Jonas Johansson

I woke up with a shock this morning, but I didn’t know why. Then I remembered some weird dream I was having where our very small stairway-cleaning lady was ringing my doorbell over, and over again.

“Heh, annoying little cleaning lady,” I said to myself while walking towards the shower.

I passed by my door and took a look at the doorbe…RIIIIING! It went off! I almost crapped my pants - which made me realize I wasn’t actually wearing any.

“Hang on,” I shouted from about an arms length away from the door. “I’m just gonna… I’m eh…”

Now, you have to realize, that while these were the 5 first seconds of the situation on my side of the door - but for whoever is on the other side this was probably about 3 minutes and a lot of doorbell-button-pressing in.

Imagine that this person opened the door to my building, climbed up all the stairs, saw my door and rang the bell. No answer. Rang again. Still no answer so he or she looked around for a bit to see if he or she could find some sort of clue that would tell him or her if I was actually at home. No obvious clue spotted. Rang the bell again - twice this time.

Right about here I was probably reaching the magnificent crescendo of my cleaning lady dream - riing riing! Poff, I woke up and start stumbling out of bed.

The person outside the door hears something at this point, and feels hope… “someone… is in there…”

The person hears someone walk up to the door and say “heh, annoying little cleaning lady.” The person outside thinks “does the person inside know I’m here… why did the person stop?” So the outsider rings again and hear me taking off in full speed to find pants…

So, about those pants. It proved to be harder than I could ever imagine to find a pair of pants in this pre-shower zombie state. Sweet, here’s something! I quickly put them and a t-shirt on and ran to the door.

I held my hand on the door handle, wondering… could it be the cleaning lady… could she have heard me talk about how small she was… and that I thought she was annoying…? Would she go ape-shit crazy over this?

Suddenly, the person outside cleared his or her throat… and either that puny cleaning lady had been munching one too many steroid snacks, or this person is a man.

I opened. It was a man. A big, bearded man. “Who the fuck are you?” I asked, using my inside voice this time.

He looked at me briefly with well-meaning eyes. Then he looked at my pants and made a face that I couldn’t quite read, but he looked weirded out for some reason. Without saying a word he just entered my apartment and started moving shit around in the hallway.

Interesting morning… let’s see how it develops.

He opened the door to a very small storage room that I refer to as “The Black Hole.” That’s where things go. Forever. He started moving stuff out of there and mumbled something about gas.

As I don’t speak Beard, I could now only assume that this person was either an employee of a gas company with the intention to do a safety check on my gas equipment, or a homeless person trying to make his new home comfortable.

I chose not to think so much about it and went to get some cornflakes and milk in the kitchen. By the time I got back, eating cornflakes on the way, he seemed to be pretty happy about the situation because he smiled and left the apartment.

First order of business was to light a match to see if the room exploded in a cloud of flames, killing me with the shock wave. Nope, all good. The second thing on the agenda was to see if I still had running warm water.

But as I was walking towards my bathrooms I noticed that the door was open to my second bathroom - which I don’t use very often since no water comes out of the tap there. Strange, I could swear I left the door closed.

Mirror still there, toilet paper still there. Nothing stolen. But here’s something… the sink was wet… I turned the knob and water came out! The guy didn’t only check the gas - he also fixed my tap!

The water was splashing everywhere, so I turned it off and looked down at my pants. That’s when I understood why he was so confused by them. I put them on backwards.

Thanks for your service, Gasman.