Life of alarms

If my life has to be abridged to one word, the word will be "Sad". The ones like me are almost always ill-treated by their masters. Some of them are are lucky enough to end up in a decent and gentle family. Or just a family with no funky, spoilt college guys. Girls of the same age are nicer, though there are some exceptions in that too. But the luckiest ones are the ones who get to work in an office or a shop or anywhere else but a home environment.

I work tirelessly 24/7. But I never complain. We are built to last long. Most of the time, my work goes unnoticed. When someone does seek my services, they don't thank me. If there is a truly thankless job, it is mine. People of my profession very rarely become famous. There is a Ben somewhere in Europe who fits the example well. He had been doing the job for a long time now. He doesn't work indoors. I hear he is a monster. So, they made him work in some place where there are a lot of tourists. I am sure there are others like him all around the world. But they are of a much lesser stature and are known only locally. Most of them are huge and work outdoors, like railway stations. But this is one job where size does not give you the luxury of choosing your retirement. All of us are servants. Servants who toil all day, all night and all the time till they can't keep going anymore. In that context, the more famous servants are the less fortunate ones. When they breakdown, people work on them, revitalize them and bring them up to speed with the present.

I work for a family. They are so thankless and unpredictable. They order me to sing early in the morning for them. They give the order the previous night and go to sleep, while I continue with my job. I almost never forget. When I sing in the morning, sometime they just get up and just move on and I feel fortunate. But most of the time, I get beaten up for doing exactly what they asked me to do. Especially the spoilt brat, The College Kid. He always targets my head. To make matters worse, I am too little for his size. Once, he threw me so hard that I hit the edge of the wall and fractured one my legs. He didn't even bother about fixing me up. The elders in the family took a look and felt sorry. But thats as much attention I got. Why should I endure so much because I have a bad voice? Why should he order me to sing if he doesn't like my voice? I guess he just enjoys molesting me the way he does. He would prefer that I have such a bad voice, so that he has a reason to abase me the way he does.

There is no respite from work. There is no retirement. There is no one to whom I can turn to for empathy. There is no law protecting us. And obviously we can't change our voice, if that might stop them from ill-treating us. If there is some thing called rebirth, I would want to be anything but an alarm clock.