Alexander's Bad Day

Today was definitely a crazy day… perhaps rivaling “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day!”


Journal entry number two:


I started the day off by trying to meet with an interpreter to get my telephone situation remedied. After I dropped the kids at school I came home to find that they had blocked off most of the parking around my building because the King is in town and would be passing by some time later in the day. I spent almost a half hour circling the buildings block after block away from my home and then back to see if anything had opened up. Eventually a police officer (who was preventing people from parking too close to the main street) took pity on me and allowed me to be just one extra car-length into the no-parking zone. Since his only job for the day (until the King is done traveling through) is to protect that area, and since he approved my “illegal” parking, I knew that he would be there to continue to protect my car – and I headed to my appointment. The next few hours were spent walking to the phone company, waiting in line at the phone company, and eventually being shuffled from desk to desk at the phone company until someone verified that an actual person would come to my home at 2:30 today. Then I raced home just in time to get going back to school to teach my classes for the day. (Of course I thanked the Police officer profusely (he was still waiting on the king) – and he humbly replied that it was no problem.)

After teaching some delightful (seriously, I like ‘em) middle schoolers, I zipped home to find ample parking spaces. (Apparently the King had come and gone while I was teaching.) As I had a few moments to spare, I thought I would run across the street to get new washers for the washing machine connection hose. (Oh, did I neglect to mention that in the middle of the night the connection gave out and water poured into my bathroom soaking the rug, the misc. laundry and towels, and the boxes of heretofore unpacked bathroom items. It’s never a good thing when you step into your bathroom and hear “sploosh”.) We are blessed with having a plumbing supply store just across the street from our building – and since I actually have a clue about how to fix the problem I headed down there.

The guys at the plumbing store were obviously surprised to see me. When I asked, in broken French, for something “like scotch tape” and pointed to a hose fixture, the guy seemed to know what I wanted and headed off to the store room. I was pretty proud of my communication skills until he came back with packing tape. I told him no – and grabbed a giant sprinkler head sitting on the counter and mimed wrapping the threads of the connection. The old man behind the counter got the “aha” look and told the younger fella “Teflon”. Duh, I should have just asked for it by name… To make a long story short, I visited these friendly guys, who were apparently amazed at my feminine do-it-yourself-ness, three times today. First for Teflon tape, then for new rubber washers, and finally for a complete new hose connection (the threads were stripped). I must admit that my plumbing prowess necessitated a new change of clothes with each trip, not to mention the new “wet-look” hairdo I was sporting. I am sure this story will be told and retold in a café over hot mint tea quite soon. Thankfully I got everything working by about 8pm and have now started to make a dent in the huge pile of laundry, consisting mostly of towels and miscellaneous clothes that were used to sop up all the spillage, er… sprayage.

So, although that tidbit was entertaining - that is not even the tip of the iceberg for today. In the midst of my washing-machine plumbing adventures, nine men arrived at my apartment. The first two were phone guys, who immediately left to return with the building super and his keys (that makes three) so that they could get into the phone access box. Of course the super had to hang out and be nosey and friendly and speak to me in a lot of Arabic that I didn’t understand. I guess that’s fair because I spoke back to him in English, “Hmm, interesting – of course I have no idea what you said, but thanks for the chat anyway,” and we were both satisfied with the conversation. So while the phone guys were doing their thing two more guys showed up (count is up to five). They were able to communicate with gestures, and with my limited understanding of French and Arabic, I managed to figure out that they wanted to check my bathroom for a leak. Let me interject that in addition to the recent washing-machine escapade, I had also had a bad smelling leak in the small bathroom (right next door to the big bathroom, kind of a his and hers setup), which a plumber/handyman had come to fix two days before, but which was continuing to leak. I thought to myself, “this sounds expensive, it must have been leaking on the downstairs apartment and they’ve come to complain”. The next thing I know, four more guys show up with a ladder – one guy is dressed all fancy and stays mostly in the hallway, another acted like his personal assistant (and ran back and forth between the important guy and the workers), and the final two came into my apartment with a ladder and join the first two (…and then there were nine). At this point I am feeling completely overwhelmed and quickly call (via cell phone – the landline phone still wasn’t working) the interpreter who had helped me at the phone company this morning. He was kindly obliging and helped interpret, via cell phone, what was going on. Apparently the fancy-dressed-dude was the owner of the big café and bakery downstairs and he had complained of a leak coming from one of the apartments above his establishment. They had discovered that the leak was actually in the building wall in the apartment above me and were trying to assess the damage and how to best access and repair the problem. (Did I mention that they used the ladder to climb into, what I had previously thought was, an upper storage closet? Kinda creeped me out that two of these guys crawled in and disappeared. They finally decided to fix it through one of the other apartments, but I can still hear them through this access hole… hope they don’t come for an unannounced visit – maybe I will figure out a way to tie the cupboard shut…) Of course, in the midst of this craziness my kids arrived home from school (I had arranged for another family to drop them off, since you don’t DARE leave your home when the phone company says they are coming… and they are always late). The kids were all nervous and excited about the sudden increase of testosterone in our apartment – and were adding to the confusion – until Steven had a meltdown (apparently he didn’t eat lunch, which wasn’t helping a bit) and started crying about everything.

God is good – and now the men are gone, and the kids are sleeping, and the washing machine is trudging along cleaning up the mess. I don’t know if the leak in the wall got fixed, I know the phone/internet didn’t get fixed. But the kids got fed, the house got tidied and tomorrow promises to be a new adventure!