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However my opinions changed drastically the day I met the numismatist. The very first day I started working he had insisted on being woken up at 5 am hammering another set of nails to my already theorized insomniac hypothesis.
How very wrong I was! I dragged myself out of bed at about five past five on the morrow and hastily made my way to his room afraid that he would already be awake and mad at me for being late. Quite contrary he was loudly snoring away and when at last I was able to wake him up, weary hands of the grandfather clock showed precisely 10.15 am.
I didn't always dislike him, for no one starts a new job by disliking his or her boss. It was the mundane repetition of cumbersome chores that planted seeds of antipathy at first.

Every morning before even washing my face and having a proper breakfast, I would wash the numismatist. Even though he looked skinny, he carried around bones of a gorilla making him weigh almost 20 to 30 pounds more than his skimpy looks suggested. And oh dearest of Gods, he would jump from one almost inaudible mutter and complain to another much like the way clear blue sky seamlessly transforms into navy blue waters at the distant horizon. The short walk to the bathroom between his and my room would be covered in canopies of utterly disgustful and irksome comments about life and especially about me. He would curse at the creaky hinges of his equally antiquated wheel chair, at the blinding darkness of early morning and would even go as far and describe in vivid detail how the cold metal surface of the seat slowly transformed the "cozy warmth" of his buttocks into "arctic cold".
This agonizing litany of curses would continue throughout the bathing ceremony; and it is not as a result of the mere incapaciousness of my vocabulary that I use the word "ceremony", it is because that particular word perfectly sums up those infinitely stretched moments.

This dire ritual would commence by filling up the bathtub with "luke-warm" water.
"A proper bath," he had lectured me during my interview, " should feel like dozens of silky rose petals raining down and lifting you up in their swift buoyancy."

But of course I had totally dismissed that lecture thinking that he was talking to some imaginary person sometimes two feet to the left and sometimes two feet to the right of me.
When the bathtub was filled with a four fingers thick gap at the top, I would gently spill up to three, sometimes even four, different ambrosial body washes, his piercing gaze and unintelligible curses unwanted chaperons. Chamomile, lilac, water lilies and plumeria were among his favorites. The bathtub nicely foamed up, I would place him with much effort right in the midst of reflecting and popping bubbles. Even the almost forty-five minutes of heavy duty scrubbing wouldn't be enough to rid his wrinkly skin of a horrific stench.

If the daily doses of annoyance were limited only with lack of proper sleep, lack of proper food and the irksome habits of the numismatist, life would have been quite merry for me.