Note: Blaise is my husband. Well, actually he's a pseudonym for my husband, because said husband is currently at a talk and so can't be asked whether he cares whether this gets posted with his actual name. Points to anyone who knows my husband and can identify why this is a fitting pseudonym.
When my children were young, my mother used to insist that it was important that we get out of the house and have an adventure every day. And she would tell me about how when we (my sisters and I) were small, she made a point of having an adventure with us every day. Fortunately for her, apparently I (and my sisters) were sufficiently docile and innocent to think of going to the grocery store or the library as an adventure. Unfortunately for me, my intrepid travelers are extremely jaded, and would never consider a trip to the grocery store to be an adventure. (Unless of course someone let a bear loose inside the store or it could only be accessed by tightrope stretched over a ten lane highway or something of that sort. Actually, an "all you can eat" chocolate sampling station might work too, come to think of it.) Of course, Blaise's adventure did not, so far as I know at least, involve any bears or tightropes (or unlimited chocolate). It also did not involve the grocery store or the library.
For the last decade or so, Blaise has slept with a CPAP machine at night. This has (at least) two positive effects. The first is that he sleeps. The second is that I sleep. There may be others. In any case, the mask that goes with it should really be replaced about every 6 months or so because the bands holding it in place get stretched out and the tubing cracks and various other things like that. His mask dated to our initial move to Marseille nearly two years ago, and so it wasn't working as well as it should have been. Of course, getting a replacement mask meant getting a prescription for one from the doctor, and that meant getting his sleep study redone. So on Monday night he "slept" without his CPAP on (and I slept on the couch, which was quieter) and on Tuesday night he went to the hospital to spend the night hooked up to tubes and wires and electrodes to confirm that he did indeed still need the machine. Naturally, he did. When he checked out the doctor let him know that he would be getting a call that morning (Wednesday) to get him a replacement machine.
At this point, Blaise has had two nights of not really sleeping, and so when he gets back to the house around 9:30 he isn't exactly at the top of his game. As promised, the CPAP company calls around 10:30 and sets up an appointment for him at 1:00 that afternoon. Blaise keeps asking where the company is located, and the person on the phone seems reluctant to give him the address, which seems a little bit odd, but after all, it's the company that the doctor told him would be calling, at the right time, and on his cell phone which doesn't exactly have a widely distributed number. And the person is calling him by name. So he looks it up on Google maps, and discovers that it's way over in a different suburb of Paris. And that said suburb is not very well served by public transportation. No matter. He keeps hunting around and realizes that there's a bus that goes there from Melun at 12:23, and that he can get the bus to Melun at the gare at 11:00. If he does that, he'll only be about 10 minutes late for the 1:00 appointment. Of course at this point it's 10:48 and he's neither showered nor really eaten, but he throws on his shoes and hustles out the door to catch the bus.
A couple of hours later the rest of us are sitting down to lunch (Wednesday's are half days for French students until high school, and so Cherry and Ezio are both home, and Sapphire finished classes last week because her school is hosting Bac testing) when the doorbell rings. That seems a bit odd to me, as our doorbell almost never rings except when the kids are getting home from school. In any case, I go and answer it, "SOS Oxygène. J'ai votre CPAP." is the reply. I realize that the reason that the guy on the phone was being so cagy about the address of the company was that they were going to come and deliver the CPAP to us. Blaise didn't need to know the address at all. Meanwhile, he's just gotten off of a bus in the middle of an industrial zone, and is walking toward the address that he found on the company's website. I tell Sapphire to grab my cell phone and call Blaise, and I head downstairs to meet the delivery technician and to explain that Blaise is, in fact, most of the way to the company headquarters rather than being at home waiting for delivery. So Blaise talks to the technician on my phone and then the technician calls the company and asks them to take care of Blaise when he gets there and then he comes upstairs to get the settings off the old machine and to figure out what kind of mask Blaise has been using. And then he calls the company to let them know what the settings are and heads back to headquarters.
An hour and a half later I'm sitting at the hair salon with Cherry, and I get a text from Blaise. He's now been set up with his new machine (and new tubes and face mask) and they've just offered him a ride home. This is fortunate because it turns out that the second bus that he took going there only runs a couple of times a day, and the next return bus leaves for Melun at 5:45 (which would mean that he got home sometime after 8:00). So he ends up walking in the door around 4:00, and we promptly try to figure out what went wrong.
We ended up deciding that the problem was really quite simple. In the United States, one would always have to go and pick up something like that at the store. Getting it delivered would be exorbitantly expensive. Conversely, in France, getting things like that delivered seems to be pretty normal. And so Blaise never thought to say that he was going to the store to pick up the CPAP machine, because it was so obvious to him that that was what you did. And the person at the store never thought to say that they would be delivering it because it was so obvious to him that that was what you did. But there are a lot of things that make more sense in retrospect.
No comments:
Post a Comment