My strangest attempt at French workmanship yet.

This morning I had a 9:30 appointment with a long-awaited plumber. We've had sort of ridiculous amounts of water dripping from our sink for upwards of four months now. Our landlady has variously claimed that the linoleum peels up because we spill water when we do dishes, that the wooden baseboard under the bar rotted completely because we spilled a bottle of water under it, and that the brown puddle that oozed out from under said bar with said rotting wood was simply spilled alcohol. Her solution to our problem is to have the counters and sink replaced, and I'm not sure if that will help, but at least it's something. So I'm awaiting the plumber at 9:30.

Imagine my surprise when the door bell went off at 8 a.m., and my brain struggled out of its dream bliss to make my body get out of bed and answer the door. The fixit dude (who, as far as I can tell, is either in no way qualified to be a plumber or entirely trained to tell our landlady exactly what she wants to hear, i.e., there is nothing wrong) brought another guy with him. The first guy explains to me that the second guy will be actually doing the work and he will be back later. The whole time he was explaining it to me he was using excessively grand gestures and the occasional sound effect. I thought he wasn't sure I would be able to understand him, and then I realized the second guy hadn't said anything and looked pretty foreign, so I asked if he spoke French. The first guy looked at me like I was insane and said well no, not so well, no.

It was not until a few minutes later when I was alone in the house with him that I realized he was deaf. He started tearing up the kitchen, putting the stove on the floor and taking off some of the countertops. Moving our appliances out of the way. And then he went to find the water shutoff, which was oddly elusive. He communicated to me in a series of motions that it took me quite a while to work out that he needed to find the valve, and I told him I didn't know where it was. I showed him where the electric meters were, but they weren't nearby. He took out the wall behind the toilet, but found only the hot water heater and a bunch of old insulation.

It was remarkably hard to communicate. My French pronunciation is evidently not good enough for him to read my lips reliably all the time, and though I know how to spell things in American Sign, I didn't know if it was entirely different, or what to spell even if I did try. We managed, mostly.

After we ascertained that we had no idea where the shutoff was, he asked me to call the other plumber and ask him to come help. So I did. That guy didn't answer his phone for an hour, and then when he did call me back he said he'd be by in two hours. So the poor deaf man is just sitting in my apartment with nothing to do, waiting for the other guy, who is, I'd decided by this point, entirely useless.

I left him with my keys and went to class. Alex, who was there shortly after I left, said that the first guy never came and the second one left without trying to communicate anything to him. He did put the stove back in its hole but didn't reconnect it. The top drawer is now open through the top and there's a lot of laminate and wood debris around. The apartment is pretty destroyed, and they didn't say when they'd be back. Also, they took my keys. So now I don't have a set, Maria's set is lost, and Alex's are the only keys left to us.

I have entirely lost faith in French repairmen now. God help you if anything breaks in your apartment. Just buy a new one. And a truck, to haul it home yourself. And you had better know how to install it, or you're screwed.