The Electric Chair
My mobile phone rang yesterday morning.
I should mention that I hadn’t been able to get to sleep until around half four to five, so a call at half nine in the morning wasn’t particularly welcome.
Anyhows, the call was from a delivery bloke who wanted to give me a chair. He said he’d be outside my door in ten minutes.
So I lashed on my clothes just as two huge lorries reversed up the lane and stopped at my gate. Fuck me! Two lorries? What size chair was this? Our new nurse [our old one I believe is doing quite well down in the funny farm] from the Health crowd had mentioned something about a chair but I had dismissed the comment as I dismiss all comments from the HSE. I hadn’t reckoned on the new nurse being so damned efficient. She keeps sending us stuff which we don’t need and the garage is filling nicely.
So two hefty blokes hauled a hefty chair out of the back of one lorry. I had to open the garden doors to let them in as the front door was too narrow. They proceeded to plonk the chair in the middle of the floor and one of them plugged it in. They left. Mercifully the second lorry was only there because they liked to travel in convoys.
Out of curiosity I plugged the chair in and started playing with it. Fuck me but it’s a miracle of contortion. It goes everywhere from a completely flat bed through a recliner, and a normal chair and ultimately tips the unfortunate inhabitant onto the floor.
My problem now was where to put it. I couldn’t leave it in the middle of the floor as I couldn’t get past it. So I spent most of the rest of the day shoving furniture around the room. It was a bit like one of those puzzles where you have to slide blocks around to get them into some sort of pattern. Penny was rather upset as at one stage her chair had ended up in the kitchen which she didn’t like too much.
I managed it in the end. The [small] room now contains a couch and three armchairs – Penny’s one, a recliner and the new gizmo. Somehow I’m going to have to get rid of something somewhere.
Herself hasn’t been able to get downstairs yet so she hasn’t seen it. I can’t wait to see how far I can chuck her by putting the chair into an upright position.
In the meantime I can practice on the cat.
Aww! What a pretty kitty! What’s it’s name again? Morgen or Maurice or something like that.
I call it Cat, Arsehole [or Our Soul?] or Fuck off. Sometimes on the rare occasions when Herself is in a good mood she calls the cat Malone. It doesn’t answer to any of them.
a bullseye on the floor will cause suspicion.
I’m hoping she’ll clear the floor altogether. She should land either on Penny’s couch or [if I’m lucky] through the window onto the lawn.
I’M BACK. Just so you know.
Going to have to get used to that Irenglish again, I see. A ‘lorrie’ is a truck, ah, okay… I get it now.
Torches and lifts notwithstanding. What do you call escalators?
Just this summer, I learned from our Irish kids who visit every year on a program that “What’s the crack” isn’t dirty at all. It’s a perfectly allowable form of greeting.
So hey, Grandad, what’s the crack?
Still sounds dirty.
Indeed you are with a vengeance.
I appreciate that you Mercans have lost the ability to speak the language and as for your spelling? Hah! Anyway now is your chance to brush up.
Escalators are just that – escalators [i.e. moving stairs].
Crack has several meanings. It can be a split, something you smoke or [*cough*] a part of female anatomy.
As visitors to these shores will have discovered, searching for crack may well lead to the nearest drug dealer. To avoid confusion we usually spell it craic, which means a bit of fun, or indeed a lot of things [i.e. What’s the craic? meaning “how’s it goin'” which in turn roughly means “how are you”].
So in answer to your question, the craic here is mighty.
Welcome back, DW!
We (meaning my sister and I) called those things upsy-daisy chairs but only because my mother was present during the time we had one. We shouldn’t have bothered since my mother (who didn’t yet need something like that) called it all sorts of things–almost all of them derogatory. One of her most common questions about the thing was, “Can’t you launch it faster?” (But only when my father was in it of course).
I can’t tell you how much easier it made our lives since attempting to haul our father’s bulk out of any stationary chair was a herculean task to say the least. Especially when he was “helping”.
I honestly haven’t had a chance to try it out in anger [as it were] yet as I haven’t been able to get Herself downstairs since. And I’m not hauling it up to the attic – it weighs a ton.
So the new “damned efficient” nurse who organised the delivery of an electric chair presumably comes under the category of “anyone even remotely connected with Public Health” that, for the new year, you wished upon them “a barrel full of misery“. You’re a tough bugger to please.
I have high standards. And there is such a thing as being too efficient. I’m losing count of the stuff that’s being delivered, and most of it is filling the garage,