Haute Tension

The last week before our departure was hell, and TBH I wasn’t handling it calmly. The stress of packing, the ongoing bureaucratic battle with our rat contractor, paperwork, computer breakages and repair fails, cleaning, getting our housesitters and garden guy up to snuff, and constant friability and forgettings on my part were ratcheting up the tension.

As I get older, it feels like my brain hangs on to the wrong stuff—clutches at reactive responses to bad events for example, grinding on them endlessly, but necessary data I need to remember? Evaporates. Sometimes I can’t even remember that I was supposed to remember something. Sylvain says it’s just the stress, but I worry about my brain sometimes.

Things didn’t go very smoothly on the journey, either: TSA tore apart my bags because I forgot to take my hard drive out—and said nasty things to me during the process—and we got hassled about our P-100 masks as we boarded the plane for some unknown reason. The gate agent insisted we had to remove them, but she was so hectic she left it to the plane crew to handle it, and they didn’t bother us about it. We had silently decided to keep our masks on, and glad we did.

Supposedly there’s a mask mandate at the airport, but ha ha ha, right. Lots of anti-maskers and no enforcement, so one is stuck for hours in a closed and locked environment with thousands of strangers, a fair percentage of which are unmasked, coughing, and putting their snotty fingers on things. As we were seated on the plane awaiting take-off, one lanky skate-teen coming down the aisle pulled down his mask to sneeze twice all over a row of seats, then put it back up over his mouth and nose when he was done. Uh, unclear on the concept of masking much??? How do you say “FFS” in French?*

*(will discuss swearing in Québec in another post)

Anyway, I suppose I needn’t point out the Brazil-like logic of trying to force people to take off their protective masks, purportedly for safety reasons, when you’re letting hundreds of other people walk around untested, unvaccinated, and unmasked during a pandemic. Well done you, TSA/FAA.

The flight was fairly uneventful, except for fretting about the woman in front of us with the deep wet frequent cough (she stayed masked at least, bless her). The taxi from the airport to the hotel demanded cash, which we didn’t really have; apparently it’s exceptional here for cabs to take credit cards, most only take cash or debit but there’s no way to know that up front unless you already know to ask.

(This is just one example we encountered of how Canada, in its unassuming way, may be trying to keep consumer and environmental costs down but loses points on the ease-of-use scale for a lot of things.)

Our hotel was clean and quiet enough despite being close to the airport, so we got a decent night’s sleep. The breakfast buffet had cold items only due to COVID restrictions (? I guess because they are wrapped in plastic?) and due to COVID restrictions we had to take our cold items back to our room to eat them.

We were also required to wait outside for our taxi due to COVID restrictions, so after we checked out we dawdled with our bags and observed the birds and newly budding trees in the parking lot until our taxi to Montréal—which we made sure took credit cards—arrived.

Our driver was nice enough but a francophone, so the convo about the weather petered out quickly. We arrived at our apartment and texted our landlord to let him know we were there, but then I suddenly realized that I HAD FORGOTTEN MY BACKPACK—with my tablet and laptop in it!!!—IN THE TAXI.

On top of the prior frantic week, and the previous traumatic year, it was too much. I flipped. Full-on panic attack.

This last period of generic pandemic stress and deep multiple griefs (and the past year of being ripped off and hassled by our rat contractor, various rat businesses, and the selection of neighbors who also chose to be rats) really took a toll on my ability to trust people, and to trust that occasionally situations can work out for the best….or at least, that they might not tumble further into uncharted circles of dank stanky hell.

As a result, unlike my younger self, these days I frequently find myself roiling with pessimism and verging on hysteria. It’s not pleasant to be me right now—and yes, you can feel sorry for Sylvain having to be me-adjacent. Ca va mal.

Perhaps it’s neurological; I read somewhere that unspecified terror in menopausal women is apparently a physiological thing, so maybe that’s contributory? Hope not, but hey: menopausal fatigue sometimes makes me too tired to even worry about it. Er…guess I’ll chart that as a win?

Anyway, I digress. Tiens, backpack:

Sylvain kept cool enough to remember that he had saved the printed receipt for the taxi ride, which had the company phone number on it. We were able to call and ask dispatch to send the driver back; he arrived about 25 minutes later and everything in my backpack was intact. Huzzah! He was very sweet about it but we felt bad pulling him away from his work, so we gave him a $US Benjamin—the only bill we had and maybe overly generous, but we figured it was worth a hundy to get my computer stuff back, and it would be good mojo to reward the guy for being honest.

The driver was very grateful and very sweet about the inconvenience (I’m sure this happens fairly frequently, but still). He told me one of his fares once left $7K Canadian and $8K U.S. in his taxi, and when he drove back and returned all the money to him, the guy gave him nothing.

So he appreciated that we acknowledged his virtue with a little cash, and we had a petit FrancoCanadian-American lovefest in the street for a few minutes. Then he said, ”Bye bye!” in that cute Quebécois way and drove off, and I was reunited with my backpack, so at least there was one happy ending during our first-landing mess.

We also got lucky with our MTL landlord, who’s a doll—an immigrant from Africa via Paris himself, so he knows what new residents go through. He helped us out immensely. He very kindly stocked some groceries for us before we arrived—which we relied upon heavily our first couple days, as we were exhausted and hadn’t figured out how to get money yet—and he walked us through setting up our new internet account. He’s francophone but wanted to speak English with us so he could practice, which was helpful as it’s hard to speak your second language when you’re exhausted (also, when you don’t really speak a second language).

However, there were some things missing from the apartment that we needed, so I made a list and we ordered what we could for delivery (since we have no car here and are still COVID-phobic).

It was a disaster. I ended up spending HOURS on the phone with Canadian IKEA because they wouldn’t take my U.S. credit card as payment on their website (but there’s no way to know that until you’ve completed the entire transaction). Their customer support told me I could buy gift cards with a U.S. credit card though, and use them to pay for my order that way, so great!

But that didn’t work either, again failing only after going through the whole checkout rigamarole again.

So I called customer support AGAIN, and they said I couldn’t redeem the cards online (oh really? you neglected to tell me that when advising me to buy them) so I had to call customer support yet again-again to redeem them.

So I did, and supposedly all was well, but the next day I got an email saying my order hadn’t been paid for. Whaa?

So I called customer support again-again-again, and apparently the order—and my $200 in payments via the gift cards—had both disappeared.

Like, gone. Not in the system. No order number. Nothing.

This rolling Swedish-retail disaster took hours and days to resolve, and to say that I was pert-near blowing my newly-arrived gasket would not be an understatement.

By comparison, I had also placed an order with Canadian Tire (a Sears-like superstore) on the same day, and no problems with payment or delivery there. None. Only IKEA. Apparently they want us non-Canadians to die of strokes, and selling us horsemeat just wasn’t enough.

IKEA Canada knows that their online retail system sucks. You can tell by the soporific music they play on their hold line, and their recorded request to ”be respectful” of their customer service staff. They know they need to de-arouse irate callers any way they can.

But hej IKEA Canada, here’s a little suggestion from someone who’s been through your online moulin: instead of spending money on sleepy hold music, maybe put a little dough behind a better online payment interface that won’t infuriate your customers in the first place? I’m sure the extra fees that occasionally might be incurred by a foreign national using an overseas credit card online with IKEA Canada wouldn’t cut too terribly into IKEA Canada’s billion-dollar bottom line…but what do I know, eh? Cheaper to let the Canadian socialized medical system deal with post-stroke care, I guess.* Tabarnak.

*(will discuss Canadian socialized medical system in another post)

As of last night it all SUPPOSEDLY-AGAIN got sorted after yet another phone call again-again-again-again, but we’ll see if the items actually get delivered. Not optimistic, per what seems to be the oft-substantiated norm.

So why did I put myself through all that? Why didn’t I just quit?

In addition to my angsty obsessiveness of The-Now-Me, because there are no desks in our little apartment. Attempts to cobble together ergonomic solutions from the furniture here failed (most of the extant furniture is from IKEA, ironically) and since my back starts to spasm pretty quickly these days if I’m not sitting comfortably, I had to order a small folding stand for my computer stuff and the only place that had one that was in our price range was IKEA.

The crazy blood-pressure spikes and obsessive fixation that kicked in due to my experience with them, though….maybe back pain would have been better. I had told Sylvain I wanted the first week here to be a much-needed vacation, but pas de dice, apparently.

L’angoisse = French for angst, fyi.

To add more connerie to our arrival, we’ve never lived in a secured apartment building before, and we didn’t realize it would cause delivery problems. We were without internet for days because the company delivering the new router didn’t call us to get entry the building’s secured mailroom, so they just bailed and left a note. Since there’s no such thing as a New York Minute in Canada, it was two more days before we could take delivery and thus were without internet for almost a week. This was especially hard for Sylvain due to work pressures, but not easy on me, either. I was able to use my phone as a hotspot for business and government communications during the net-out, but frankly the internet also serves as my blue blankie when I’m anxious, and there was beaucoup arrival anxiety and pas de blankie.

Plus, unlike at home, we have no front or back yard—just a little balcony of about 15 square feet, not really an emotional escape valve like the garden was. Quite a change-up, this metro lifestyle (cue “Green Acres” theme song here). Makes us grateful for our little spread in L.A. We’ll have to figure out how to deal with the being-on-top-of-one-another-ness until we head back to L.A. in the fall.

Alors, the internet’s up and running now….whew….and I was able to activate my Bixi bike rental membership yesterday and go to the grocery store. There are a bunch of government filings to do today, and so many adventures and interesting things to report!

But for now I must say à bientôt! We love you all and hope to hear from you soon. Stay tuned for our reports on our new neighborhood (“The Village”) and all things French and fanciful. Bye bye!