Washing Machines and Cereal

Last week was not boring. In fact, for the first time in a long time Erin seriously considered dropping all her clients, quitting her job, leaving John by himself, and moving back to the U.S. OK, honestly she did not think about it seriously; it was more of a fleeting thought for all of 5 seconds. Wednesday was just one of those days.

Maybe because Erin is either using the phone a lot at home or is gone at work she gets very few calls from people in Dutch. Wednesday morning was one of those rare times. Erin understands just enough Dutch to figure out when someone is asking to speak with her, the lady of the house. After the woman continued talking in Dutch for about a minute, Erin tried to get her to explain what she was calling about in English. The woman did not speak English very well and kept asking Erin if she received something in the mail from the Oud Zuid Gemeente, which is like the city offices in our area of town. Erin finally arrived at the conclusion she had seen no such thing in the mail and, since the Gemeente is an important office, she tried to get the woman on the phone to tell her if this was an urgent matter - like we need to fill out a form to keep living here or something. The woman apparently did not understand and ended up saying “thank you” and hanging up on Erin. So far no one else has bothered us so we figure it wasn’t too important.

A few hours after the mysterious phone call in Dutch and in the midst of fielding phone calls from counselors and coworkers, Erin heard the washing machine had stopped. She went in to put the laundry in the dryer and was met with a washing machine filled up with water flashing an error code at her. “F-05”!!!! What does that mean?!? After looking through the manual that only said an F-code is an error code that needs to be reported to the service center, Erin finally starting searching the internet to find out what “F-05” could possibly mean and how it might be fixed. After searching for about 15 minutes the internet decided to stop working. Now, we had this problem of the internet randomly deciding to take a break for hours or even days at a time for the first 6 months we lived here. After John repeatedly called the internet company to hassle them about the problem, they seemed to finally find a solution and our internet has worked continually with no problems for at least the past 6 months…until Wednesday. Erin did finally find a service center phone number in the washing machine manual and we called the number only to be greeted by an automated system in Dutch. Thankfully, we punched some numbers, entered our postcode and were given a phone number in our area to call. We called the number. A man answered the phone who had no idea what we were talking about, so we called the service center again. It was about 5:05 p.m. by this time. Do not ask us how this is possible, but the automated system was closed for the day! Uugghh.

The next morning, still faced with a washing machine flashing an error code, Erin took John’s advice and shut the whole machine off. When she turned it back on, she put the dial on a different wash setting and started over, hoping for the best. This time the machine went through the whole cycle without a problem! We have now decided to just not use cycle number 6, which is fine since we have about 18 other setting to choose from. So far so good. Oh, and the internet decided to start working and has since worked without any problems!

Since things always happen in threes, there was one more incident last week. The grocery store didn’t have our cereal, so Erin decided to try a different brand that was in stock. When unloading her basket onto the conveyor belt at the check-out Erin noticed the bag of cereal had a hole in it. She set it on the ground to continue unloading her basket and thought she would just hand it to the cashier and tell her that she didn’t want the cereal. Well, as she picked the bag up off the floor to hand to the cashier, the entire bag ripped open and cereal flew out all over the entire front of the store! Erin tried to tell the cashier, but this particular cashier didn’t speak English. Erin’s limited Dutch would not allow her to explain the situation, but thankfully a man behind Erin explained. We guess it all got worked out and was alright. Well, except for the part where Erin became embarrassed by spilling a bag of cereal all over the front of the store and then was not able to communicate to the cashier about it.

Ah, the joys of life in the Netherlands! So far this week is already much less exciting. We think last week was a fluke.