What a frustrating day.

I tried to go to bed relatively early last night -- and by that I mean around 2 a.m. Instead, I was awake until sometime after 5 a.m., and woke up when my alarm went off at 10 in a haze of dream-confusion and grainy-eyed pessimism.

I got online and bought a plane ticket from London to Geneva to meet up with Rachel on Christmas Eve. The next plan was to head over to the SNCF office and get a ticket from Bordeaux to London to visit Tom, since their website has been steadfastedly refusing to show me train schedules for days now. But after a comically cold shower, while on the point of pouring cereal into a bowl, I was surprised by a phone call from our landlady regarding the washing machine problem. Yes, the washing machine problem is ongoing. Yes, this is three months.

And of course, since I can't stand letting cereal sit in milk for any length of time longer than strictly necessary, I halted my breakfast preparations. As it turns out, Auchan mailed the estimate to my address in Bordeaux, but they made up a fantastically French last name for me -- it was four syllables and hyphenated, and I have no idea where they got that from "Tanner". Apparently, despite having a mailing address, the name was enough to dissuade the postman from putting the estimate in our mailbox. This makes no sense to me, as mailed advertisements in France come address-label-free -- it seemed like they'd not really have a problem with delivering the letter.

The really comical thing about our washing machine problem (or, the latest really comical thing in a very long of almost-comical-but-really-frustrating-things) is that it's been so long, now, since we had the first estimate done that they have to send the technician back to our apartment to make another estimate. Yeah. I can't even fathom the idiocy of wasting my time, his time, and probably more of my (or my landlady's) money for him to come out again, when the problem remains a simple belt.

Anyway, the phone call delayed me some, so I didn't have time to eat breakfast if I was to achieve train-ticket-purchase before the Thursday. I went to the office. I was number 265, and when 264 was called no one came up, so they called my number. I sat down and explained the ticket I needed. She was about to search in the computer for a train schedule when 264 walked up (well, tottered, really) and complained that I had taken his place. But really, he'd failed to present himself. Still, I went back to the waiting area and then was helped a few minutes later by another agent.

Now, for some time I have been confused by the francophone reaction to accents from otherwhere. I'm sure I sound funny speaking French, though I'm equally sure that if I knew how it was I sounded funny I'd be trying to correct it. Still, I think most anglophones seem a lot better able to understand English spoken with a foreign accent.

That said, when I told the travel agent where I wanted to go and when, he proceeded with alacrity, and explained me my options, which were somewhat puzzling. I could arrive in London at 4 p.m., which was 3 hours later than I told him I needed to be in London, or I could leave at 1 a.m. the night before. He said that maybe if I came back tomorrow there would be more he could say, because that 4 p.m. train was not actually bookable today, for some reason that made no sense at all.

I asked him if there were any other trains. I mean, surely on the 21st of December there are more than two trains going from Bordeaux to London, right? Or just Bordeaux to Paris and I'll figure out something from then? And he gets all confused and asks me why I'd want to go to Paris. And at this point I'm pretty sure there's been a miscommunication. I mean, my French geography (and really, my geography overall) is not very good, but, having just made the trip to London a couple of weeks back, I was reasonably sure that the Bordeaux-Paris-London trip made a lot of sense.

Turns out, he thought I said I needed to go to Arles, which is in fact on the southern coast of France. In that light, his confusion made a lot of sense. After all, going from Bordeaux to Paris and Paris to Arles would be one of the longest, most ridiclous three-point trips you could take in France.

Once we cleared up our confusion, it took considerably longer than I would have liked for him to look around for the cheapest price, and by the time I left with my ticket in hand, I was only going to have about 45 minutes to find a printer on campus and print my art history paper.

The part of me that is compulsively early was worried that this was not enough time. But my inner college student was thinking that was about 35 minutes too long, as I knew where the copy shop was already.

Turns out, compulsive-Jessie was closer to the mark in this case. The first computer I tried did not have a working USB port. The second computer would open my files but could only be printed from if you had a subscription card for the printing service, whereas the others could be coin-operated. The third (and final) computer would load my files, and then immediately freeze. This happened twice before I asked the guy who worked there to help me. He ran the diagnostic program, which would not let me eject my USB drive until it was finished -- that took forever. I spent all of those 45 minutes trying and failing to print my paper, and then I went to phonetics.

Since my professor of typology is always 15 minutes late to class, I decided to take that few minutes to go to the computer lab in building K to print it. I figured I'd be late, but he always spends the first half of class repeating the last lecture using the same superfluous number of examples.

When I got to the computer lab I could not, for the life of me, convince the computer that I was me. Maybe I reset my password at some point and forgot about it, but I had to get the guy who was monitoring the lab to reset my password, and deposit money into my printing account, before I could print my paper. When I did, the computer was incredibly slow at loading. From log in to seeing my document on the screen, it took 15 minutes. Really. In this amount of time I noticed that there was an Intel Celeron sticker on it. I hadn't seen that word in a while.

Then my document wouldn't print. When it did, it printed twice, which used up all my money and I had to pay again before I could print my bibliography, which for some reason I had decided to put in a second file. By this time I had missed 40 minutes of class, so I decided not to go back. I went to the library to pick up the book I had last week and had to "let spend the night in the library" when I wanted to recheck it on Friday.

On getting to my art history class I realized that the images I'd inserted into my Word file had decided to print only in the words "You need Quicktime to view this image." Really frustrating. Now I have to e-mail the photos to her...and I looked like the incompetent foreign student.

Finally, I got on the tram to come home. A few stops from my place there was a malfunction of some kind in the emergency stop system, and the doors all locked themselves shut, except for the one at the back of the train. The conductor had to walk through the whole train resetting each of the emergency stop handles, and when he was done we finally started moving again. Until the next stop, at which point we had to do it all over again. After several more minutes of not moving, I made my slow, awkward, and claustrophobic way to the back of the train and exited into what the sky was probably calling rain...

Only to have the tram suddenly decide it worked, and pull away. Awesome. Not that it was a long walk. It just was a really silly end to a long list of things that went wrong.

Now I have to go do my laundry. Here's hoping it doesn't turn pink or combust in the dryer or something. That would figure.