The Geezer Inspectors
October 14th, 2007
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about India; this is happening because we’ve been here long enough that few things are wacky. We’ve been here 2 days longer than exactly 4 months and most days are fairly typical. Late last night I realized that something that had happened earlier in the day wouldn’t have been normal 4 months ago.
In the morning Heather had headed over to Joanie’s house to hang out with her and the baby at the pool. I stayed at the house to play video games, break our home network and play more video games. Sometime during the middle of the day the door bell rang. I paused my game and went to the door to find two guys, one holding a clipboard. One guy said: “something, something, something, something, something geyser something something something.” This is slightly more humorous if you know that almost all Indians pronounce “geyser” as “geezer” and that a geyser is actually a water heater and that every water tap in the house has its own water heater (I have 4 water heaters). If you’re worried about electricity being wasted, worry not: every electric device in an Indian home has its own switch so 3 of the 4 water heaters are always switched off.
Luckily I’m up to date on the community mailing list (a place where my neighbors complain about things ranging from “big kids” playing soccer too rough in the common area to their maids making too much money) where folks have been complaining about their “geezers” leaking for some time now.
So then this guy kicks off his shoes (as though his feet are any cleaner than his shoes) and walks to our ground floor bathroom. He lifts up the false-ceiling, inspects the geyser, writes down something on his clipboard and then proceeds to walk upstairs toward the other two bathrooms. He repeats this procedure in both bathrooms: lift the ceiling, make some notes, walk away.
At the end he cruises downstairs to the door that’s still open, puts on his shoes and starts yapping to my driver (he apparently woke up from his midday nap for this) in some other language. Then he says “Thank you sir” and walks away.
Just smile and nod.
My driver tells me he was inspecting my geysers to see if any of them were installed incorrectly. Apparently one of the upstairs bathrooms (the one we don’t use) has the geyser installed wrong and so they’re going to come back whenever its convenient for them and fix it. I have no idea when they’re going to come. It might be this week or it might be next week. It might be during the week, it might be on the weekend.
Entry Filed under: India