The Crazy Way Stuff Works

In this post, I discuss four things that took me a little while to figure out. But Elena calls me a dromadaire sometimes, so maybe it should take me a while to figure this out. ;-)

1) The toilet
OK, this one didn't take that long to figure out. I'm not that much of a dromadaire. ;-) Basically, lift up on the knob to flush. The nice thing is that you can lift just a little bit and then push back down. You can't do that with American style toilets because it would require pushing a chain and you can't push a chain--only pull it.

2) Stove control
This is our stove control:


It goes up to 6. Of course, America's stove controllers go up to 'High' and Spinal Tap's amp goes up to 11. The funny thing about it is that the little mark that shows what number you are on is just a sort of indentation. You can see it in the picture, but in the real world of kitchen work, it's almost impossible to see. I wonder why they didn't paint it white. Maybe I'll buy some WhiteOut and whiten it up so we can see it. It has already caused problems.

At least this stove has a red dot and a white circle to indicate which burner the knob corresponds to. The red one, obviously. The stove in the place we stayed in first had a white circle and a disc (white filled in circle). Which is the burner: the circle or the disc?

3) The door lock

This one took us a while. We were about to go tell the reception girl that the door doesn't work when I finally got it. The door is operated on a lever. Push the lever down to unlatch the door. Simple, right? Right.

The problem came when we left our apartment and tried to lock it. We put the key into the lock and rotated it clockwise. But the deadbolt tongue didn't engage. The deadbolt stayed put. We turned the key harder. Then harder. Still the deadbolt tongue didn't come out. There seemed to be no way to get the deadbolt tongue to stick out. It seemed like it was broken somehow.

Then for a reason I can't explain, I turned the lever up. Like this:


When I did that, the deadbolt tongue came out. Push the lever down, the deadbolt retracts. Lift the handle up, the deadbolt comes out.

So what does the key do? The key puts the doorknob into one of 2 states. The "unlock" state allows the handle to be lifted up or down. The "lock" state allows the handle to be lifted only up--but not down.

It's a very different locking mechanism that I've ever experienced. I've seen wooden locks in Japan (usually for shoes), and all sorts of other locking mechanisms, but this is a first for me.

4) Closing the cereal box
This is a Grand Jury brand cereal. It seems to be the store brand of the Marche Plus. The only other way I know of the Grand Jury brand is from the "Americans in Paris" episode of "This American Life" (available on iTunes) where David Sedaris, an American living in Paris, was reprimanded by his partner Hugh for buying Grand Jury brand butter and allowing Ira Glass (the host of This American Life) to eat, like, 6 pieces of bread with that butter. Anyway, Hugh's opinion notwithstanding, I have no problem with Grand Jury brand. We bought a couple things from it and haven't had a problem. Anyway, I digress.

The box has 2 flaps. One flap has the little tongue--just like an American cereal box. But whereas the other flap on the American cereal box has a little slit that accepts the tongue, the Grand Jury box has a slit, not on the flap, but well down the side of the box. Then it has sort of pendulum-scythe shaped scorings on the side of the box. And the flap that should have the slit is actually connected by a scoring that suggests it should be torn off.

OK, I can handle this: I'm an engineer. So I ripped of the flap. Then I squeezed the box and the top of the box sort of collapsed. Then I saw that if I flip the tongued flap over the top of the box, it would reach the long slit on the side of the box. I've never seen anything like it. I'll have to check other serial boxes of other brands. It might be a French thing. Or a European thing, at that. Here is it all secure from the oxygen, bugs, etc. But as it is muesli, it is not safe from Elena. ;-)