Murphy's Day

It's been a long time since I posted anything that wasn't football-related, but it's been a rather eventful day, and one that deserves a mention, immortalized in the glorious web of information.

The taste of bile is never a good thing, and having that as your waking sensation is even worse. After retching in the bathroom for a few minutes - no, I'm not pregnant - and wondering how the hell that happened, I found myself welded to the toilet as well. Bad news on both ends then. Sister theorizes that two weeks of pasta and pizza means that my body is rejecting curry.


The next few hours were spent shuttling back and forth from computer desk to bathroom, finding an equilibrium where I could properly diagnose my laptop's newfound habit of freezing during SWTOR, GW2, TF2, and even other games which aren't abbreviated. Friendly advice has offered such remedies as compressed air, replacing burnt cards, and the abolishing of gaming altogether as possibilities to alleviate this troublesome syndrome, but each has either been totally and utterly proven invalid or rejected outright.

Eventually meeting the Missus, after trawling through a rather random mid-afternoon highway jam, our dynamic duo embarked on a journey to fix her laptop, and I was given the quest to escort the lady to Bukit Timah Plaza, where the service centre was apparently located on the fifth floor.

There is no fifth floor in Bukit Timah Plaza.

One parking fee later, we were in Bukit Timah Shopping Centre, finally locating the elusive technicians. A hard reformat had to be done, which they said would take half an hour. Fair enough. So we went to look for the SAMURAI FRIES that we didn't get before going to Italy.

These Samurai Fries were as Samurai as Tom Cruise.

Cheese shaker fries are not Samurai Fries, McDonalds. After two weeks in a land where an order of large fries can amount to almost three Euros, we came back hoping to reintroduce ourselves to the goodness of the promised reward.

How we felt cheated.

But the half hour was up, in any case, and so we strolled back to the Lenovo service centre.

Well, "stroll" is misleading since we took the escalators, but therein in itself lies the next pitfall in this hero's journey.

Most of the 7 semi-regular readers of this space have read or heard of the reports about people in those God-awful Crocs having toes shorn off after their "shoes" have been caught in escalators (a little caveat, Crocs are not shoes. They are abominations). The horror stories of severed appendages flashed through my little mind as I realized what had happened, with my relatively new and ultra-fashionable Quicksilver slipper (the right one, if you're pulling a Phoebe) caught catastrophically in the end of the escalator, or as I labelled it at that moment, the Moving Metal Mauling Monster Maniac.

But all it did was swallow my slipper.

I was left flabbergasted and half-barefooted. The slipper was gone. Dreadfully and utterly and totally.

I still have all my toes (though there's a spot that's now blistered somewhat), but what the hell.

So I hopped/limped (while she laughed) back to the car, and we decided to travel to a friend's place for some solace and serenity after an already annoying day. A calm, pleasant drive accompanied by the soothing sounds of Kiss 92FM shamelessly plugging the products of one of their former employees (by the way, watch The Monday Night Verdict and World of Football on ESPN, Mondays and Wednesdays). A relaxing drive.

Of course that didn't happen.

Being rear-ended is, unfortunately, something I've experienced before, and it's not something you can ever get used to unless you are perhaps addicted to bumper cars. The fact that I had been stationary for a few seconds (and not travelling at high speed prior to that) made it worse. The scene about ten metres back, where another three cars had decided to form a vehicular conga line didn't improve things either.

As the obligatory details and photographs were being exchanged, a curious truck driver in the other lane seemed to be enthralled by the spectacle of the Automobile Centipede smashed into another stationary lorry, innocently waiting in line to turn off the highway. This, of course, led to a Volvo following closely behind the kaypoh truck to join in the festivities, and the menage a trois quickly became a foursome when the last one compacted the Volvo, blowing all his windows out.

The driver of the Volvo seemed pretty upset, storming out of what was now effectively a Mini to berate the others. How the airbag didn't deploy astounds and frightens me.

Finished with exchanging details, we drove off before more inducing more carnage.

The time spent at the friend's place was rather nice, though it did confirm my suspicions that my dear laptop was well and truly fu - err, spoilt, since the compressed air did little to help matters despite uncovering a hidden dust bunny.

But leaving from her place to look for dinner was a trial in itself, with every highway crammed with commuters. Not an entirely foreign concept once you've lived here for a while, but still. Plodding along in the dented Mazda, the abdominal adventures from the morning came back for an encore, miles from a known and available public restroom.

"This has been a shitty day," she said.

Har har.

Mercifully, I had the fortitude to hang on until we managed to find a suitable place, and boy was I relieved.

I half-expected to be locked out of the house, or to trip and fall somewhere, or to be the target of a similarly diarrhetic bird as I walked home, but I managed to escape incident.

For now.