Nebulous Mooch

I saw this commercial the other day and it cracked me up. I love to see the races coming together to buy sofas. We really can get along.

The phone rang the other day–it hardly ever does that–so I answered. A telemarketer named Peter was on the other end. He wanted to tell me about the special deal my bank is now offering on personal injury insurance. Intrigued, I listened as Peter explained injuries that could occur and what the payout would be in a much too enthusiastic voice. “If you break your leg you receive ??? pounds. If you break both legs you receive ??? pounds. If you loose an eye you receive ??? pounds.”

I had to stop him at “loose an eye” to tell him I wasn’t interested. What kind of phone call is that to make to people all day? I don’t want to pick up the phone and hear some stranger talk about the possibility of me loosing an eye. I like both my eyes right where they are. I don’t intend to loose either of them.

“We’re offering this insurance free until the first of September to all our customers,” Peter said.

“I’m not interested.”

“Why aren’t you interested? It’s free until the beginning of September.”

“I’m not going to loose an eye between now and September,” I said.

“That’s really not the point. An accident could happen at any time.”

“I’m just not interested. Thanks.” I hung up the phone.

Peter just didn’t seem to understand that to me buying that insurance would be like saying I’m going to loose an eye. I might as well have grabbed a spoon out of the kitchen drawer and used it to pry out my eye as I talked to him on the phone. I could never buy that kind of insurance. It’s bad luck. Doesn’t Peter understand bad luck?

I wonder how many people actually purchase the insurance. I wonder how many of those people’s eyes drop out of their heads as soon as they hang up the phone.

That’s a picture of my husband’s melodica. When we first move into this flat I remember him holding up his melodica and asking me where I thought he should store it. I don’t remember giving him an answer, but a few days later I noticed it sitting way up on top of the cabinets in the kitchen. The melodica was left there for a year, untouched.

The other night we saw a Brazilian jazz band play in a London club. At one point in the performance one of the musicians played the melodica. This was enough to inspire my husband to get try to play his melodica again the following day. He used to play it a lot. He even played in on his album.

The melodica is now so covered with grease it’s not playable. It’s so sticky that an ant tried to crawl across the keys and got stuck. He died a sad death standing on the Ab key.

“How did this happen?” my husband asked.

“I don’t know. It was near the stove,” I replied.

“I’m going to clean it up so I can play it again.” He placed it on the windowsill, where it’s sat for a week untouched–the sticky beads of grease glistening in the sun.

The guys who came to replace our broke fridge with an “almost new” fridge where shady looking characters. They took the old fridge away and after they left my husband said in his best Watford accent, “Two dodgy blokes, two dodgy fridges. We’ll replace your old dodgy fridge with another dodgy fridge. We’ll take the old dodgy fridge  and sell it to someone else who doesn’t know they’re getting a dodgy fridge.”

Our refrigerator broke and my desire never to waste any food drove me to eating the strangest food combination. I snaked on Kalamata olives and put dabs of red curry paste in just about everything I cooked during the day. I said a little pray before heating up the leftover spaghetti that had already gone warm in the the fridge to feed my family for lunch. No one got food poisoning luckily. No one noticed that the sauce tasted just a bit like red curry either.

Isn’t it just our luck that the weather was so sunny and warm on the weekend we had not refrigerator.