Car Trouble.

My man noticed a few days ago that it was getting increasingly difficult to steer my car, and all turns were accompanied by a grinding, whiny sound. It was time for my 30,000-mile checkup anyway, so yesterday I took my Jetta to the dealership to kill two birds with one stone. After I’d been squirming in my seat for a little over ninety minutes, the service rep found me in the waiting room and gave me an apologetic grimace.

“It appears your rack is leaking,” he informed me.

I was certain I’d misheard him. “I’m sorry?”

An encore grimace. “Your rack is leaking,” he repeated, shrugging and holding out his hands as if there were simply nothing else to say.

My eyes got wide as I dropped my gaze to my shirt for assessment. That wasn’t supposed to happen for months! Your milk couldn’t possibly come in during the seventeenth week of pregnancy, right? Plus, I didn’t feel anything amiss. But I was mortified all the same. When I didn’t see any milk coming through my clothes, I looked back up at him, questioningly. It finally hit me that what he’d said may have been embarrassing, but more than that, it was crude. How dare he!

Taking his cues from my wide-eyed expression, although blessedly misinterpreting my thoughts, he said, “Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Around 30,000 miles, Jettas from your year tend to develop a power steering leak. The part we need is on backorder…” He continued talking, but I was so relieved my rack wasn’t leaking – that it was only my car’s – that I barely understood a word.

Leave it to pregnancy to make you self-conscious about the weirdest things.

Tires.

Yesterday early, so early, in the morning I groggily opened my eyes to the sound of my beloved dog snoring so loudly I feared a disturbance-of-the-peace citation from the policeman across the street. (Of course, we’re running this risk every time Peabody eats, drinks, or sees another animal. Or car. Or human. Or dried-up leaf blowing in the wind.) I am no morning person, but the sight of that little creature snuggled up next to me melted my heart, even though he did wake me up ten minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off. Oh, well: ten minutes to consciously enjoy the warmth of my bed. But somehow—this mystifies the mind—the ten-minute change in my schedule set off a chain reaction: a tad late getting in the shower, a little later packing lunch, moderately late making coffee, seriously late leaving for work. My anxiety quotient skyrocketed because I hate being late for work, even though I don’t have a first block class. Still, as I pulled out of the driveway, I could get there before the first bell, even without speeding, as long as traffic was at a minimum on the interstate.

What I was definitely not expecting was for one of my tires to blow out on a bridge, less than two miles from my exit. I lost control of the car but kept the steering wheel turned slightly to the right so that as I drifted, I’d drift away from traffic. As smoke trailed off into the distance from somewhere in the back of my vehicle, I cocked my head and said aloud, “Interesting.” When I had stopped shaking like a hedonist on Judgment Day, I investigated the tire. The wall had caved in, causing the rubber to separate from the wheel. It was masterful. So I crawled back in my car, turned on my hazards, and did what all girls do when they’re in trouble: I called my daddy. He was tied up at work, so I called my mom. She and her (male) assistant came, and in a few minutes the latter had my tire changed. Only one problem remained: the spare was flat.

Already we have a comedy of errors. And by this point, I was chuckling a little at the unlucky turn of events. But hey, nothing terrible had happened, and when I apprised my boss of the situation, he was very helpful. T assured me that I’d have enough air in the tire to get to the truck stop and fill it up the rest of the way. “Gotcha. Thanks,” I replied and settled into my car a third time. I’d barely turned the ignition when my mom walked up to my door, laughing. I rolled the window down and looked up expectantly. Through her laughter, she finally managed to say, “My battery is dead.”

“What?!” I said in disbelief. Apparently, the fifteen minutes of hazard lights flashing had been enough to drain the battery. So T, gentleman that he is, went to work on the third automotive problem of the day. Fortunately, I had a battery charger that my dad got me for Christmas the year before. But, as you probably already guessed, it was dead itself. And the only other thing I had to offer was a set of girly jumper cables. They’re not even jumper cables: they’re two cigarette lighter inserts attached by a cord that are supposed to start the car without touching the battery. Now, before you point and laugh, I have before started girls’ cars in the high school parking lot with said apparatus, so I know it works. It does not, however, work when what you have to charge is a full-size truck.

No problem! Mom had normal, human-style jumper cables under the passenger seat in her truck. When my car charger didn’t work, she opened her door and pulled up the lever to release the seat so we could reach them…only to throw a new monkey wrench into the situation when the lever broke off in her hand. I am not making this up. So now poor T is stranded on the side of the road with two maniacally laughing women who own two down-for-the-count vehicles. I’m sure this is not what he pictured when he took the job last year.

I called my boss and thanked him for his concern. Then, I said, “Umm…P.S.: Do you have jumper cables?”

“I thought it was a blown-out tire?” he said, more as a question than a statement.

“It was. Then, it was a flat tire. Now, it’s a dead battery and a broken seat lever as well.”

“Wow. What an awful morning,” he commiserated.

“Not an awful morning per se. Certainly a ridiculous one,” I conceded.

“Okay, well, I will find you some jumper cables. In the meantime, keep calling people in case you find a set before I do. We’ll get you to work somehow, I promise.”

I thanked him and hung up. Then, I called my friend A (remember Italy Day?) and explained the situation. “So…do you have jumper cables?” I asked.

Without hesitation, A said she would find me jumper cables. Not only did she find me some almost immediately, but she also brought them to me herself. At this point, we were quite the spectacle: three cars and four adults on the shoulder of the interstate, seemingly having a roadside party.

I did end up getting to work just fine. A little worse for the wear, perhaps, but there all the same.

After all that, this morning was so uneventful it was almost boring. Almost.

Livebox.

You might have seen on FaceBook that E and I had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day yesterday. An explanation is in order. E and I are 21^st-century Americans: we want our Internet, and we want it fast. We use it for communicating with people back home, for entertainment, and also for receiving messages regarding where we should be when because we are cell-phone-less here in France. So on Friday at 1:15 p.m. when it stopped working, we panicked slightly. Not on the level of Peyton-Manning-has-retired, but more along the lines of I-have-a-zit-two-days-before-prom. So it didn’t work right before we left to read our World War II assignment in the park? It surely would when we returned.

It didn’t.

Our panic level rose from yellow to orange, in the manner of the Homeland Security Advisory System. It was now prom day, so to speak, and the zit had grown to hairy-mole size. We played with it for a bit, but ultimately decided just to go to bed and assume it would kick itself back on in the middle of the night. You can sleep off a headache; why not Internet malaise?

You can’t. At least not in France.

By Saturday morning, we were on full alert. Batten down the hatches, boys; it’s Internet or bust! After becoming completely disgusted with both the troubleshooting manual and the piece-of-crap Internet box itself (called “Livebox”), we decided to visit McDonald’s to take advantage of their free Wi-Fi. The priority was making sure our families knew that our silence and missed Skype dates came from an Internet malfunction, not abduction by angry French World Cup soccer players. But wouldn’t you know it: our computers simply would not hook up to McDonald’s Wi-Fi. Our vexation mounted.

We went across the street to an Internet café. At least we knew it would work there. And it did. From a computer attached to a French keyboard:

(Notice, for example, the placement of the letters compared to where they are on your keyboard. Also, check out the punctuation marks. Totally different from yours. And do you see how there are two symbols plus a number on each numerical key? Yeah, that’s not easy to finagle.)

In the end, we spent 25 minutes—and a euro each—sending two emails per person of three to five sentences apiece, something that takes less than eight minutes when using our computers. After that, we were back to the issue at hand: fixing the Internet in our own apartment since we’d each paid 26 euro for it. Remembering the exorbitant price and feeling the anger mount again, we tried to call our landlord. Unfortunately, he lives in Avignon, which is nowhere near us. We got a busy signal anyway.

We returned to the apartment and fumed, frowned, and spoke harshly to Livebox. Nothing happened. Livebox is a jerk. E read the troubleshooting directions to herself. Then out loud. I did the same. We restarted Livebox. We restarted our computers. We turned off everything. We turned it back on. We seethed.

Leaving the apartment, we headed toward Orange, the company that makes blasted Livebox. They sent us to SFR, the primary Internet provider in Lyon. They sent us to France Telecom, the centralized French telecommunications company. They sent us to Orange. We noticed a pattern. We tried another Orange. They sent us to France Telecom. We tried a second France Telecom. They sent us to…wait for it…Orange. Our problem seemed to be no one’s but ours. We returned to the Internet café and dialed up France Telecom. There’s no toll-free number, but by that time, we didn’t care how much it cost to get the Internet running again. That is, until the café owner told us we owed him fifteen euro. Then, we cared how much it cost.

Raging anew, we lamented the fact that we’d spent money at McDonald’s, the Internet café (twice), and the landlord, and ended up with no Internet. Discouraged and forlorn, we returned to Quai Claude Bernard, growling and murmuring all the way there. Eventually, I said, “This may sound like the stupidest idea ever, but we could ask the guy at the café who speaks English to help us.” (We live above a café.) E said that she’d thought of that earlier, but was afraid to mention it since he was unlikely to be of any help. But he was our last option, and no one else in France cared that we desperately wanted to talk to our families.

Upon returning to our apartment, we found English Speaker and breathlessly explained our troubles. We handed him the troubleshooting manual, Livebox’s serial number, and several phone numbers. Expecting him to do what, I don’t really know. In the end, English Speaker was indeed able to help: there was a particular username and password that had to be changed periodically, and it was time to do so. It wouldn’t let us back in until we changed said information. Showering English Speaker with a deluge of Merci!s, we hiked up the 10 flights to our apartment and tried the password-changing. It worked! 

For two minutes.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that we pushed every button on Livebox and our computers, and everything was finally functional again, after another hour or so of work. We consider our connection to be pretty tenuous at this point, but at least it’s running again. I’d make a comment about how dependent E and I are on the Internet, but the fact is, it’s actually our families we’re addicted to. More than anything, E and I just wanted to be able to communicate with the people who are so special to us. So this post is dedicated to you. May we never have to be cut off from one another again. Cheers!