to bed. I haven’t turned it on for a month now.

I pressed the button

It was night time. I was sitting in the kitchen working on my new laptop. Di and Alex eventually came in and we started chatting.

We were having a good time and at some point, I pulled up my music player, cranked up the volume and we were singing the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge

“Love lifts us up where we belong!” we bellowed. “Where the eagles fly! On a mountain high!”

With ten seconds to the end of the song, the music got stuck. The laptop sat there, blaring out one loud and terrible note.

“Aargh!” We blocked our ears. “Turn it off!”

I tried to exit the program. Click, click, click. The exit cross didn’t work.

Control, Alt, Delete. Nothing popped up.

“Try the external volume control! There must be a mute button!”

I found it eventually and pressed the keys but the screeching wouldn’t stop.

“Turn it off! Press the power button!”

I held the power button for five seconds and finally, the blaring stopped.

I waited a couple of seconds before I pressed the power button again. The computer woke up and scrolled through the set-up. It got to the screen that told me that Windows hadn’t shut down properly and I should probably try safe mode.

Well, I tried safe mode, and I tried ‘Previous settings known to work’, and I tried ‘Start Windows normally’. With every option, the computer paused then flashed me the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) for half a second before it reset. I didn’t even have time to see what the messages were. Something about ‘unmountable partition’.

The computer was stuck in a reset loop.

Alex forced the computer off. “Let it rest,” he said, hopefully. “Sometimes computers just need to rest.”

I looked at him and Di, stricken. I had a month’s work on the computer and all my photos since arriving.

“I’ll wash the dishes,” I mumbled. “Washing dishes will make me feel better.”

I put on the yellow gloves and started scrubbing at the charred rice stuck in the rice pot. I moved onto the saucepan, working at the egg and tomato residue. Behind me, I heard Alex boot up the computer again. I kept scrubbing and scrubbing, all the while, listening to the whirr of my laptop. I turned around to look at him when the whir stopped.

“Nothing?”

He shook his head sadly. “Do you have a recovery CD? If it’s just a problem with the hard drive, we can start it up again. But… I think it will format your computer.”

I bit my lip and was silent for a minute.

Di said, “You can try and rescue the hard disk with the computer service tomorrow. Or wait until morning. Maybe it needs more time.”

I looked down at my feet. Di and Alex looked on in sympathetic silence.

“It’s really just my photos,” I said slowly. “I had some work on it but nothing that I can’t recreate in a day. But my photos… There are copies on the internet but they’re small.”

I wrung my hands and thought about all the time I had spent on setting up the computer and all the work I needed to do. I really didn’t have time to get my computer fixed.

“I’ll get my recovery CD,” I decided. “I just want to know that it’ll be all right.”

I got the CD and handed it to Alex. I sat down next to him as he loaded it up.

WARNING: Your hard disk will be completely erased. Do you really want to continue?

It almost made me cry. Or maybe it was laugh.

“Are you sure?” Alex asked.

“Yes. Do it. Press OK.”

“I’m not pressing it! You have to, Joan.”

I gritted my teeth, reached over and pressed the button.

The Secret Life of Alcoholics*

“What are we going to get for Alex’s birthday?” Di asked. Alex is one of our housemates.

“I was thinking of getting him two boxes of Stella Artois. Do you remember how we were at Sainsbury’s that first week and how wistfully he looked at those boxes? We couldn’t carry them home last time.”

“That’s a great idea!” Di agreed. “Let’s go tomorrow afternoon.”

The next day, we left the house at 4 PM and rode 15 minutes down the road to the big supermarket. We found the beer easily. The special price for two boxes of 20 bottles was still available.

We took the boxes through the checkout and opened our backpacks to put them in.

“Uh oh.” I tried to rearrange the box to fit into my 30 L backpack but it was just too wide.

“It’ll fit in my backpack, I think,” said Di. She unzipped hers for the other box. Our hearts sank as it quickly became obvious it wouldn’t fit. “Maybe it’ll fit in my bike basket…”

We wheeled the boxes outside to the bike parking lot. Di picked up the box and carefully placed it into her basket. “I hope it doesn’t break the basket,” she murmured.

It didn’t fit.

“What are we going to do?”

We looked at each other and had the same idea at the same time. “We’ll have to take the bottles out and carry them,” Di said.

“I think we should put them in our backpacks, not in the basket,” I cautioned. “I reckon there’d be some law against riding a pushbike with 20 bottles of beer in the basket…”

We spent the next five minutes reloading the bottles into our backpacks. Then, with 10 kg of beer and glass on our backs, we gingerly hopped onto our bikes, turned on our lights (it was getting dark) and rode onto the street.

I laughed all the way, even as I struggled up the one hill in Cambridge. My bag tinkled with every pedalling motion. Rider after rider overtook the two of us. We did make it home without an accident.


*Don’t worry, mum, I’m joking.

Triple ‘Oh!’

Paul, our first aid trainer, was teaching us what happens when you call ‘000’ in an emergency.

“The first thing they ask is ‘Police, fire or ambulance?’,” he said. “Today, we’re asking for an ambulance.” He wrote ‘AMBULANCE’ on the board then marked out about six or seven dashes underneath the word.

“What’s the next thing you think they’ll ask?”

“I guess, where you are?” someone suggested.

“Right.” Next to the second dash, Paul wrote ‘PRECISE LOCATION’. “What next?”

And so we went. Very quickly, we had on the board ‘AGE’, ‘CONTACT PHONE NUMBER’, ‘CHIEF COMPLAINT’, ‘CONSCIOUS?’ and ‘BREATHING?’.

There was one more spot left.

“One more to go, guys!” Paul urged. We stared at each other in puzzlement. Silence. I racked my brain. What else do paramedics need to know? Dangers on site? Medical history?

“Come on, one more… It’s a three letter word…” Paul hinted.

The two youngest men in the room said simultaneously, “SEX!”

“Correct!”