It's the little things...

Sometimes it is the little things that really get you when you are living or traveling in a foreign country; those subtle little things that are familiar enough to make think you know what you are doing, but just different enough to frustrate the hell out of you. One thing I discovered about myself during my first week in Switzerland was that if presented with too many of these things at once, and thereby reaching a critical frustration threshold, my solution was to just walk away. Avoidance is a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem. If I walk away from the problem then it is no longer a problem, right? Or as Bob Marley says, "Tis he who fight and run away, Live to fight another day." I just need a chance to regroup and mount my attack with a new strategy.
There are many variables that can affect the frustration threshold, therefore sometimes it can be reached quite quickly, and other times more slowly. My first day of language class was a low threshold day. After class I was in the train station before returning home and had a sudden urge to use the toilet. I followed the signs in the international language of stick figures to the appropriate facilities and was thwarted by locked doors on the stalls. I remember the days of pay toilets in the US but they seem to be long gone, along with the accompanying "Here I sit all broken-hearted, paid my dime and only farted," graffiti that I still remember from my early years in store bathrooms. (As a tangent, I suspect that there are more Americans who can quote bathroom graffiti limericks and poems than true lines of literary poetry). The toilets required a 1/2 Swiss Franc coin. I reached in my pocket; no 1/2 coin, but I did have a 1 CHF coin. I went back out into the train station and went to the "Change" window. I don't think the guy who sits at the window is there just to make change for using the toilet but I appreciated his services. I returned to the bathroom and looked at the coin-lock mechanism with its foreign instructions. It can't be that hard, insert coin and open door. I inserted the coin and tried every combination of pushing, pulling and turning the knob. The door didn't open. No problem, thanks to my handy change man, I have another 1/2 CHF coin. Insert second coin, try again. Turn knob, push, pull and repeat. Only one thing left to do. Walk away. I don't have to go that bad anyway, I tell myself. By now, it is almost time to board my train so I head for the platform. Once on the train I found success with the non-pay facilities on board. However, I was shocked to find that my waste was just flushed out onto the tracks. So you mean I have to pay to properly dispose of my waste but I can just dump it on the tracks for free?
Upon returning home, I went out for my first solo trip to the grocery store. Supermarkets here are essentially the same, but there are those "little things." I approached the shopping carts and tried to pull one out of the line. Stuck. I pulled again and then looked down to see that the carts were chained together. I briefly pulled on the chain to see if it would come out and looked to see if there was an obvious release button. My low threshold limit already reached, I walked away. I think a basket will do just fine today. "'Tis he who fight and run away, Live to fight another day." Later I found out that the carts are coin-operated. You must insert a 1 CHF coin into the handle of the cart to push out the chain that connects it to the next cart. When you return the cart and re-insert the chain your coin is returned to you. My first thought was "Do they think that someone is going to steal the carts? And do they really think that 1 Franc is enough incentive to keep someone from taking a cart?" I had images of homeless people and bottle recyclers in the US pushing shopping carts full of all of their booty and thought if you really needed a shopping cart 1 Franc would be a "steal." So far the only thing I can think of that I have been able to buy here for 1 Franc was a package of yeast at the grocery store and entry to look at a waterfall that you could see from the opposite side of the river without paying anything. I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that, since there are virtually no homeless people here, the coin system must have another purpose. I think it is simply to get people to return the carts in a nice, orderly fashion where they belong at the front door. No paying pimply-faced kids minimum wage to round up stray carts in the parking lot, clean out the cart corrals and drive the herds back to the front door- like they do in the US. The Swiss are such a neat, orderly and law-abiding lot that I suspect if you told them they had to do it, they would return the carts on their own, without the 1 Franc reward. As an extra bonus of returning your carts, you also reduce one more parking lot hazard for your BMW or Mercedes.
I have yet to return to the train station toilets to see if I can get them to work, but it would be in my best interest to do so before I have the additional stress of really needing to make it work. Kind of like last week in the grocery store. Up until last week I had only paid for groceries in cash. Although I had removed cash from the bank, I had yet to use my ATM card at the grocery store. If I was smart I might have pioneered this usage sometime when I was in there during the middle of the day with only a handful of housewives and pensioners with nowhere in particular to be. There are no grocery baggers at the grocery store (another way to cut out those minimum wage kids) so I usually am trying to bag up my groceries as quickly as possible so that I don't hold up other customers. When my purchase was totaled I had the sudden panicked realization that I was about 7 CHF short of being able to pay in cash. This was the only register open and by now there were 4 or 5 people lined up behind me. I fumbled for my wallet and pulled out my card and then looked blankly at the card machine. No place to swipe the card on either side, nothing on top. The cashier is very patient with me. Somehow I always end up at her register and she knows that I am a dysfunctional German speaker. She indicated to flip my card around and pointed at the bottom of the card reader. Ah yes, you slide the card up from the bottom, but it is hard to see when you are panicked and standing above it. There is no way around it, you look like an idiot when things like this happen. I don't think there is anything you can do to redeem yourself. You can't say "Believe it or not, I scored in the 95th percentile on the problem-solving section of my Graduate Record Exams." Just walk away. 'Tis he who fight and run away, Live to fight another day.