Floored!

The above title has several connotations. It coud mean getting knocked out in a fight and biting the dust or getting

zapped by a PYT. I am not a guy to be floored in a fight ,no I am not a champion fighter, I simply don’t like getti ng a bloody nose and scrupulously avoid fightsa other than verbal duels. And[ if I get floored by a PYT I doubt whether the DW will lend me a hand to get up.


Or it coulfd simply mean the floor on which your feet are firmly planted.., whe you are sober that is not after a few pegs. To make it even clearer think of a marble or granite floored room.


Now why am I talking of marble floors, have I lost my marbles? Well You are the judge on that. But What I want to narrate is about my floor troubles that floored me. Nope, I have no trouble standing on the floor with too much of booze in my system. It is just that I had trouble with the floor of the first floor of my house thanks to DW.


It all began just after we had settled down in our new house and all the chaos nof moving house had ebbed. Ebbed? AT least I was naive enough to think so until.....


“I don’t like this floor” the DW said suddenly o emorning at breakfast.


“You don’t like this floor? Do you mean you want to move to the ground or seco d floor of the house?” I asked slightly alarmed. The ground floor was fine but the second floor that housed my gym and study was my castle. I sorely missed a moat there.


“No, this first floor is fine. I just don’t like the flooring” she said. “I want it to be changed” she throw a nuclear device at me.


We had spent a fortune completely revamping the house .nand adding an extra floor to It. Now I know I was going to have nightmares of currency notes growing wings and moving away in a flock like migratory birds.


Well no one listens to an Uncle Scrooge like me who would prefer to keep all the cash in a vault and keep swimming i n it. Daughter throw her weight behind DW and I was outnumbered.


And what was settled became unsettled again my carefully arranged books in bedroom went for a toss and I had to retreat to the ground floor, the daughter’s den—and that of her cats. I slept for days to the sound of a meow orchestra., or rather tried to sleep attempting to brainwash myself that they were singing a lullaby for me.


Now the dust has settled down again but the floorin business is not over. My daughter decided that I should be up to date on telecom gizmos and learn how to use a Smartphone with a touchscreen.


She tried to teach me with her own phone but whe ever I touched the screen hieroglyphics appeared. The phone floored me badly. I told the daughter that with all the hieroglyphics I won’t touch the Smartphone until and unless learn enough ancient Egyptian to converse fluently with the Pharaoh and his pet crocodile. It is good that Pharaohs don’t exist any more and I don’t want to look for pet crocodiles to talk Egyptian to them.


But talking of flooring guess whom my family floored? The cops in our area!


It all began with us taking the Supreme Court ruling on crackers during Deepavali a bit too seriously, probably more seriously than the court itself. On the Deepavali day we grinned and bore it but it was the last straw on camel’s back whe the kids burst crackers the next day too.


We called the cops who arrived in a jiffy looking nquite floored. To receive a call from our colony. They explained that they were used to receiving such calls only from not-so-posh localities and this was the first time they got a call from our colony with its upper class pretentions.


After lecturing the kids they left but it didn’t make us very popular with some of our neighbours whose kids were harangued by the men of law.


Our next door neighbours have stopped talking to us. But the optimist in me finds the glass half full, not half empty. I saw an advantage here too. The guy next door had poetic pretensions and had promised (threatened?) to read his creations to us. So whe ever we passed his gate we felt that the Damocles Sword of bad verses was hanging over our heads.


.As an optimist, I feel we are free from that threat now He won’t read his precious verses for those people who called the cops over his family kids bursting crackers.


Or looking at the darker side of the picture, may be he would., to torture these vile neighbors of his.

 

walk on the line is a good idea. Even if they are not drunk it will be a good training for them in catwalk. Who knows, the drver.drunk or not, might scorch the ramp tomorrow.i

 

True, kids are fond of crackers but in an area considered most polluted in the country, even kids must take nlready inhaling enough toxic air that is equivalent to 24 cigarettes a day and in . such a situation even kids need to show some social responsibili. Schools and parents are duty bound to tell kids that crackers have ceased to be fun. True I burst crackers as a kid but then the air was not toxic and even crackers did not contain so much toxic chemicals which were incorporated to make the fireworks look more spectacular. As for neighbours being helpful, it depends on the kind of neighbours you have.