You folks will remember that the wife and I were hunting for sofas a while ago and it was a horrendous experience, but we finally managed to agree on one particular sofa, and we bought it. The thing is sitting in our living room now, and the wife is very fond of it, and takes rather good care of it. The other day, I was sitting on the sofa and drinking my morning coffee. The cup was a little hot, so I kept the coffee cup, filled with coffee, on the edge of the armrest.

I can already hear several of you (especially the ladies) sneering and saying - “Don’t keep the coffee cup on the sofa, it’ll fall!”, and, coincidentally, that’s exactly what the wife said at the time too. But you know, I don’t really subscribe to that viewpoint that coffee cups filled with coffee should not be kept on sofas. I mean, I’m not entirely convinced about this whole gravity and falling-objects thing. The story of Newton and his apple sounds very suspicious, and I have reason to believe that it may be a staged hollywood fake! That’s right folks, this whole concept of gravity is a fraud. More on that some other day, but as I mentioned, the wife was not too happy with my keeping the coffee cup on the edge of the sofa’s armrest.

Wife: “Don’t keep the cup there. It’ll spill!”

I was trying to be a little smart then, which, by the way, always seems like a mistake only in retrospect - and always a good idea at the time. I started playing with her, pretending to have spilled the cup, saying “whoops…. hahaha… oh! I almost spilled it… hahaha” etc.. etc.. I even moved the cup closer to the edge, and and waved my arms about the vicinity, pretending to knock it over. The wife gave me The Look. But it was rather amusing at the time.

Just as I was playing the “oops I knocked it over… hahaha…” game, my phone rang. My phone is usually somewhere on the sofa, and I turned around, trying to look for it. At that moment, the entire universe suddenly decided that it would teach me a lesson. My elbow accidentally touched the coffee cup (full of coffee, if I haven’t already mentioned it).

As soon as my brain received the message from the receptors that contact has been made with the coffee cup, which I had kept at the very edge, it caused a level of panic in my brain that hasn’t been seen before. All my brain’s processes - from heart beating, phone searching and sub-concious dreaming - all of them jolted into alert and tried to catch the coffee cup as it toppled over.

But it was too late. From the corner of my eye, I could see that the coffee cup was well beyond its equilibrium state and was on its way down, towards the sofa, and was going to dump the full load of the freshly made, hot coffee right on the sofa.

Oh, Crap! This was the end of my life.

The 25 years that I’ve spent on this planet all flashed in front of me, as the coffee cup was completing its irreversible journey from the edge of the armrest to the sofa. I prayed simultaneously to the Gods and SuperMan, hoping someone will come to my rescue, but, as is the case in most such situations, no help was immediately available.

The cup fell on the sofa, spilling over half of the coffee on the sofa, then bounced once, turned 180 degrees and fell off on the floor. The wife was watching this whole scene from her vantage point from right across the sofa. The cup hit the floor and shattered into several hundred pieces.

Silence.

Deafening Silence.

It would probably have been appropriate at this time to apologize and clean up the mess, but my brain, in its infinite wisdom, after searching over the near-infinite space of excuses, decided to send the signal to my vocal cords to say the following:

“I don’t know how that happened!”

Once my head overcame the stupidity of the previous statement, it had no option to brace for the inevitable moment that follows such accidents - The utterance of those three dreaded words by the wife, the three words that are the declaration of defeat, the three words that indicate a life long fall into slavery, the three words that will always haunt me for all of eternity, the three words that cut through me like the blade of a ninja sword:

Wife: “I TOLD YOU!!!!”

As you can probably imagine, the rest of the evening didn’t go very well. Luckily, there was no violence, but an infinite amout of gyaan was handed to me, and I fully expect this incident to be recalled and invoked on every possible occasion in the future as a conclusive demonstration of my incompetence.

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