Another One of those Horrible Days

Picked up 2 more relatives from the airport yesterday to add to the 4 that were already at home and went for a nice round of sightseeing. Thorughly exhausted we reached home at 10pm to find that the lift wasn't working!

Let me clarify: Our building has 2 lifts. Lift No1 was for general purpose and use and lift number 2 was only for the house owners above floor no 5. It needed (yes past tense) a key to be operated and could only be summoned to the floors by a button located inside the flat.

Lift No 1 after constant sputterings and false starts, completely gave way in December. Yes, December 2007! It has still not been repaired. Seemingly not all the flat owners were willing to pay the required extra sum for the repair of lift number 1.

By February, the key mechanism of Lift Number 2 was disabled so anyone could press any number inside the lift, but the lift could still only be summoned to the floor by pressing the button inside the apartment.

Since I live on the top floor with only the terrace above me, I constantly have workmen who have accessed the terrace ringing my bell (10 times in quick succession, like they OWN my FLAT and ME!!) to get me to press this summoning button for them. Nobody rings the bell of the woman opposite me (2 flats per floor only) as she is a known harridan. It is very frustrating to be summoned to the front door from all corners of the house in the middle of a nap, cooking, eating, sleeping, typing, consulting, writing, phone conversations, guests in the hall by the persistent and insistent and adamant ringing of my front door bell by all and sundry!

I have put up with that for almost 4 months now on a daily basis!

The final straw was when after all the walking about of the day yesterday, we came home with my husbands parents who had also walked around with us the whole day to find the lift was not working and the lift repairman had not appeared for over an hour and refused to answer his cell after originally agreeing to come.

All 8 of us made the painful trek to the 13th floor with some of the smaller bits of luggage and souvenirs purchased during the day.

We had an additional floor to climb since I have shifted to the upstairs annexe right now. Once I climbed the extra floor inside our apartment, I was confronted with a kitchen cabinet filled with my landlady's glass & ceramic crockery (that she had left to be used by us, but I was using my own stuff and had stored it upstairs) that had fallen off the wall and crashed to the counter below. Smashing up all the glass and ceramic ware in the process and strewing minute splinters all over the room.

I had kept some of the extra pickles and masalas that had arrived from India on the countertop below the cabinet. So those were crushed and added to a sticky mess!

That took a nice couple of hours to clean and mop multiple times with little bits of wet kitchen roll - to ensure no little splinters remained to hurt any human or our cat - who still refuses to use shib-shibs!

Just one of those days when nothing goes right. Anyway that put paid to an early morning start today for more sightseeing, but will be headed out in a while.

This is the first time I have seen/heard of a kitchen cabinet coming right off the wall and crashing below! (No extra weight had been added inside that cabinet) Only in Egypt!