Showered

This little adventure is an excellent example of why I never leave the house. People ask me, "Why is your production so slow? Why can't you make more pipes?". The answer is, "Because I spend a third of my life doing stuff like what I'm about to describe."

For some time now, one of the doors of our downstairs shower has been slowly breaking. It's a cheapo (OK, "entry-level") enclosure with doors that just hang on plastic rails instead of rolling on wheels, and the rails began to split off on one door. This brought us to an interesting question - We've never had to do this before, and had no clue who to call. For that matter, we weren't sure if it was possible to replace just one door (with no idea where the enclosure came from or when it was installed). Time for a trip to Castorama, France's version of Home Labyrinth.

The idea of trying to explain, en français, to a clerk at Castorama exactly what we wanted... and get what we wanted.. was harrowing enough that we decided to call in help in the form of our friend Claudie. She went along with us to the megastore back in December. After some prowling through the bathroom section, we found a shower enclosure that looked vaguely like ours, and whose doors measured exactly the same - price 100 € for the whole enclosure.

Claudie found an employee and reeled off a long string of lightning-fast français. Occasionally, Claudie or the store employee would look at us, and we would nod and look wooden, merely non-French-speaking tide markers bobbing in her wake. Yes, it is possible to order a single door, but it must be ordered special. A single door costs 70 €, a blatantly obvious attempt by the manufacturer to convince people to just buy the whole darned thing please.

But, unfortunately, we choose to get just one door, initiating yet another utterly ridiculous encounter with efficiency in action....

A deposit is placed, the order is entered, and we are told by the cheerful help-desk person that our door will arrive before Christmas. This is about two weeks away, and sounds reasonable given the fact that Christmas had cast its giant chaotic shadow over the world at that time. Of course, anyone can guess what happened next.

Cricket, cricket.

We are too busy in January to even worry about where our shower door is, but we're nonetheless amused when we finally receive notice on February 3rd that our door has arrived (You know, the one that would be there before Christmas). Off we go - Day #2 taken off from work - and eventually find our way to the pickup desk, which is of course deserted. There's a bell, which Emily politely dings. We wait. Time passes. I rrrrrrrrrrrring the bell obnoxiously. Again, we wait, and time passes. Eventually a smiling, cheerful fellow shows up who must be North African, because we absolutely cannot understand anything he says. Imagine hearing a hard-core Rastafarian or deep Cajun accent laid over a foreign language, and you have an idea just how incomprehensible this fellow is to us.

"Bjjjjrkleyhfrrrnnecc luu paouppyiuh?", he asks.

We smile politely and pass over our item ticket.

He eyes it suspiciously, like we were bounty hunters delivering a court summons. "Ggrrthhling nuzz efflight shhuv ngginth pauuppiyuh cahhunla bip?", he asks. We smile like idiots and point to our ticket, hoping it will answer all questions. "Hjjurrpl cmme liejjloipla frnurp.", he comments, no doubt thinking we must both be mentally handicapped. He vanishes into the back room and returns with a long box on a cart. Wow, how easy! "Thyjjkling liueh frgling teeekuh pajhunkah.", he adds, gesturing to the box and to our ticket. We pick it up and wheel it away, not entirely sure if we've been served by a Frenchman or a visiting extraterrestrial.

It isn't until the checkout that things go wrong. The equally smiling girl at the register rings up our door at 299 € - Yeow! "Ce n'est pas la porte vrai, msr", she adds, as we thank the heavens that she at least speaks in a foreign language that we sort of understand. It isn't the right door. In fact, according to the item ticket, it is an entire shower enclosure assembly for a totally different setup. Cashier girl gets on the phone with ... well, someone, and the most amazingly long exchange ensues..... We literally wait for ten solid minutes while every possible iteration of the situation is discussed, apparently with great enthusiasm. At one point our girl exclaims, "Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!! Mais oui!!" ("But yes!") repeatedly, leading us to wonder if our door has somehow brought her to orgasm. Tired of just standing around, I determine to apply the American approach to the question of exactly what we have, and I tear the box open while our cashier sighs in post-coital bliss.

Inside the box is a beautiful, obviously expensive single door off of a very nice shower assembly - not even remotely like what we ordered. Our cashier finally gets off the phone (no pun intended) and tells us we must go back to the help desk and speak again to the Being Of Exotic Speech. Back across the store we go, but of course he isn't there. At this point we're both hungry and have lost two solid hours of working time (not counting the previous trip in December). I am ready to just dump the thing on them and leave for home, letting them "Oui oui" their way through whatever the fallout might be, but Emily wants to wait a bit.. and, magically, Mr. Blfgghltl returns one minute before we're about to depart.

"Bgflljklly ghhtulgly fhtagn ullthilyyll cmwymwymwylln thangkling fghtlu nnthlasgh.", he says earnestly. Fortunately, we have passed the Blinking-Stupidly stage and eased into the Cold-Dead-Stare-of-a-Potentially-Psychotic-Postal-Worker look, and he somewhat nervously gestures for us to follow him back across to the other side of the store. There, in the bathroom section, other employees converge and apologize, and offer to let us take a door right off a model if it will fit. Unfortunately, the display that matched our shower has vanished! Beaten by the system again. We get a refund of our deposit and depart, starving by that point and resigned to being forced to buy a whole new shower enclosure simply because it's going to be too much of a damned nuisance to try to order a part. We've already lost much more than the 30 € price difference just in lost working time, so we opt to wait until Spring when we will (hopefully) have more money and just buy a very nice, totally new shower then.

This, then, is another great example of why, when customers ask me if I can finish a pipe by the end of the week, I give replies like, "Well, maybe, possibly... if nothing weird happens....."