Modern Inconveniences

At this point, if we had to summarize our experience with one word it would be: frustration.


The third day we were here, the driver's side window on our van stopped working. All efforts to fix it thus far have failed. A real inconvenience when have to open your door in the pouring rain to show the gate guard your ID to get onto base.


Next was the whole Internet and TV debacle. Something that should have taken one day took 10.


Followed by our washing machine. We were glad to have one but have since discovered it doesn't have hot water. But, worse than that is that it's now completely broken. Whatever spins around on the bottom of the washer to wash the clothes comes right off in the spin cycle, spinning dirty scum all over the clothes. Pretty inconvenient when there are five of us working on a limited wardrobe until September when all of our stuff is scheduled to arrive.


The best story is more funny than frustrating. Our toaster. The American one we had took forever to toast something so we walked down to the local E-mart (told it was like Target but really, very very very remote comparison) and bought a Korean toaster. Easy enough. We thought we bought a white one to match the kitchen as the box and floor sample indicated it was white. Well, it's tan. That's fine, we're not picky. Also in the box, a telephone cord. Humph. That's odd. Whatever. Check the crumb pan, oh, there's already crumbs in there. Nice. We've just purchased a used toaster. Lovely. Just what we always wanted. In an effort to spare ourselves any further frustration, we decided to run it a few times to heat it up and kill off any leftover germs. We figured that was much easier than going back to the store and trying to tell them we wanted to exchange it.