Someday My Head WILL Explode

I always try to be patient when locally hired staff that comes to our house to do repairs and maintenance. Often these guys have limited English skills or such heavy accents that I can't really understand them, but then they are hired to fix things not carry on a conversation with me. I have known FS personnel in the past that were rude, impatient, and even condescending then they wondered why they had such a hard time getting things fixed when things went wrong. DUH! I try hard not to be the ugly American when dealing with these guys, I really do.

Today I blew it. It is only the second time I have ever completely blown up at these guys and both times it was here in Malawi. The first was when they informed me they would not be fixing the shower until after we moved out. We had been in the house less than two weeks at that point. We will be here for three years. That story is part of a different blog post about housing, so suffice it to say I did not take that news well.

Back to today. One of the nicest features of the housing here in Malawi are the khondes. These are screened porches that function as a second living room. Since most of us don't have patio furniture as part of our HHE a wicker furniture set is part of the government issued furniture here. In theory this is nice. In practice a lot of the wicker furniture is falling apart. Ours looked like it had been chewed on by a dog at some point in the past. Every time I swept the khonde I ended up with a pile of little pieces of wicker as the furniture slowly fell apart. Today we got a brand new wicker set. YAY! So why did I end up losing my temper? Was there something wrong with the furniture? No it is fine. It looks a lot nicer than the old stuff and it doesn't appear to be shedding bits and pieces of itself every time I sit down. Instead it was a total head on collision with Malawi culture.

The furniture delivery was scheduled and I expected them to remove the old decrepit stuff, leave the new stuff, and be done with it. The man in charge of the delivery seemed a bit taken aback by this attitude. He proceeded to cram the new stuff in with the old so that the khonde is now so packed with furniture it's impossible to walk around. I was all "Wait aren't you going to remove the old furniture?" This is when things took a turn for the worse.

"Madame" He responded patiently, "When your husband gets home he can look at the furniture and decide if he likes it. Then he can call and tell us what to remove."

"No no no. I know what I want gone. This and this and this all needs to go." I pointed at the offending furniture hoping to get it out of the house before it finally decomposed into a pile of twigs.

"Madame" he repeated, "You should wait until your husband looks at the furniture. Yes I think that will be best. Good bye." Then he just left. While my head spun around like a scene from the Exorcist. I was left with a desperate need to break something and an almost instant stress headache from losing my temper.

I have calmed down a bit and although I am still pissed because the old furniture is sitting there next to the new furniture decomposing and David will have to call to tell them to come get the same stupid furniture I told them to remove earlier today. I can see how this will be funny...someday...after a significant amount of wine... in another country.