09:14 am - well that was fun
Y'know how taking your car to the dealer for service is always a little weird? You never feel you're in the right line, you're not sure about what you're asking for, you don't know if you need your differential fluid flushed or your flux capacitor is shot, and they don't really know what you need either, even if all you're doing is coming in for the 50,000 mile check.
Now, do that in another language, in which you can talk about the plight of the Gypsies or Noam Chomsky's theories about anarchy fairly easily, but you can't get vacuum cleaner bags because you don't remember the word for bag. But instead of that, you have a warning light on your car that they've never heard of (you have a RAV-4, possibly the most common SUV on the planet, and you're at a Toyota dealer). Turns out the warning light only exists on American models, because the rest of the world looks at their tires to determine whether they're flat. And their services go in 15,000 kilometer segments, so you have 75,000 or 90,000 to choose between, and you're at 50,000 miles (times 1.6 or so, which comes out to about 80,000 km), but they don't have an 80,000 km service. Oh, and you can't find the letter from the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not Masters of Fine Arts) that says you don't need a registration, because you haven't paid taxes, because you aren't actually importing your car, because you're a diplomat.
After 45 minutes, you agree that they'll do the 75,000 km service, and that they'll see if their computer knows how to turn off the flat-tire light. And now, it's 8 am, so you head to the coffee shop on the corner for a cappuccino and cream pastry to recover from the experience.
Yeah, that's a fun way to start the day.
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