Another fine mess you've gotten us into!
Trip Start
Jul 24, 2008
1
13
22
Trip End
Ongoing
Umalas,
Indonesia
Friday, September 26, 2008
Well my friends and ex-colleagues... Where to start... Oh I know... Thursday morning. It was a hazy, start, but when I ventured to school at 6.30am you could still see the distant blue mountain peaks either side of the volcano's silhouette. I approached the schools gates with an unusual frisk to my step. Today my microscopes along with $2000 worth of kit arrive! Real science can begin today!! Up the plateau steps to my classroom I bound, a scent of wild pollen and wet earth from the previous night's rain. Gosh what a day to be alive and living in bountiful, beautiful, Bali. As I sit down and start my morning routine, (plug in seven hundred wires while laptop boots, switch on the A.C. to achieve room temperature in the room and down the luke-warm tea made from sub-standard leaves and partially dehydrated milk) I realise that there is a small puddle on the floor... Hmmm... Has the rain, again, pervaded the floor? (despite the hundreds of pounds of excavation work, done over the summer hols) No, that's not it... Most of the floor is dry and oh! There! The sink beside my desk is dribbling from it's attachment, so unattractive in the morning. Anyway, I decide there is only one answer... Call Mr. Ketut! So a short dialing later... 'Mr. Ketut! Mr. Ketut! Come and fix my sink please!'
'Oh well' I think, 'no worries, today is still a bloody good day!' I trot off to collect a box of valuable broken toys from reception years leaving the hugely competent Mr. Ketut to fix the sink. It is a shame that Mr. Ketut has not yet arrived at school, as he is far sexier than Mr. Ketut, (this is probably a good time to explain that there are two Mr. Ketuts, rather unfairly fate has cast one as beautiful and very good at his job, the other is fat, has chosen to sprout a rather odd growth on his upper lip - possibly to try and disguise his god awful face, but has simply made him look like a constipated, consternated, west-countriated, terrier, he is also hugely incompetent and is possibly the result of familiar incest for several generations, no, no that is unfair! After all I must be honest and truthful - I love west-country terriers).
Anyway. As I leap, Impala-like, back towards my classroom, I begin to feel a twitch... just a hint of what is coming... I imagine it is similar to how Capone felt as he dodged his last tax bill, that sneaking suspicion that you have over-looked a minor problem in your gigantic crime empire / early morning routine. I open my classroom door to see a stunning recreation of the last moments of the titanic's tragic demise. A rising tide of water is creeping inexorably toward the library, my last set of stock arrivals and me! A, literal, fountain of water is cascading up out of a pipe, hitting into the table above it and splashing sideways near vertically, wonderfully giving me a flashback to Trafalgar Square when my life was simple and getting to a farewell performance of Les Mis, a minor heart condition, moving my entire life to the other side of the world and a lack of a working visa, was all I had to worry about, (sigh!). I jerk back painfully to reality and notice the huge bulk of Mr. Ketut, (Hitherto to be known as the Unutterably moronic throwback to a simpler time when multi-cellular life had yet to complicate the universe with ideas of co-ordinating more than one cell at a time, or UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! For ease of communication.) Standing next to the fountaining water, soaked, looking at the water in shock as if only now noticing that water is somewhere it shouldn't be... I am shocked by the rate at which the water is rising - seriously reminiscent of the Titanic's stampede toward oblivion - I can see that in seconds it will reach the electric sockets against the far wall, (My whole room is shaped like a basin, sloped away from the doors you see - to enhance such disasters no doubt). UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! Is stood inches from the sockets and for half a second I consider allowing natural selection to continue it's good work and make the world a fitter place, but the Catholic school boy in my past rouses sleepily and half yells 'UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! Get out of the water!!' After all I have just noticed that my laptop has been saved by a freak table corner blocking it from being soaked! Yay for fate not being totally without pity! Shame to have a 'man' die until he really pisses me off, after all what could I do to the person who did come between me and electronic satiation? That old rat-in-a-bowl torture thing is so eighteen hundreds and don't think much of this modern electrode business... Far too close to some people's idea of a good time for me!
Thankfully that oh so useful preservation instinct that is embedded so deep in both us and cockroaches has not yet been eradicated from UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! And his bulk responds, stepping out of the water and then turning around to watch! Just as the surge protector explodes in flame and a ripple of electricity flashes across the waters surface. Santa Maria and all the angels! I turn to UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! 'Where's the stopcock?' Ha! As if the word stopcock was going to translate!! I try gesturing emphatically but still I get the shrugged shoulders, (Brighter than his dad/brother you see! That's what you get for sending the boy off to primary school when he turned 18 instead of selling him for offal like his mum/grandmother wanted to do!) As he has mastered this universal sign language for 'I'm a moron' I finally manage to recruit our librarian, Bowling, (no jokes please she is lovely! And boys, pheworh! Not my cup of tea like, but that is one fine looking woman!) to translate. UMTTASTWMLHYTCTUWIOCMTOCAAT! Manages to shrug again and by a process similar to slouching but involving less speed, efficiency and with only a distant nod at the grace slouching embodies, he departs. My headmaster arrives and with a display of gymnastic aerobics which is actually quite touching swings across to my laptop and rescues it, (from it's perfectly dry position, but still!). We are now twenty minutes into the fiasco and the water pressure has not lessened a jot - possibly due to the schools low position compared to the acres of rice paddies currently flooded with water and acting as a reservoir above us - Yay! for waters ability to combine pressure and force litres per second through tiny openings. I realise that half the power is still on and bustle off to switch it off before something worse happens. The library is now being threatened as is the prep room, (with my brand new fridge and freezer in!!!) and the English room...
I realise the only chance is to get up to Canggu Club and get them to turn off their water, (well actually one of the housekeeping staff tips me off, honestly they are the best people to get anything done!) Race up to find My headmaster is there trying to sort it out... At this point Mr. Ketut arrives and with his usual gruff indifference, (Woof!) half jerks his head at the catastrophe, strolls outside, starts to count out steps much like Jim Hawkins must have done and at an undistinguishable point in the floor... digs up a stopcock! Casually switches it off and flashes me one of his incredibly rare half-smiles. Almost jump into his arms and kiss him, but realise that this might not be the correct moment and so slump down onto a bench and start to panic over how I am going to bake bread with twenty year 8's in, oh, fifteen minutes! - Fuck-a-duck! - At this point Mr. Tre arrives with a man carrying a huge box - My kit has arrived and needs to be checked / double checked and then sent back as it is mostly wrong, right better get started on that! End up miming bread-making which keeps a messy and fairly fun prac different and a bit special, especially when spiced up with tales of the flood!
Your long suffering and ailing friend in foreign parts,
Ixxx
P.S. Where the hell is that Catholic school boy when I need to get inside the head of good hearted straight men? Clearly I need to wake him up with more morally objectionable thinking! Who am I fooling? I can't even remember what morally objectionable thinking is like... let alone what the difference is between straight and gay men! Both definitions seem to primarily consist of; male, git and uninterested! (Oh well at least I've got bitter and bitchy nailed for the next fifty years, hate to think my matrondom would suddenly arrive with me all unprepared!!).
