Qu'est-ce que c'est tupperware?
With Gretchen being gone for so long I've tried really hard to keep our place spotless (this is the part where Gretchen says "washing the sheets every six weeks is not spotless"...you say tomato, I say tomahto). But--cue the violins--with having to work long hours and travel, and with Grady shedding enough in one day to make wigs for an '80s hair band and its audience, it just got to be too much. So, I decided to hire someone (I guess I can say I have a French maid now, although whatever image you have in your head of a French maid, it's the 180-degree opposite) to clean the flat once a week and this was her first week. I felt decadent and maybe even a little guilty having someone clean up after me, but after coming home the first time and seeing how clean everything was, I'm sold. And she irons my shirts, too! Decadent doesn't feel so bad after all!
So anyway, she came over in the morning and that day I was sitting at lunch and my cellphone rang, which pretty much never happens. I answered and it turned out it was Henriette, the cleaning lady. Now, it's hard enough not being fluent in a language (in this case French, which at least is better for me than German) in normal circumstances, but there's something especially stressful about having to talk on the phone. In person you can use hand gestures, facial gestures, etc., but on the phone it's completely different. So naturally I immediately panicked and handed the phone to a Canadian colleague who speaks French. Turns out French Canadian and French French aren't identical (especially since the Alsace has its own dialect), but all he could figure out is that she took some plastic boxes and did I need them back or did I want them recycled? I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went home after lunch and couldn't figure out if there were any plastic boxes missing. I called Gretchen and she mentioned something about there being a bag filled with tupperware--right next to the recycling. That's it! So it turns out she took all of our tupperware. (Evidently they don't use tupperware in France--they probably use "ceramic" or "glass" or eat "fresh food" instead of saving and reheating it...I pity them.) I had my colleague call the number that had appeared on my cellphone (naturally I didn't have her number and the colleague who referred her to me was on vacation) and he left a message asking her to please not throw away our tupperware, but the fact is I won't know until I get back from Wisconsin whether all of our tupperware ended up in a recycling bin somewhere near Mulhouse.
So anyway, she came over in the morning and that day I was sitting at lunch and my cellphone rang, which pretty much never happens. I answered and it turned out it was Henriette, the cleaning lady. Now, it's hard enough not being fluent in a language (in this case French, which at least is better for me than German) in normal circumstances, but there's something especially stressful about having to talk on the phone. In person you can use hand gestures, facial gestures, etc., but on the phone it's completely different. So naturally I immediately panicked and handed the phone to a Canadian colleague who speaks French. Turns out French Canadian and French French aren't identical (especially since the Alsace has its own dialect), but all he could figure out is that she took some plastic boxes and did I need them back or did I want them recycled? I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went home after lunch and couldn't figure out if there were any plastic boxes missing. I called Gretchen and she mentioned something about there being a bag filled with tupperware--right next to the recycling. That's it! So it turns out she took all of our tupperware. (Evidently they don't use tupperware in France--they probably use "ceramic" or "glass" or eat "fresh food" instead of saving and reheating it...I pity them.) I had my colleague call the number that had appeared on my cellphone (naturally I didn't have her number and the colleague who referred her to me was on vacation) and he left a message asking her to please not throw away our tupperware, but the fact is I won't know until I get back from Wisconsin whether all of our tupperware ended up in a recycling bin somewhere near Mulhouse.
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