Man vs Machine

Here I am, at 9am on a Sunday morning in Boston. The weather outside is fine, which in April means that it's a toasty 10C outside and there is no sign of rain or snow. I'm wide awake and have been for about four hours. And already I've been outwitted by a washing machine.

Earlier this morning I'd gone to the hotel laundromat to wash some clothes. I had duly loaded the machine, closed the lid, inserted my coins, and rammed in the coin loader/machine starter. And then I and the machine stared at each other in dead, calm silence. I soon tired of trying to outstare a white metal object. So I asked a passing employee to help. With a pleasant smile (that screamed "You daft furriner") she sweetly pulled the loader/starter back out and presto, the machine started running.

It's history repeating itself. Years ago I visited a friend who had just moved to Bangkok. He was facing a crisis because he'd run out of clean clothes and didn't know how to operate his washing machine. The Thai user manual did not help. The building staff were a little better. We phoned them and said "Please repair washing machine" using every syntax and accent we could think of. Eventually we managed to transmit the word "repair". Then followed a Siamese version of Twenty Questions in which we successively denied damaging air conditioners, toasters, televisions, refrigerators and assorted other appliances. Eventually a technician came up to investigate and in about seven seconds had the washer up and running. In the process we learned that you have to turn the starter knob, and then pull it out.

So within 36 hours of leaving Singapore I have learned two valuable life lessons. The first, of course, is about the intricacies of operating washing machines in alien nations. The second is about the incompatibility between toddlers and laung-haul flights.

Imagine a three-year-old boy. Imagine getting him into a plane at 11 in the morning, wide awake and full of beans. Imagine keeping him there for the duration of an 18-hour flight. If you're imagining a small, roughly cylindrical object ricocheting off the walls of a flight cabin, you've got the right image.

In hindsight it was rather funny. I, my wife, and our Monster were seated at the back of the cabin. The Monster invented a sport which consisted of giggling all the way to the front, then hopping all the way to the back. Along the route he would stop at randomly chosen fellow passengers, look them closely in the eye, and then giggle some more. They were obviously unprepared for such childish attention; at this point it's worth mentioning that every one of them was a tired-looking businessperson.

After about 10 hours of alternating the mile-high hopscotch with lusty renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", we had gotten to know the cabin crew rather well. They were great - they went a long way to take care of us. Maybe they thought it was a neat way to get back at excessively demanding business passengers. Or maybe it was just the exceptional dedication to service that Singapore Airlines instils. Either way, they took fantastic care of us, bless their sarong-clad souls.

And now we're here in the promised land, with a week of house-hunting ahead of us. The weather forecast promises sunny skies. Let's hope that's an omen.