Thank You Mr Hulk and Mr Bulk

The doorbell rang and I opened it to welcome Mr. Hulk and Mr. Bulk into the house. Let me rewind a little: this feels like trying to bite a carrot in the middle portion. It is easier to start working off one end or the other, but the middle of the carrot leaves very little to play with.

The husband was seen pottering about the home with a book in his hand. He has also been extolling the many virtues of getting work done, and how prompt action has saved many a day. Imagine, the number of things that can be done if we set aside a few minutes everyday? As he says these things, there is a light around his head that emits a faint glow.

A bit of a jar coming from someone whose home has reached a state of disrepair that needs Mr Hulk and Mr Bulk to come into the home to get it running up if you ask me. Yet, he seemed so happy to be in his book, that I did not have the heart to dampen it just then. Sometimes, keeping quiet is harder to do than saying what you think. You see, while he was illuminating my life with his snippets of knowledge, I had taken an old sheet, torn it in half and was spreading it about the sink area. I then went on to take a cup and clasped it around the exhaust pipe in the sink. I also took an old towel that is extremely water absorbent and placed it on the floor near the dishwasher, should water leak on the floor by mistake. To answer your question, I was not plumbing a new connection or taking care of exhaustive water leakages, I was just getting my attention-seeking-dishwasher started. It had become part of the daily routine.

We usually rely on one person, who does a reasonably good job with our household projects.  Of late though, he has been telling us that his services are required in Lake Tahoe, Seattle and Washington DC and that if he does not take care of a trap door in the White House, it might become an issue of national security: so busy! Therefore our dishwasher has been limping along spewing all of its water on to my kitchen sink and the floor nearby for months. One or two of the others we called said their minds were meant for larger and greater things than mere dishwashers. It looked like everyone had washed their hands off our dishwasher.

That was not all. We had to postpone baking during the Thanksgiving season because the oven put on its Santa’s whiskers and sat down like an old man. The oven light would flicker, cough and then die. The sounds from it were not alarming, but they were not soothing to the soul either. Of course, we ignored it and went about bypassing the oven, till one day it beeped like a noisy toy with a motion sensor in a Bazaar. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP. I promptly did what I know best and googled for the remedy. I was glad to see that the remedy was one we had tried before with intermediate success with our television (Namely, beat it hard to silence it. That will take care of loose connections.) All the strong men and women were called upon to wield their hands on it and we had silenced the thing, but it was so angry with our crass treatment of it, it refused to start up again. The reset buttons, fuse boxes, nothing worked. Fussy people and things rarely receive much attention and so, it remained till a friend of ours started a cookie business. It might have gone on in this state had she sold cookies, but she sold cookie dough. So, every week-end, we would wistfully sigh about what baking might have been had the oven worked. I was not afforded the luxury on brooding on it for long, since the dish washer would give me an angry snort and gorge out a bucket of water spraying the sink with it and I would leave to deal with that.

“One must never put off things that can be taken care of today.” said the husband meaning well as usual. There was no restraining me at this point and I marched up to see the drivel he was reading to enlighten me and saw it was a book called ‘Solving The Procrastination Puzzle’. I gave him a look that mixed incredulity, sarcasm and why-don’t-you-practice-what-it-says all at once. Of course, it was completely lost on him. So, I asked him why we could not exert our energies into finding another handyman, and the husband said that made sense and found the hulk-and-bulk pair.

That is the story of how Mr Hulk and Mr Bulk came to our doorstep the other day. The men, heaved themselves in and asked after general health. I started to tell them about the corn in my foot, when I realized that by health, they meant the health of the dishwashers and ovens. I don’t know what they understood because I mixed a bit of Tamil into places I could not get them to understand in English and they seemed to get that. Maybe, a study on the similarities between Spanish and Tamil is in order.

Once they ascertained all the things that needed fixing, they went about their tasks. The pair of them looked into the sink pretty deeply, talked among themselves, and did a bit of pipe doctoring. In a few minutes, they started the dishwasher and voila! The water was not spilling on to the kitchen counter anymore. I was amazed at them and showed them to the oven.

I swear I do not lie when I say this: but all they did was go to the fuse box, switch off and switch on the thing again, gave it a mild thump and the oven greeted them happily and hummed back to work.

There is no saying how grateful I am to having things back to normal. If you will excuse me now, I might go and bake a fresh batch of cookies in my oven after giving it an affectionate pat and give my dishwasher an indulgent smile when I load up the dirty dishes.