When ingenuity goes horribly awry...

Ahmed and Abbas, our two maintenance men onsite at our housing complex are a plucky if somewhat haphazard team of handymen. They don't let their limited tools and skills impinge upon the hasty completion of any task, no matter how marginal the outcome. To their credit, they are always happy and upbeat. At least, their non-verbal clues lead me to that conclusion, because Ahmed especially speaks such a staccato patois of Nile Delta village Arabic, that even Michelle, who is nearly fluent in spoken Arabic, usually just gives up on conversations after a minute or so. I take a strange sort of encouragement from that.

Anyway, they can be pretty inventive in their solutions. A week or so ago, our washer/dryer combination (which really doesn't dry, it just somehow superheats our clothes into a steaming creased crumple - I've considered taking clothes out with tongs) suddenly stopped working. So I called Ahmed and Abbas over. After pulling off the top, checking the switches, the wall fuses, they pulled the unit out away from the wall and Abbas began to remove the wall plate. Not being particularly electrically literate, I figured maybe there was a fuse in the wall plate. I asked Ahmed what they were doing. The only phrases I caught were "lots of these" and "back in five minutes." I figured they would return with a new wall plate. Five minute later, they were at the door carrying in a new washer/dryer. They explained to Michelle that since it was the weekend and the appliance company was closed, they just took a unit from another apartment that was still empty. We were happy with their can-do attitude. Ten minutes later, we had a brand new washer/dryer. Brilliant.

Our next incident came up when Connie, our cleaning lady, ironed our front curtains and was kind enough to even put them back up. Unfortunately, Connie, for all her diminutive size, is a proverbial Cape Buffalo in the china shop. That evening, Michelle asked "why is our curtain rod hanging lower - it wasn't like that before, was it?" I, of course, hadn't noticed (I'm convinced I eventually would have).

So I went out to get Ahmed, who was soon up on our stepladder, pulling the right sconce of the rod out of the wall to reveal a much larger hole in the plaster than the plastic screw plug that had been holding the rod up. In the process, he also hadn't unscrewed the other sconce end of the rod completely, so as he twisted the rod to remove the curtains, he etched a nice corkscrew design in the left side of the curtain rod. At this point Michelle asked what his plan was. Ahmed explained calmly that he would just make a hole under the too-big hole that obviously hadn't been working. As a shower of plaster fell on the floor, Michelle tried to explain that having the curtain rod level was equally as important as having it stay in the wall.

Ahmed seemed nonplussed. The problem, of course, was that the curtain rod was going to fall; his solution promised to rectify the situation. The fact that our curtains would then be listing ten degrees to starboard was immaterial. At this point, Michelle retreated to the entry hallway, doing an excellent pantomime of pulling her hair out. Meanwhile, I had a perfect view of Ahmed simultaneously struggling for balance on the stepladder while he lost his grip on the curtain rod itself, which went swinging down like a pendulum (missing our iPod dock, luckily), and I thought to myself, they pay people good money to come up with this stuff for sitcoms, and I have it happening in my living room.

Eventually Ahmed's solution was to take three or four screws and put them in around the plastic plug. The curtain rod was actually just about level too. When he started to try and undo the tiebacks, I started fearing another catastrophe, and said don't worry we'll get that later - Michelle through in a few al-hamdullahs for good measure. We were all smiling, and then Ahmed decided that to allay any fears about the quality of his work, he'd tug on the curtains to prove how solid they were. And so we were back to ten degrees to starboard. We smiled and shooed him out of the house, and now, two weeks or so later, the curtain rod hasn't fallen. So far.