Samira and Adnan
In rural Punjab, in times past, Samira had a barrow in the marketplace, Adnan was a singer in a band.  Adnan said to Samira, ‘Girl I like your face’ and he said this as he took her by the hand.

Samira took offence, got her brothers to take Adnan to the fields outside the village where some summary ‘stick justice’ was applied.  However, when Adnan’s broken bones had healed, he approached Samira’s parents and revealed he had inherited a sizable plot of prime agricultural land the other side of town to the fields where he had been horrifically beaten.  Samiras parents acquiesced and Samira and Adnan where happily married for ever.  Legend has it that Adnan stopped singing soon after he was married and became an accountant as it had a much more regular work than a Nasheed Artiste.  Why is their story so legendary?  Adnan is a hero to all men, he knew what he was in for and went back for more.

Mat and Amirah
In Malaysia, in the seventeenth century, there is the legendary story of Mat and Amira.

Come from different tribes, who are at war.  They both decided to flee.  they also decided to flee together, which would save on costs.  Starting on their epic journey to the United States, they got tired and  ended up settling in the next village.  Mat became a blacksmith, and the happy couple had a large family and became moderately successful.  Mat heroically save Amirah from a rabid cow by stabbing the cow with a machete, quite savagely.  However, it was for a noble reason, so everyone was happy.   In that village, all young men have to savagely slaughter a cow with a rusty machete before they get married in honour of Mat’s heroism.

Shaheena and Fred
Many romantic stories tell of love that crosses cultural divide, but the story of Shaheena and Fred illustrates how love can make a man, quite literally.  Shaheena was a princess in some generic Sultanate, oh, lets call it Baghdadylonia.  When she was young, the court painter had put a portrait of a dashing man on horseback.  This  masculine countenance gazed down on the young Shaheena, becoming the image of manliness in her eyes.  When she was of marriagable age, her line of suitors were rebuffed, for they could not match the image on the canvas.

Exasperated, her father asked her what the issue was, and the Princess confessed.  The father summoned the painter, who revealed the manly visage was based around the face of his Aunty Farida, was quite a well built woman.  He had added a beard on for artistic effect and the rather dashing image was the result.
Eventually the sultan ordered a mechanical man be made in the image of the image.  A European inventor was paid handsomely to build the worlds first robot companion, well before Azimov thought of the morality and modernity had put a more deviant spin on it.

[delete as appropriate]

I am writing to remind you that I am there for you, and I have been doing all I can to support. I am forced to write this in response to the latest request from you for us to

I do not mind supporting you in the normal reasonable things, but this latest request goes too far. May I remind you that I am not a supremely wealthy man, or one endowed with the patience of the Prophets, or one that can be in more than one place at a time.
May I also, kindly remind you that

I am a simple man, with simple needs. I have studied what life is about, and learnt its lessons through a series of failures.. At the risk of sounding patronising, I will relate to you Maslows hierarchy of needs, namely, your phsyiological needs, your safety, your self esteem, your need to be loved, and self actualistation…

I vow to provide these to you willingly, freely, and with no condition. I also vow to tidy up behind me, to keep myself well groomed, and to wear clean clothes and not smell of bad things. The balding, the going grey, the wrinkling and the sagging I can do nothing about.
However, one small item please honour my request for

One final thing before I sign off, when you are puzzled as to how my friends and I can socialise by just eating a little food, sitting around and occasionally insulting each other, that in itself is a good time and we do not have to have an output at the end of it.

I write this letter as a response to your initial request. I hope, having read it, we understand each other a little bettter.

As your wife, I have been filled with deep emotion and intense feeling, and it is getting overwhelming. I cannot function properly, I cannot sleep, can’t even look after our child properly. Marriage is a bond unlike any other, and as a woman, knowing my husband is around and helping is a only to be expected. However, it is times like these I really need you around, and not do your typical man thing of giving presents and ignoring me the rest of the day. In short, I need reciprocity. I cannot think straight.

The tootache is unbearable, the appointment is at 2.20, and I expect you home at 1.55 to babysit and drive me to the dentists. Happy Valentines Day.

Lesson No.1 in how to keep the wife happy

There, as one sees the convenient signs pointing you to the nice place, one realises that most of Coventry, Birmingham, the East Midlands and Warwickshire have all decided that today is the day that they want to join you at IKEA. You will find blue-coated men (and one woman, there for gender equality purposes) who will wave you on as your traffic line progresses slowly.*

On entering the car park, a stern gentleman will inform you clearly that unless you spend £30, you will have to pay for parking. You feel from the tone of his voice that the purchase of goods is compulsory. The consequential raising of ones blood pressure is merely the start of you calories being burned. Enjoy.

On parking ones car one has to take a lift to the shopping levels. This means going to level six. However, this is not the shopping level but the cafe level. Some goods are displayed here nominally, to show that if one is inclined one can obtain goods on this floor, but this is not a sincere effort.

Ones family is then herded across to the sixth floor to the OTHER lift, that will take you down to the fifth floor where one can begin shopping in earnest. On questioning why one can’t go down the lift that just came up, one is shooed away. IKEA in their wisdom, have decided that the initial lift only travels between the car park and the top floor. They pay a man to stop you travelling down in the lift you just stepped out of. That’s right; a people-herd (rather like a shepherd, but without a canine) will herd you to the other lift across the floor. This futile walk should continue ones calorie burning.

On descending to the fifth floor, one cannot find goods that total thirty pounds as the goods are not needed. One uses ones maths degree to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of purchasing useless items versus paying for parking. Ordinarily paying for parking is taken as a given, but now this false choice has presented itself one finds oneself making guilt-laden but useless calculations to save pennies, having listened to a documentary the previous morning about Bolivians who live on less than two dollars a day.**

One will then find ones spouse and firstborn having exhausted any transactional opportunities, and one makes the decision to travel home, with a small amount of purchases. Ones spouse will then say, let us flee from this maze-like den of misfortune, and then we go to the checkout which is on the third floor. After paying money for our goods, ones spouse will say, I have to return this item from the IKEA in Wednesbury and one looks around for the customer service desk, upon which it is revealed lo! The customer service desk is on the FOURTH floor.

One then spends further calories thinking about money, and how a chap, or chapess, or groups of chaps and chapesses got together to organise with IKEA into a customer friendly environment, upon which, other chaps and chapesses came along and said… what is this nonsense… make them aimlessly walk between floors and further still, make the lifts just big enough to squeeze in but small enough to be painful. Heaven forefend we should have a simple retail experience for our customers. One realises they should all be sent to Coventry, in all senses of the phrase.

With customer returns being on a different floor, one will then make a decision that we shall not be customers who return. One will have to share the cramped lifts down to the car park, one realises that in sharing this lift, the prams with delicate babies inside are compacted next to eager but gullible homebuilders who have precariously piled pointy objects on unstable trolleys. One keeps a vigilant eye on the LYFT cutlery set with knives exposed as it rests on a RAMBERG mattress dangling above ones firstborn.

Like the Hajjis who have been promised much but the experience fails to deliver, the pilgrimage is worth doing once, if only to tell your descendents how circumambulated the floors of IKEA, gratefully kissed the blackened exit sign, was put through great hardship, survived the queues and people stampedes and lost a few pounds in the process.

via digg.

Here is the source

**EDIT**
I mean, give your own parents a call. Don’t call my in-laws, unless you know them.

Yesterday you bought me a new mobile phone, one that I’d seen in the shops and liked but didn’t want to spend so much money on. You opened the box, thoughtfully charged it up, put my sim card in for me and said “Here’s the phone you wanted, got it cheap online,” and I thought, “Oh ok, thanks.” That was a typical man thing to do.

Alternatively what you could have done is wrapped it up, bought a nice card and put a sweet message in there and on Eid morning said “Eid mubarak darling, here’s your Eid present. Hope you like it,” to which I would have responded “Woohoo! You got me a pressie! Awww how sweet, just what I wanted!” Thereafter whenever someone commented on my phone I would have proudly said “My hubby got it for me for Eid ”