There are those wretched days when irritations come in mocking doses you could swear unseen forces were at work.

Just last week, being already late for work, I am in the lift heading downstairs when, just as I am heaving a sigh of gratitude that the lift is about to reach the ground level with no intervening stops, the lift proceeds to make a call, and of all floors, at the 2nd floor, yes that 1 (one) floor above ground! I thought to myself, which idiot was this who, for his own good and the health of his heart, could not even afford the effort of walking down one solitary floor?

The lift door opens, and in struggles a frail, elderly lady well into her 80s. Feeling guilty, I immediately retract my preceding feelings of irritation only to replace them with thoughts of understanding – she is after all an old lady. However, I am only temporarily successful at that endeavour – for this lady starts taking what seemed like an eternity to traverse the 2 feet needed to get in clear of the doors. So, I patiently wait… and as I watch her moving herself in with insipid progress, fresh thoughts of irritation creep in – ‘why couldn’t she have chosen to leave the house at a more forgiving hour when the working masses were already comfortably ensconced at work? Surely, there could be nothing pressing in her schedule that would necessitate her joining the morning crowd and contributing to the rush-hour congestion?’

The lift finally arrives on the ground floor to applause from the back of my head. The joy is however momentary, as the process that ran its course on the 2nd floor began its full reprise, this time in reverse. Of course, I could have stolen a march on her and darted out first, leaving her to grapple with the closing doors, but surely not?! And so, I again patiently wait, holding open the lift doors as she made her slow and laborious exit.

I get to work, later than normal, and the minor irritation of the morning is quickly forgotten.

Much later, on my way home, the forces that reared their mocking ways that morning, re-appear, this time at the ATM machine. I slide in my card to get some cash and the machine promptly gobbles it up. A screen-message informs me that something’s awry with my card. What nonsense! I had just used it barely a minute earlier to top-up my ez-link card on another machine without hassle!

The ATM machine then screens a ‘Thank you for banking with us’ message – although I couldn’t for the life of me understand what banking I could have managed in the circumstance! The machine however remains all silent and coy about my yet-to-be-returned card. Was I going to get it back in one piece? Was it going to be spewed out the moment I turned my back and walked away? The ‘thank you’ message refuses to budge and no amount of tinkering with the machine’s buttons would prompt it to divulge more. I wondered if I should slap, shake or kick the machine to provoke a response, but I realised this wasn’t Hollywood (or Bollywood, for that matter), and slowly accepted that there must indeed have been something screwed-up with my card for it to have now screwed up the system.

I called the bank hotline number immediately, and am informed that I could apply for a replacement card the following day at a charge of $5. As a consolation, I am assured that there was no risk of any security breach to my account, and, I could apply for the $5 replacement charge to be waived. Some consolation, I thought. So, in the meantime, I’m stuck without cash.

I arrive home at my lift lobby, press the lift button and notice that the lift’s at the 2nd floor. Well, at least something’s going my way today, I thought, as the lift would only have taken a split second to arrive.

How wrong I was! Instead of descending, the lift proceeds to do the direct opposite, as though in execution of that perfect taunt! F*%#! I must have been one-hundredth of a millisecond too late. The lift goes up to the 6th, stops for a few moments, before proceeding to descend once again. Okay, at least it didn’t go up all the way to the 16th. However, as if in a show of defiance on its way down, it stops at the 4th, and then again on the 3rd, in apparent perpetuation of its taunt. I thought, by the sheer laws of probability, how often could it happen that in just a minute, there is demand for the lift’s service from 4 out of the first 6 floors of a 16 storey block?

Perhaps Murphy has his explanation…