Walid's Betrayal

Walid's betrayal hurt my heart all the more because he was so nice about it.

Yesterday morning, I realized that my bedroom and one of the bathroom outlets had no power. I tried flipping the fuse switches to no avail. Weirdly, the air conditioner in my bedroom still worked fine, as did one light and power outlet in the bathroom. Whatever. I dried my hair in the living room, where things were working fine and went to work, not noticing that the kitchen power was also out, leaving our refrigerated items defenseless.

When I returned home around six, there was no change. I'm not sure why this was surprising, as if our apartment had somehow assured me it would rewire itself during the day and then failed to follow through. My roommate and I called the bowab, the doorman/handyman that the tenants in our building pay to hang around and be available in such circumstances. Ali, the bowab, came up to the apartment and, unsurprisingly, flipped the fuse box switches with no success. He informed us we neededn electrician, which we already knew since only about a third of the available lights in our apartment actually work and even those require tricks like jiggling switches, pressing the bulb until it turns on, etc. We didn't think we'd be able to get someone after six on such short notice but Ali called around and found Walid.

The first thing we noticed about Walid is that he spoke English. Not just a few words related to his trade like "light" and "cord" and "on" but he really spoke English and understood what we said, even the jokes. This was disconcerting and Marisol and I switched to Spanish a couple of times so we could discuss him and our electrical woes more privately.

Walid spent over an hour and a half in our apartment. He fixed all the lights, leaving twice to buy replacement parts. He rewired the fuse box, replacing an entire switch at one point, installed a light in the ceiling of my room, and popped the light switches off in my bedroom and the kitchen, and the air conditioning switch in the living room, to tighten things up. Room by room, Walid revived our apartment and kept saying, "if you have anything else, you'd better tell me now," and again and again we'd come up with just one more thing that we realized had either stopped working or had never worked.

Finally around 9:30, Walid charged us 77 pounds, the equivalent of $14.00 for parts and services. We tipped him to even out the total at 100 pounds, or $20 and he left happy and exhausted. Marisol and I reveled in our well-lit apartment, wandering dreamlike from room to room staring at the glowing bulbs until we had to blink the burning spots from our eyes. We both retired to our rooms, she to read, me to do yoga, now that we could see what we were doing in that part of the apartment.

Which is when the trouble began.

A half hour after Walid left, the fuse overloaded again and clicked off the lights in my room, Marisol's room, half the bathroom, and the whole kitchen. The same line of wiring that had tripped the fuse and blacked out in the morning. Marisol was in the shower so I had to wait to mess with the fusebox for fear of picking the wrong switch and leaving her in total darkness (remember that one of the two lights in the bathroom was on a different circuit and still worked). When she came out of the bathroom, I went to the fuse box, found the right switch and switched it back and forth. The lights came back on and Marisol and I went back to our respective reading and workout.

The fuse tripped again. I switched it back on again. It switched off again almost immediately. Marisol tried her hand at the fusebox but the lights did not come back on. I tried and they did flip on again. Things seemed to stabilize for twenty minutes or so. I wound down my workout and Marisol's boyfriend Megid came over to hang out. Marisol was showing him our well-lit, if finicky apartment, and I was about to get in the shower, when the lights went out again. This time for good. No amount of fusebox tampering, switch flipping, and frustrated cursing could bring the power back.

The lights going out at 10:45 has a different meaning than the lights going out at 5:30. After my shower I was headed to bed and Marisol and Megid were planning to turn in before long as well. So at first it didn't seem we needed to demand that Walid return immediately, though we did call him to tell him that the problem we'd originally called him to solve was back in full force. He reluctantly confirmed that he would come back if we made him despite the late hour because electrician's ethics demanded that he finish what he started. We told him it was okay if he come back the next day, today, after work hours, instead. As soon as we hung up, however, we remembered the fridge.

The fridge had been out the entire day yesterday, though we did have a good number of frozen items in the freezer that has kept the rest of the fridge cold during the day, even as they thawed out. One of these items was a full package of chicken breasts that was already suspect after partially thawing, then refreezing on Monday when the maid defrosted the fridge. By 11pm, when we said goodnight to Walid for good, the frozen items were thoroughly thawed and the fridge was starting to warm up, risking the health and safety of everything inside.

We also had the problem of Marisol and Megid being confined to the living room because there was no light in Marisol's room. This is when Marisol's genius kicked into high gear. For a while we joked about cooking all of my chicken, and the ground beef, shrimp, and calamari Marisol had in the freezer, all at the same time. She suggested mixed meatballs. I suggested stew. None of us could think of the recipes for too long without shuddering or gagging. Marisol had joked about planning to solve one problem at a time, then set about in all seriousness to actually doing it. First, she ran an extension cord from the bathroom to a lightbulb on a cord we'd been using to light the kitchen before Walid fixed the central ceiling light in that room. The lightbulb she ran to a curtain hook in her room and poof! bedroom mood lighting.

Then, she had Megid and I help her slide the refrigerator away from the wall in its corner of the kitchen and turn it around so its back faced the corridor between the kitchen and the bathroom. She unplugged the extension cord from the lightbulb in her room and ran it in the opposite direction to plug in the fridge. I heard her bemoaning the fact that she had only one extension cord and only one working plug in the bathroom and saying if only she had a splitter for the outlet she could solve both problems at once. I did have a splitter and soon we had a working fridge and light in Marisol's bedroom. I'm pretty sure the chicken is too far gone to use, or at least to use safely, but everything else in the fridge will be safe until Walid can bring juice back to the affected areas this evening. Just in time for me to leave for the weekend. I plan to throw out the chicken and the last Tupperware of some shrimp chow mein I made earlier in the week right when I leave so that if the bowab doesn't throw it out right away, I won't be around to gag at the growing stink in the stairway garbage can outside our apartment. Insert evil laugh here.

I am going on a whirlwind trip to Siwa this weekend. I leave at 11pm tomorrow night, drive through the night [hopefully] sleeping on the bus, spend the day Friday doing tourist activities, camp out Bedouin style (no showers or bathrooms) Friday night, sandsurf the day away (or in my case, photograph others sandsurfing while reading and improving my tan) on Saturday, then drive back all night Saturday getting back into Cairo around three in the morning in time for work at 9am on Sunday. I am hardcore.

If I survive the trip, I will report on Siwa in detail when I regain consciousness next week.