Soft Granite

I had learned that something very hard was said to be hard as a rock. I had also learned that granite was one of the hardest rocks. So when they fitted granite in door frames and as partitions in the loo, I was pleased. Some pleasures are short lived. When we moved into the repaired hospital building, the pleasures started wearing off, sometimes even before experiencing them. "Sir, the granite put in the frame of the door of the toilet in the office block is broken into pieces. The contractor has put the pieces together with transparent tape." "This I must see" I said. I had known a lot of uses of adhesive tape in the hospital. This seemed to be a new one. I went to see how they had done it. It was done well. You could miss the repair in the darkness of the loo. The repair is still holding three months later. Perhaps it is a new concept in civil engineering. "Sir, the door frame in labor ward recovery room is broken" someone else informed me. I had a look at that one too. There was a 2 feet X half foot piece missing from the door frame. "How did this happen?" I asked the nurse. "It broke when the trolley hit it while shifting a patient." "Get it repaired" I said. "We have not been given full charge of the premises yet." "Yes, Sir." I had to visit the urinal in the college building the other day, when one of the meetings there got unduly prolonged. They had big sheets of granite put between adjacent stalls. One sheet was almost entirely missing. Only an irregular jagged strip was left behind. It had been so six months ago, which soon after they had finished the repair of that building. Perhaps it was meant for better communication between two persons in adjacent stalls, when they had noting to hide from each other.