Cock ups

1. The old folks asked me to pump tyres. No problem about that. It was getting flat for a while, and I really didn’t mind learning about these things. So I went down to the petrol kiosk to pump the tyres. I didn’t know what the correct pressure was. I had just come back from sending my grandmother to the eye doctor. There was 1 old woman sitting in the passenger’s seat, 1 maid sitting at the back, in the sweltering heat, 1 guy clowning around with the air pump.

I read the tyre, and it said that the maximum possible pressure was 54 psi. I thought that was much. But the guy before me put in only 30 psi. Was that the standard for cars? In the end, I compromised and I put in 40 psi for all 4 tyres.

So I asked my parents what the correct pressure was. Asked them why they didn’t tell me what it was when they asked me to pump the tyres. My father said, “you got to be more independent in life”. I thought that was pretty rich coming from a person so reliant on me to get his power point slides done.

They said, look at the sticker behind the car door. So I did. Unfortunately I found out that the numbers were in bars, not in psi. I told my mother that I had pumped in 40 psi. She said, that’s too much. You should have followed the sticker, and put in 27 psi for the front and 33 psi for the back. I thought, that doesn’t really correspond with 2.7 bars and 3.3 bars, does it? Anyway, she went to the kiosk and let some air out.

Later on, I went on the web and checked. 2.7 bars is 39.2 psi. 3.3 bars is 47.8 psi. My initial estimate was not far off the mark. (Actually I will put in 39 psi for both front and back because the back is hardly laden.) Luckily we have somebody in the family who’s mathematically literate. Now I have to go back there and pump in more air again.

2. There was another cock up in the family. My aunts bought 2 ducks for CNY. Then my grandmother, who is blind and incapacitated, kept on nagging my father to buy ducks. So he bought another 2. The result now is that we have 2 ducks we don’t need. So if anybody wants a spare duck let me know.

3. There was once I went shopping in IKEA with honest face and a few others. We were each getting a gift for the department gift exchange. There were a few $10 items, and I saw a CD rack that could be mounted on a wall. I thought, great, just what I need. So he agreed to buy it and I would take that during the gift exchange.

After the Christmas party, when I got home, I opened it and found that there wasn’t anything there to mount it on the wall with. Basically you had to drill a few holes in the wall, and then screw the thing on. It was a lot of trouble. So that’s why the thing was lying around doing nothing for the last 2 years.

Finally, I decided to do something about it. I borrowed a power drill from my uncle, and then tried to mount it. It was a sweltering afternoon, and my shirt was already soaked with sweat before I began. In the end I had to shut the door and work without my shirt. It wasn’t difficult knowing how to work the power drill, but the first 10 minutes were extremely difficult, until I found out the function on top of the drill: I had been operating it in screwdriver mode, not drill mode.

But even with the bit in drill mode, getting through the plaster proved to be extremely difficult. In the first place, getting the hole where I wanted it to be was difficult enough. The pencil markings turned out to be a little ambiguous after a while, and I kept on constantly having to bring up the rack to measure against the wall. It was difficult to keep on drilling, and the noise was terrible. I tried using smaller bits to drive the hole in deeper, and then using a larger bit to expand the hole. After a certain point, I wasn’t sure that I was making any headway. And the worst thing was that I was working on 3 different holes at the same time.

1 hour later, I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to drill deep enough to get a hole as deep as the plug. I decided to give up. Moreover the holes didn’t look as though they were the right shape to support the plugs.

Later on, I decided that enough was enough. After 3 ugly holes 2 cm deep. And not quite regular enough to support the plugs. I turned to my second choice of location to put the CD rack: my bed post. Drilling the holes through wood was comparatively a wonderful experience, and within 15 mins, I was done. I went to the HDB estate to buy some nuts and bolts, mounted the rack, and suddenly 75 of my CDs found a new home. So that was nice.