Short Circuit!

To be ethical, this post's title was suggested by a good friend of mine (whose circuits are shorted more often than not!)....

Visited an old (and famously flaky!) friend the other day. On reaching her place, I found her pacing on the terrace as TNEB were tinkering with the electrical supply to the building. Apparently it was a case of high voltage leading to an electrical fire. We had hardly started chewing the fat when this dude started yelling for help. We found him in the middle of some rather thick smoke as his washing machine was burning merrily. Finally everyone exited the building and the EB folks and us got organised and started rushing in bags of sand. In the meantime we called the fire dept who came in time to put out a smoldering fire that the EB folks had missed.

After all the excitement we were gossiping with the local cops when this mama in veshti went by us doing a sprint worthy of Ben Johnson. Why? To collar one of the dudes who went out sand collecting, and accuse him of stealing sand from his house! On being told the situation, the mama insisted that the dude should have got sand from elsewhere! After much soothing of ruffled feathers he chilled out only to tell the cop that electrical fire cannot occur! As if we were making the whole thing up!
(Our considered opinion being he was drunk as a skunk!)

Why o why do I have to come across all the weird Tamil mamas in the world?