Settling in is a long and painstaking process. Here I was thinking that once our container gets delivered and the boxes get opened we’ll just be a hop, skip and jump away from getting back into gear, after five months of floating in transit. It’s now six weeks in the new place, and there’s still a seemingly endless circuit of odd-jobs people trooping through almost every other day.
We’ve had innumerable visits of electricians, locksmiths, carpenters, plumbers, pest control people, haulers, fixers, cleaners, and often scammers. It’s doubtless fed by the fact that I’m allergic to DIY and have developed a sense of inadequacy and sloth towards all things manual or technical. Over the last month, it has resulted in this pronounced Eloi-Morlock dynamic (a la Time Machine), with packs of predatory handymen (whom I am unable to benchmark against the market, as am so disconnected), popping out of their wells and helping themselves to a sometimes questionably earned livelihood at our expense.
The carpenter left a short while ago, and I’m sure he must have been here a couple of dozen times already. I have to make an effort now to remember just what he does on every visit, as he’s now working at a rarefied level not visible to the naked eye, or to the amateur client. He’s perfected his business model along the lines of tar-baby consultants. He looks busy enough, sounds noisy enough, and fills the evening neatly, but leaves just enough to do for the next time. His tools have been sitting in the drawing room corner for weeks, left there in what must be the custom of marking territory with the species. We’re so defenseless with him. He has this “I’ll solve your problems, go any length for you, and pray for you all night” kind of attitude, with just a touch of the “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me” look and manner. He’s pulling it off flawlessly.
We got wiser with the electrician duo though, who pushed their luck with their otherwise admirable growth-mindset driving an almost daily price inflation. They didn’t bother to wheedle us with subtlety or effective diversionary tactics. They did try a bit of it…so on being asked the price at the end of the day, one of them would randomly throw a crazy number, as if to test the limits of my sanity, but would pull the punch just a little by saying “the work amounts to x” (“x bantay hain” in the original version), the suggestion being that the number was arrived at through a very rational and complex value-based pricing algorithm (“man I just work here – it’s the pricing model”). It was a massive fail.
The client in a skewed handyman-client relationship is already gnawed by the uneasy sense of being a gullible Simple Simon, but is too comfortable to break the charade. However, when the handyman is theatrically gauche, with “affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other”, as Dickens put it in Martin Chuzzlewit, even a dumb client can stiffen the sinews and call it quits. He does it, though, in a kind of spontaneous and short-lived over-reaction, to release his pent-up frustration…in a churlish tone of “I know I’m being bamboozled, and won’t have any of it you rascal!!”, but there’s a tremulous undertone of “..but then again I don’t know by how much, and I’m too lazy to fix the problem myself, so just have a little more finesse in your extortion would you, and we can get back to playing our charade”.
Notes to Self 
Hahaha.. Enjoyed this..