Woke up sharp at 5 am, blithe as a lark and went about my early morning routine. Vitals measured and noted down, classical music put on in my study, logged previous day’s 64 point updates, wrote in my journal, made my first cappuccino and settled down in my chair. Suddenly, I heard Sharmila screaming from our bedroom upstairs:

“Rajib, are you around?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I think the dishwasher is beeping. Need to call the mechanic. Can you switch it off?”.
“Okay”.

Hmmm…. now what do I do? I started wondering. You see, that high pitched beeping noises were not coming from the dishwasher. (admittedly, I was impressed with her confidence without doing any debugging).

It was actually me, on my new learning spree. So, about a month back, I took it upon myself to learn Morse code! I know, I know, in these days of GenAI, I could not have picked up anything more anachronistic. After a month of learning my dots and dashes, I got myself a Morse code machine. And that is where I was trying to spell out different words. Not sure what is so dishwasher-y about it.

Anyways, I went back to practicing after connecting the audio output to my headphones.

Eventually, her coffee was ready and she came down. I was hoping she would have forgotten the incident.

“What happened to the dishwasher?”

My burgeoning hopes were summarily … err… “dash”ed!!

I took her to my study and showed her my Morse code machine.

Have you ever noticed how people driven to exasperation involuntarily put their arms on their hips with their palm folded around the wrists? A visage like that was the last recollection I have before I heard her say “You are a quirky man”.

Helplessly, I sat there grinning to myself with no re-Morse whatsoever! I am going to keep learning this…

So there.

Ha! (that would be dot-dot-dot-dot dot-dash to you)