If I was an Indonesian bricklayer I would spend all day mixing semen: HAPPY NEW YEAR

who are you calling big nose, big nose?

vanessa somehow improsoned herself in the goldfish bowl

julian discovers exactly how painful it is to pull his own face out of his eyeball (whilst eating his own thumb)

People in a lift. Stuck

Well, as far as portents for a new year goes, I think this year has some sort of bizarreness in store for Vanessa and myself. Hopefully not dark portents, but certainly surreal ones. This is the story of our New year celebrations, I hope it comes across as bizarrely in the translation to text as the events themselves seemed (however in the true style of, well, me and a million other alcoholics in the world, it is suffice to say that I was ever so slightly drunk for the majority of these proceedings, but nonetheless, they were all a bit odd. Enough preamble, here goes.

New Years eve 2007, 7pm:
Arrive at KLCC, next to the Petronas Twin Towers, at the very nice, very expensive and very plush new apartment belonging to Vanessas aunt and uncle, where we are to see in the New Year. Everybody all dressed up and ready for dinner. Jimmy (Vanessas youngest uncle, the pickled one) plies me with very nice Johnnie Walker Blue Label and 21 year old Ballatines. I accept. Photos and exchanges of pleasantries, the girls go and get ready.

Around 7.45pm:
Myself, Mr Chia, Mr Hii (uncle, owner of apartment),Oma and Opa (Grandmother and Grandfather), Cousins Claudia and Darius, sister Jess and boyfriend Julian all get into the private lift down to the lobby (this is a lift with no Floor buttons, they just put their keycard to the reader and it whisks you up to the 23rd floor), the others go out to Delicious (a nearby restaurant) and I linger in the lobby to wait for Vanessa, who is right behind us in the next lift load. I light a cigarette. I wait. I finish cigarette. I look around, getting a bit concerned, is there another way to the restaurant I don’t know about? I wait a bit longer, vexed. It occurs to me that there are at least 6 women in the next lot, so maybe they are just procrastinating with their hair or some obsessive clean-up project. I go to the restaurant to see if they snuck past me.
Claudia conforms my suspicions about possible last minute preening, by saying, “well there you hav it, that’s my family for you”

Around 8.05pm:
I’m now decidedly baffled as to Vanessas whereabouts. Opa comes over and says “lif stack, ho ho ho” with a big smile. Hmmm, what is this? Lift stuck? I go out to the doormen of the apartment and the conversation went a bit like this:

ME: “you know your lift? It’s….”

DOORMAN: “oh lift, that way” (pointing in a very helpful way to where he know’s I already know where the lifts are because he watched me go into it a few hours before and come out of less than 20 minutes hence).
ME: “No I’m on about the private residents lift, it’s..” (point to private residents lift)

DOORMAN: “Oh that’s private residents lift. Private residents only there

ME: Yes, well you are a mighty intelligent fellah aren’t you, I can see they only pick the cream of the graduates from the Acadamy for super-sharp doormen here. Did you by any chance get a first? (OK, I exaggerate, I obviously didn’t have the quick wit to articulate such a scathing retort on the spot, in fact I just said)

ME: Yes, that one. Over there, it’s broken.

DOORMAN: Huh?

ME: Broken
DOORMAN: Huh?
ME: Broken, stuck, eee no workee, kaput
DOORMAN: Huh?
ME: Oh for f@*ks sake, come with me idiot
DOORMAN: Huh? (follows)

We enter the lobby to find a member of the maintenance staff (in blue shirt) standing in the doorway of the very high tech lift maintenance room, with his hands at chest height doing the classic dance of the incompetent fool:

One step into the room, shake head, one step into lobby, look for boss, alarm rings in room so step back in, waggle hands around, repeat for around 15 minutes with a look of complete uselessness on your face, going “errrrm”. (deee dee-dee, dee dee dee dee deeee deee, cha cha cha)

So by this point they’d all been stuck in the lift for 15 minutes and nobody had been alerted (fortunately the system has an automatic call out to the maintenance guy, but he was over 30 minutes drive away from the centre of KL, which is normally very jammed, but on new years eve, with a big fireworks display planned in the park behind Petronas and several roads closed, it was just pure chaos). By the time I got to the random useless dancing caretaker, Mr Chia, Mr Hii and Opa had all arrived in the lobby. Mr Hii, the owner of said very expensive and exclusive apartment was no a happy man at all, Mr Chia stood there looking like the building manager was telling him a series of increasingly funny jokes (such as “it’s going to be at least half an hour”, “yes there is a manual over-ride, no I don’t have the authority to use it, why not? I know I’m the building manager but I haven’t been trained to use it” and a lot more besides.) My favourite comment from the building manager would have had me in stitches in some other time and place, I asked him to come and help me force open the lift doors (as they were only stuck between 1 and G), his reply was amazing……

“we can’t do that, oh no, oh no, if you open the doors then the lift will fall automatically, it will go straight down to the basement”

Now call me a bit ignorant if you will, but in all seriousness, did he truly believe that the lift manufacturers would have an inbuilt mass-murder/suicide system for when the meddling firemen turn up and try to save the people trapped in said lift. The lift descends, detects problem, emergency brakes go on, alarm pressed, firemen come, prize open doors and then whoooooooommppphhh, straight from the 20th floor to the sub-basements and all inside are turned to puree. Genius.

"Don't worry madam, we'll have you out of there in a jiffy" Wheeeeee splooorgge!!! "oh well lads, I must try and remember that suicide catch next time, always slips my mind"

So I ignored him.

Needless to say the 3 elder males were not a very happy crowd, as they are men who are accustomed to saying “I want this done” and the immediate response is “certainly sir, as quickly as possible, in fact it was already done before you asked for it, perhaps you'd like me to remove my trousers and drag my testes accross broken glass and chilli sauce as way of apology” (or something a bit like that anyway).

Opa was very angry indeed and shouting things in Hokkien at the manager, no idea what he was saying but he didn’t look very happy and sounded even less so. I decided (ina very rare moment of sensible clarity) that another person shouting probably wouldn’t be much use (or less of a lie is that I thought "bugger me, this is all a bit frightening, these chaps don't need my help to rip this guy apart, I'm getting as far away from here as I can feasably can in case they suddenly turn on me, I'm off!!! But the truth sounds so much less heroic doesn't it), so I went up the stairs to go and check on the unfortunate captives.

Would you believe they were playing cards? Of all the things. There was a battle of concerned fathers meets the blur-blur doorman going on in the lobby (shortly to be joined by the rest of the family) and the buggers in the lift were having a very jolly old time of it.
Jimmy (on the inside) and myself tried to prise open the doors, but to not much avail as they were bloody hard to budge, so I went back down to get some lads to help. I went back into the lobby and much to my surprise 2 metal bars had appeared from somewhere (god only knows where they came from) but as I walked into the lobby Vanessas granddad was smacking one metal bar onto the marble reception counter as an emphatic counterpoint to his Hokkien rage (bit scary, somehow moreso coming from a near octogenarian), Mr Chia was shouting at the man to just phone the fire brigade, and I managed to grab a hold of Darius, Julian and Krishnan (the driver) and get them to help pull the doors apart (the metal bars came with us),
So we had about 5 or 10 mintues of door wrestling in order to create a 3 inch gap (Uncle Benny started shouting “there’s people fainting in here!!! It’s so hot!! Help us!!!” The joker, but it put the fear in the manager, who ran off to get cups of water) and then the bloody lift man turned up.

What happened next was just a sheer shock, I had to restrain myself from punching somebody (anybody) because there we were, 4 lads and 2 metal bars jammed in the bloody doors, and the lift guy saunters up, cool as a cucumber with a very thing piece of metal with a little bend in the end. We took the metal bars out, closed the doors and he just pushed the little pokey device into the gap at the top, moved it about 2cm and then CLICK, the doors opened.

THAT WAS ALL IT TOOK?????!!!!! I could have bloody done it with my glasses, for pitys sake.

In the name of all things good and right in the world I prevented myself from smashing his smug git brains all over the polished floor tiles.

So then we all had fun pulling 13 people out of a lift that was half way down in the most dignified manner possible(it didn’t plummet to the ground and slaughter everybody by the way, a point I felt compelled to make to the manager afterwards) and so like some crazy fire-brigade reality show we started to haul them all out into the fresh air-con. 10 minutes of shouting followed (all the escapees felt like venting it onto the manager, I’d say I felt sorry for him, but he was a total doink so no sympathy from me) and we went and ate food.
Dinner was very nice, service was shit, but food was nice, and everybody was quite happy to be alive and no longer stuck in a lift.

MIDNIGHT: So we all went back to the apartment after dinner, drank more and awaited the coming new year. We thought we’d have a pretty good view of the massive fireworks display at KLCC, what with being less than 100metres away and eye level to it. But, unlucky for us, in our assumptions we hadn’t bothered to check which way they would be launched. Ooops, didn’t take into account the building in the way now did we. Whoops, so we got to hear a lot of loud bangs, saw they sky flash lots of colours, we even got to see some reflections in a building opposite, but sadly the only way to see the real quality of the display was on the frigging TV. 100 meters away, on the 23rd floor, and we had to watch the pissing thing on TV. Bugger that, what a gyp. Eh? Never mind though, we should have done us homework (more to the point I should have laid a bet with Vanessas uncle Jimmy, then I could have won back the 300 rinngit I lost to him at poker in Langkawi, cos I did have a sneaking suspicion that Sods Law would come into play a little bit there). Never mind. Somebody in the carpark below did set off some mortars and we got the novel experience of being directly above them when they exploded (ever had that? Me neither, until then, it was quite bizarre, and fun too), which made some attempt to recompense us for the loss of the Million rinngit fireworks display going on the other side of a big building from us. Some way, but not all.
Oh and somebody had been sensible (and bling) enough to buy a few bottles of Dom Perignion 1990 from Langkawi duty free. Which made up for quite a lot.

3.30am: After a lot of very silly drinking games, being drunk on the balcony and sticking playing cards to our foreheads (for a reason that quite escapes me now) we went home to bed, but not before a bastard Taxi driver charged us 50rm to back to my apartment, the shit left the meter running too, just to rub it in, it came to 8.20rm – which after midnight is double time, so say 16.50rm, plus a bit extra for new year, I would have been magnanimous to give the bastard 25rm, or maybe even 30. 50!!! 50!!!! I told him to choke on it.