shopping

Stores in France are not allowed to have sales. I guess they don't want one store to have an advantage over another store.... that would be *so* capitalistic, I suppose. So what they do have is a month-long sale twice a year. That is, *all* stores can have a sale at the same time and there is a specific day on which this sale can start. So, on the specific sale day (of which I was totally oblivious) I went to the mall to buy an extension cord. It was crazy. The mall was a mad house - just like in the US on the day after Thanksgiving, or the day after Christmas. I had to take the escalator up to the extension-cord store and since only 2 people can board the escalator at a time, the mob that was trying to get on the escalator was HUGE. I prompty decided that I had enough of the madness and left, empty-handed.

These sales are pretty good, actually. Some stores have 50%-70% reductions. But we are not currently interested in shopping for sales, we are still in the "need to get" stage for getting the apartment livable. We are still working on light fixtures so we decided to shop for those again.
So instead of walking, we took the car, parked in the garage, got our ticket and went on our way. After a long day, shopping with zillions of other people (still got the sales going on), we were ready to leave. We had gone through the routine a few times before. At the exit of the mall, onto the parking lot, there is a machine where you put in your ticket and it calculates how much you owe. Once you pay the machine, your ticket comes back out and it will then magically open the exit gates. Paul took the ticket out of his pocket, inserted it into the machine, tried to pay, but it wouldn't work. And the ticket never came out. Paul said, "Maybe since the ticket was in my pocket, and it was kinda damp, it got stuck." OK, so now what? Where do you go to tell someone the stupid machine ate our ticket and we just want our car back so we can go home? There was a button to press "attention". So we pressed it and the machine talked to us in French, of course. Now the problem was to tell the machine (or person talking from the machine) what had happened - in French. Somehow we communicated and a very long time later, some man showed up. He worked, and worked and worked on the machine as we stood there watching. He asked if the ticket was wet. Paul didn't understand him, but I did. I didn't know the word for "damp" but I told him it was a little bit wet.

Yeah, Yeah........... "jamais, jamais" put a wet ticket into the machine.