On Humility

One of the best things about living abroad is that it leaves no room for pride. You are practically guaranteed to be humbled at least once a day by something utterly banal. Today it was photocopying the readings for a class. First you have to find the readings. Then you have to find the photocopiers. Then you have to figure out where to stick the copy card. Then you have to figure out how to stick the copy card in correctly. This sort of thing always occurs in front of an audience. You can’t really feel like a dumbass about failing at a simple task like trying to get the card reader to read your card unless there are at least three people waiting in line behind you to use the copier, watching you try every possible permutation of putting it in with the chip backwards, frontwards, upside down, and under the influence of voodoo chanting. Only then, when you start to consider forgetting the whole university thing altogether and going in for something that requires no photocopies, like garbage collecting, do you realize that you had it right in the first place, you just weren’t pushing it in far enough. (Why do you always feel dumber when you had it right in the first place?)

But that’s just the opening act. When you think you’ve got the situation under control, that’s almost always when it gets better. When, for instance, you’re halfway through the tedium of copying the first package of notes, and the guy behind you – who is in your class (why is it always more embarrassing when it’s someone you kind of sort of know?) - asks you with a touch of concern and an undertone of impatience if the “Einzug” is broken. It should also be noted that these situations invariably involve vocabulary that one has never come across, the better to make one feel completely at sea. The Einzug? That large slot on top of the copier cover that you didn’t notice, because the ones at your university at home don’t have one. The slot that you whack all the sheets into at once, so that it copies and collates them all in one three-second go. “Oh. Well that would be faster! [idiotic laugh]” Stupid foreigner here! “We don’t have such good technology where I come from!” As if at home I live in an igloo and ride a polar bear to school and we make our copies on birch bark with quills.

Other advanced space-aged technology that has stumped me here: how to work a washing machine, the difference between shampoo and conditioner, how to lock the bathroom door, how to deposit money at the bank machine, how to open a window, how to get ketchup out of the ketchup bottle, how to set up the voicemail on my cell phone. (“To confirm your personal password, please press the ‘mwetph’ button now” Guess how many buttons I had to press to figure that one out. If you guessed all of them twice, give yourself a cookie. I still don’t know what the right one is called in German, but that’s okay, because I certainly came up with my own name for it.)

Conversely, trivial successes also count for more. There is a feeling of victorious satisfaction that comes with things like finding the flush mechanism for the public toilet, locating and borrowing a book at the library, actually receiving what you were trying to ask for in a store, or being able to give a correct and comprehensible answer when someone asks you for directions on the street. That’s right, I live here. I flushed the toilet this morning and everything.