Mr P catches a ghost!

Mr P could not sleep because of the ghost. Every time Mr P moved in his bed, the ghost would tap on the window and send him curling to form a shaking, shivering ball under his blanket…... Strangely the ghost hesitated in coming out of his bedroom and he heard the knocks only from the bedroom window, especially when he turned out the lights and lay down in his bed.

Things got so bad that Mr P sought out all sorts of excuses for sleeping on the couch in the living room, or prolonging the time he stayed out of his bedroom. On this particular night, Mr P had finally gathered up some courage to go to bed and had brushed his teeth. He had spread his washed towel on the clothes stand by his bed and was wiping his hands on it when the knocking started. Mr P screamed and ran out of the room. He was shivering, crouched on the sofa in the living room when he heard another knock and screamed again before realizing that the latest knock was coming from the front door. He went and opened the door and saw his friend and neighbour who had come to investigate the screams.

Through chattering teeth, a trembling Mr P told his friend about the ghost and he wanted to check it out. They walked into the bedroom. There was no sign of the ghost anywhere and there was no knocking sound when both of them stood still in the room and waited with bated breaths. Then Mr P suggested that the ghost could be waiting for Mr P to get into his bed before it started knocking. Mr P’s friend asked him to get into his bed to stir the ghost up and Mr P obliged.

As soon as Mr P climbed into his bed, they heard a knocking sound coming from the window. Every time he moved in his bed the ghost did not seem to like it and kept knocking at the window. While Mr P shivered and slid under his blanket, his neighbour moved close to the window to catch the ghost in the act of knocking. And he did! It was the clothes stand!

The clothes stand that Mr P had inherited from his grandfather and kept next to his bed was touching the bed. It was wobbly and it moved every time there was the slightest movement on the bed and a part of the other end of the stand knocked on the window bar! No wonder there were loud knocks at night that woke Mr P up from his dreams of playing soccer. Bear in mind, Mr P kicks around a lot with his legs when he is sleeping. Anyway, the long and short of it is that Mr P was very glad HE had knocked off the knocking ghost!

A Kind of Holiday! - Mr P goes to Kangaroo Island

Have you heard of Kangaroo island? Before you jump up from your seats and say “I know…. it’s Australia”, let me tell you it is Not. Agreed Australia is a large island continent and agreed there are plenty of Kangaroos there. But just because of that it does not become Kangaroo island. And No, it is not a place of Kangaroo courts that some of us know well of.

Kangaroo Island is an island that belongs to Australia and separate from the mainland. The easiest way to get there is by ferry or flight from South Australia. Mr P had chosen to go there for holidays and he had chosen the ferry operated by SeaLink that also transported his car to the other side for him. The ferry operated between Cape Jervis on the mainland and Penneshaw in Kangaroo island. There were two things that made Mr P nervous about this ferry trip. 1) He did not like the name Cape Jervis. It gave him the creeps. For some reason Mr P was convinced that Cape Jervis was in fact the location for the movie ‘Cape Fear.’ He felt there was an eerie atmosphere there and he kept looking over his shoulder for a psycho to pounce on him any time. 2) Mr P hated driving his car to and from the boat. This had to be done over a bridgeway and Mr P’s heart was in his mouth while he drove from the land into the boat and back. He kept looking at the sea fearfully while doing this and it can only be SeaLink’s good luck that he did not drive straight into the waters.  

Mr P liked the boat trip but for the occasional butterflies he felt in his stomach when thinking of driving his car out from the boat when they reached land. Once Mr P and his car were on solid ground at Penneshaw, he felt better.

He had decided to spend that day and night in Kangaroo island and had reserved accommodation at a motel in Kingscote. He drove to the motel, got checked into his room, took a nice shower. He had had to wake up early in the morning to drive down to Cape Jervis from Adelaide to catch the ferry and was very tired. He turned on the TV and fell asleep on the bed. He dreamt of kangaroos and koalas.

It was late in the afternoon that he woke up from sleep. He ate a hasty lunch and then embarked on the journey around the island. It was just mile after mile of grey tarred road with bushes and trees on either side and there was not a soul in sight. He kept his eyes peeled for any sort of animal life but did not see any drowsy koalas up on the gum trees or any kangaroos. As to "animal life-lessness", he saw plenty on the road in the form of carcasses of small dead animals that had met their fate under the wheels of some speeding vehicle. Finally he came across a junction where he found a shop and Mr P bought some toasted cheese sandwiches. He sat in his car and ate them and then he saw his first wallaby.

The cute creature had come looking for tidbits of food. Mr P did not share his sandwiches with the creature, not because it was considered bad ecological practice to feed the native creatures, but because he was terribly hungry himself.The wallaby even held its front legs together and prayed and begged for some crumbs, but Mr P could not be moved. After some time the disappointed creature gave him a very disgusted look and disappeared back into the bushes.

Dusk was settling in by then and the lady at the wayside shop had told him it was dangerous to drive in the dark as animals, especially big kangaroos, could jump across his path and cause accidents. So now Mr P decided to cut his drive short and return back to the motel. Back at the motel, Mr P collected his fishing reel and went to the Kingscote pier. He threw the line into the sea and waited anxiously for a catch. The wise fish in the seas of Kingscote gave a wide berth to Mr P’s hook, line and sinker. Of course, Mr P had forgotten to bait his hook! By evening it had become very windy and cold and after getting chilled to his bones for a couple of hours Mr P came back to his room, ate a TV dinner and fell asleep.

The next morning Mr P drove to Seal Bay and saw the seals. Oh! The Poor seals! All the downturns in the world economy couldn't make them more depressed.

They all looked bored and despondent and were lying straggled on the beach! Mr P felt he could agree with them wholly. He would be terribly depressed as well if doomed to a whole life time on that island. It was with this thought that he suddenly remembered that his return ferry would be leaving from Penneshaw within the next hour. He could not have driven faster to the ferry even if all the animals of Kangaroo island chased him.

On returning back to Adelaide Mr P talked to his friends about the lovely time he had ….. He waxed loquacious on the romanticism of Cape Jervis! (He tended to pull down his shirt sleeves as he mentioned Cape Jervis. His hair still stood up eerily). He boasted about the different animals he had seen (he kept it to himself that they were mostly dead on the road sides), such a good time he had fishing (not that he was chilled and nearly caught pneumonia without a single bite on his line) and how jolly the seals were. Truthfully of course, he mentioned the wallaby he had seen the first day at Kangaroo island,...... and the kangaroos and the koalas. Remember? Hadn't he seen them in his dream?

      

Dumb? Mr P was just being himself!..

Many of us would have heard of the world’s dumbest criminals. The story of the thug who went to steal a shop and found that the till was nearly empty, is especially hilarious. He had threatened the shop owner and thoughtfully left his phone number with him with instructions to inform him as soon as the till filled up. Can it be just bad luck or Karma that the thug’s thoughtfulness was soon rewarded by the police knocking on his door? However, it cannot be denied that had it been Mr P who was the shop owner, the outcome could have been quite different. It must be conceded that there are “world’s dumbest victims” too as the following incident proves!

Getting up late in the morning, Mr P had opened the door of his flat to collect the newspaper that had been left outside. He saw that his neighbour was also standing at her door and was talking to a man in the hallway. To the rest of the world Mr P wanted to project himself as a diligent early riser and Mr P felt slightly ashamed that the neighbour saw him still in his pajamas getting the newspaper so late in the morning. To appear as nonchalant, Mr P squeaked out a “Good Morning” to her. She was quite startled by the greeting. “Oh! Good Morning!” she said. Then, may be to cover her embarrassment in seeing Mr P in his pajamas, or to dispel doubts about what she was doing with a strange man at her door, she resorted to some unnecessary explanation. “This man has come for the newspaper dues.”

Mr P now looked at the man standing outside her door and said “Please come and collect my dues too. I would like to pay for a couple of months in advance as well. It is a pain paying every month and I may not be in every time you come a-knocking.”

“Sure”, said the man and he came to Mr P’s door. Mr P went in and brought out the money and gave him two months’ dues and two months’ advance payment. Needless to say that it came to a hefty sum and Mr P asked for a receipt. The man wrote out a receipt, signed and gave it to Mr P and hurried off.

Later that week Mr P was asked to pay the dues for the newspaper again, but this time the person who knocked on his door was a different man. Mr P said he had already paid for the paper and he even had a receipt to show. He brought out the receipt and the new person had a look at it. “This can’t be genuine, sir," he said trying to hold back his laughter. "Looks like you have been duped. Did you check the name of the person who signed this receipt? I am sure that President Barrack Obama would not be walking around collecting the dues for the Times of India!”...

Funny Travel Incidents: Mr P's woes with customs!

If you would ask Mr P to mention some scary things he has done in his life, he would say it was passing through customs and immigration and border security at the various international airports during his travels. No matter how many times he had done this during his frequent travels, he was a nervous wreck as he passed through these checks.

Every time, he felt as though the officers who checked his passport and looked into his eyes were trying to read his deepest secrets and did not like what they saw! Just the thought of the Tylenol and Paracetamol tablets he carried for headaches, made him feel as though he was being suspected of carrying something illegal. Whenever they asked  him  about the purpose of his travel, he felt that they believed he had some evil plans. This made Mr P so nervous that his replies often came out in a squeaky voice. Mr P would struggle to rectify his voice to their next question and it would then come out as a hoarse grunt. Suffice to say that all this combined with his fidgeting made him appear as a suspicious character. So, very often he was subjected to strong scrutiny and checking. Often he was asked to remove his shoes and he was pat-checked. This really irritated Mr P as he could not now safely hide in his socks, the larger than 100 gram tooth paste tubes. Since he could not carry them in his cabin bags ever since the new rules came into effect, he had tried hiding them in his socks. Walking with a tube of tooth paste stuck inside the sock and kept there with a rubber band is definitely not one of the most comfortable things to do. It did have its advantages sometimes like giving Mr P a limp and a strained look on his face which helped him get sympathy from fellow travelers. Some of them let him ahead in queues and some even helped him with his luggage! But with the thorough checking he had to go through, he had to throw his tooth paste tubes away so many times!

Then at the airport there were those sniffer dogs. After that incident on his travel to New Zealand when he had to pay a fine of NZ$ 200 for carrying a forgotten pear in his bag from the lunch at Melbourne, he was very careful. He understood how much New Zealand customs hated plant material......... in the luggage. So he had made sure that he was not carrying any plant material to that country other than what he had consumed in the plane and was safe in his stomach. Yet on one travel, this little sniffer dog had hounded him and the customs officer had detained him and thoroughly checked his bags before the problem was identified as some residual smell from the bananas he used to carry as part of his lunch in his briefcase to work. Till he was allowed to proceed, he had felt that every eye in the airport was on him, scornfully wondering what sort of drug he was carrying in his bags!

Mr P had been deeply embarrassed by this incident. It was because of this embarrassment that Mr P bought a brand new "American Tourister" bag from Walmart to carry as cabin bag on his next trip. On reaching Auckland airport, Mr P rested his new bag on the floor and was in the process of collecting his checked in luggage from the conveyor belt when a sniffer dog came a-sniffing at his bag! "Not again!" thought Mr P as the customs officer followed and started examining his bag. The officer started questioning Mr P on the contents and kept asking if Mr P had had any fruits in the bag within the past few days.

"No, Never", he replied. "Just to avoid this situation I left at home my regular briefcase in which I take my lunch to work. This is a brand new bag that I bought just yesterday!"

"Ah! That explains it!" said the officer. " Sometimes this sniffer dog falsely alerts to the smell of new bags!"

Mr P stood agape! "One can never win with immigration, customs and border security!" he realised. "You could not avoid suspicion if you traveled with your old fruity smelling bag. Can you not travel with a new one either? Life was tough."

Something you don't want to give as a Valentine's Day Gift, even with a price rollback!

Mr P was planning well ahead for Valentine’s day. He did not want things to happen like last time. And he was not going to buy anything other than the gift when shopping, especially no two things similar in size. Mr P cringed even now on remembering last year’s Valentine’s day.

Last year, he had totally forgotten to buy a gift for his girlfriend and had gone to Walmart in a hurry at the last minute. Searching through the pharmacy aisles for a fragrance that was not expensive, he had finally picked one that was just $10.  While looking through the aisles he also bought some stuff for his personal use. At the check-out, he had asked for two separate bags, one for his stuff and the other for his girlfriend’s gift. He had then rushed to his girlfriend’s flat and found that she was not at home. So he had written a note and slipped it into the plastic bag he thought contained the gift. “Sorry for this late gift. But better late than never! I hope you will really love this”, he said in his note. He had hung the bag from the door handle and left for home to watch a game on TV. It was quite late in the night that he had decided to get the stuff he had bought for himself to put it in his medicine cabinet in the bathroom. That was when he nearly fainted with shock. Out of the plastic bag had come a bottle of ladies’ perfume!

He shook in his shoes even now thinking what his then girlfriend would have discovered in the plastic ag he had left for her on the door knob! Fleet Liquid Glycerin Suppositories:#1 doctor recommended laxative brand. It was: $4.56 but he had bought it because there was a rollback and was selling for $3.98!

Fleet Liquid Glycerin Suppositories:

Acknowledgement: Pictures were copied from Walmart online catalogue.