My Week 238: It’s A Miracle

As I told you last week, I’m working off-site with no days off except for yesterday. I’m really tired and it’s making me a little punchy. I know this, because on Wednesday morning, I turned on my laptop and actually yelled at my computer boyfriend Carlo because once again, he pronounced my last name wrong, and I was like, “SAY MY NAME RIGHT, B*TCH!”. Luckily no one was around to hear me because I arrive at the site incredibly early to avoid rush hour. I normally don’t mind that Carlo says the last part of my surname like ‘Why-Talk’ instead of ‘Whit-ick’, because who would even think that was correct in the first place, but in retrospect, I think he might just be passive-aggressive, because he has no trouble with the part that I own; it’s the part that Ken owns that seems to irk him, so maybe it’s subtle jealousy. Or maybe it’s just Ken’s name in general, because even my Car Phone Lady has a problem with it:

Car Phone Lady: Ready.
 Me: Call.
Car Phone Lady: Please say the name or number to call.
Me: Ken.
Car Phone Lady: Did you say ‘Karen’?
Me: No.
Car Phone Lady: Did you say ‘Joe’?
Me: NO! Ken. Call Ken!
Car Phone Lady: OK. Calling ‘Maria’.

I call Ken at least twice a day from my car when I’m commuting, but she always, like literally EVERY TIME, makes me confirm that I do indeed want to call Ken despite the fact that I never have to confirm anyone else, including ‘Mom and Dad’ or ‘Jong Uk Park’.

So there are several things irritating me, and when I told Ken last night that I was feeling punchy, he looked at me questioningly and I said, “That means I might punch you”, which I did at about 2 am when he wouldn’t stop snoring. Finally, I said, “You know what?! I’m going into the other room and I’m taking Quackers and Brian with me!!” and he said, “GOOD! Then you can’t hit me with them anymore!” (Quackers is a duck and Brian is a shark, in case you’ve forgotten.)

But the one good thing about being away from the office is that I’m almost next to the airport, and watching an airplane take off is something that never gets old for me. The other day, I was walking to the plaza to get lunch. I looked up as a huge jet roared by, and I thought ‘People are so smart. Look at that airplane. A monkey couldn’t invent an airplane. They aren’t even particularly good butlers.’ And I know this because I have done quite a bit of research on the topic “How to Train Your Monkey Butler” and let me tell you, it doesn’t sound very promising. So I was on a huge ‘people are so smart’ high until yesterday morning when I heard some cars pull up and I looked out my bathroom window at the church across the street. We live kitty-corner to two churches—I call them the “Platform Diving Jesus Church” and “The Other Church”. As you may guess, I don’t attend either of them. I got their names from the fact that a couple of years ago, the doors of the church directly across from us were painted with an angel on one side, and Jesus on the cross on the other, both in gold paint. It looks very nice up close (well, the angel does, but I always feel sad for Jesus), but from far away, it looks like Jesus is about to dive off a cliff or whatnot.

Am I right?

Anyway, from my bathroom window, I could see five men standing around a piano which was sitting on a flat cart on the church walkway. It looked like they had just unloaded it from a rather small mini-van—a feat unto itself, I would imagine. I could hear yelling, so I opened my balcony door. The men had surrounded the piano and were having a very loud discussion in what sounded like German. Were they an angry yet musical Saxon mob intent on a good sacking? After a few minutes though, it seemed like their intention was to put the piano INSIDE the church. And I say ‘seemed’ because they kept just wandering around the piano, staring at it dubiously, and talking a lot. I had nothing better to do, and it was a beautiful sunny morning, so I went out onto the balcony to watch.

After a lot more Germanic discussion, the youngest-looking guy ran over to the mini-van and brought out a long strap, which he looped around the piano. ‘Here we go,’ I thought. Nope. They all just stood back and stared at it again. I wanted to yell, “Just push the damn thing, for Christ’s sake!” which seemed appropriately church-y, but then the guy ran back to the mini-van. He reappeared with what looked like a gas can and at first I thought maybe they were going to set the piano on fire and claim an angel spoke to them from within it, like a ‘burning bush-type scenario’, so that they could blame God for not getting it inside the church. However, it was only a toolkit. The young guy took out a hammer and started hammering at something while the rest just stood around. One of the other men put his hood up, like he didn’t want to be recognized, and frankly I don’t blame him because I was at the point where I just wanted to march over and push the piano through the doors myself. Then the one with the hammer ran back to the mini-van and grabbed what I thought was a blanket of some kind, but it was just his coat, which he randomly donned, then he looped some kind of harness around his shoulders and waist. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘He’s going to hook himself to the piano and pull it in like a team of oxen’ but again, I was disappointed. And then I was really confused because they started pushing the piano down the walkway and I had a moment where I thought they were going to take a run at the door with it, but again, NOPE. They wheeled it back towards the mini-van and I was like “What? Don’t give up Hans, Karl, Kristoff, Otto, and Gunther!” (which is what I had affectionately started to call them in my head), but then they wheeled it PAST the mini-van and kept going. Down the street. I watched until they were out of sight, then I quickly got dressed and hopped in the car to see where they went, but they, and the piano, had disappeared like some kind of vaudevillian miracle. But then I had a terrible thought–what if I had just witnessed a crack German heist squad, not unlike the villains in Die Hard, actually ROBBING the church?! So I tried dialing 9-1-1, and the Car Phone Lady said, “OK. Calling Ken.”

 

44 thoughts on “My Week 238: It’s A Miracle”

  1. Love that story! Ken IS the person to call in this particular situation, so the Car Phone Lady got it right. Maybe the piano team was just trying to get a running start? Maybe the plan was to put the piano in the van and drive it far, far away and then ram the van quickly through the doors of the church?

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  4. Punchy is right, and you may be the only witness to that German church piano hijacking gang! As for the car lady, she never, ever gets the voice commands right! Like the autocorrect on my iPhone. I mean, when in the hell do I want to use the word “ducking” when I’m feeling verbally punchy!?!? NEVER! Also if she’s not going to get my voice commands right, I’d much prefer to have Bradley Cooper’s or Sam Elliot’s voice get it wrong, then maybe it be okay with my car calling the wrong person. I’d just sit in my car during lunch talking to my car calling the wrong number all day long, just sayin’. 😎

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  5. You make me and my wife laff so much 😊
    Love the German piano mover story. If only it had been made of cardboard, eh? 😉 (sorry, couldn’t resist bringing that up again)
    There are so many similarities between you & Ken and me & Sue (there’s another one); thanks to my eldest daughter’s Xmas present to Sue I now have to share my bed with a heatable owl called Hootie🦉who doesn’t understand where my bit of bed starts. A key difference, though, is that it’s Sue that does the snoring.
    As for nonrecognition of “Ken”, this is because it’s a very short phoneme and therefore hard to recognise clearly (my day job is in speech analytics). Easiest solution is to rename him in your phone as something longer, such as “The Incredible Ken”. I imagine you will have a ball coming up with appropriate epithets 😁

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  8. There are so many questions here. Is there another entrance to the church and how far away is it? And why couldn’t they use the front door? And why is Jesus painted to look like Greg Louganis and would I have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out? The mystery of the disappearing piano sounds like a Nancy Drew title.
    While the car lady rarely understands you is a lesser mystery, more Hardy Boys fare, but Ken was the perfect person to call because what happened to that piano will keep him up all night.

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    • Unfortunately, there’s only one door, and that’s the front–Ken was super-intrigued when I told him and wanted to walk around town and see if he could find it. I was hoping maybe it was in the local pub but I was in there for hours and it never showed up…

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  10. The German gang took the church’s piano… they had special powers and disappeared after hanging around outside talking about probably disappearing for a rather lengthy time… who ARE you? 😂🤣😂 Some kind of conspiracy whisperer with stuffed animals!!! I’m LMAO! The car lady… I can’t even… I’m afraid of her and she only listens to my hubby… what is THAT about? Obviously the car lady has it out for married women. There is a story there. Some kind of conspiracy story! Ha! Terrific post! You are a delight to read, always!

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  11. desertcurmudgeon says:

    Dang, I’ve missed reading your page. I don’t know why I just seem to stop looking at other blogs when I’m taking a hiatus from my own. I hope you don’t mind, but I put a link to your hilarious page in my latest Fifteen-centric post.

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  14. Several mysteries here. Did they not have the key to the door? Was the door too narrow when open? If so, did they think of removing it from its hinges? Or was that what young German with the hammer was attempting? Perhaps they decided they had the wrong church; maybe it was the “other” church, without the diving platform that needed a piano. Or maybe, they asked their phone in German what the delivery address was, and it only spoke Korean.

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