Bad days happen. . .

Even in Duino, it is possible to have a bad day. 

Today, I took a driving test (they called it practice but it seemed like a test) with one of the maintenance men from the college, to make sure I could drive the school vans.  No big deal, right?  Yeah, except the van was HUGE, a manual transmission, I don’t know my way around here at all, and the guy only spoke Italian.  So I had no idea what he was telling me to do, ever.  And he had to take me on narrow roads and steep hills, to make sure I knew what I was doing, apparently.

I’m going to keep telling myself that he wasn’t yelling at me the whole time, it was just my language barrier that made it seem like he was ridiculously annoyed.  And I only almost gave up when he was making me parallel park the van.  By the way, I couldn’t see out the back windows because of the way the seats are.  And I had no idea how big the van was.  It was awful.  In the end, he shook my hand and said “bene, bene, bene” which means good, so I think I essentially passed, but it was still ridiculously stressful.

Then, I tried to get confirmation from our moving company that they received the payment I made.  If they didn’t get it by today, we have to start paying “storage” fees, and we could pay them until whenever the next boat leaves from the US.  So I emailed them late last night (still during business hours in the US) asking for a payment confirmation.  No answer.  Then I emailed first thing this morning.  No answer.  Then I emailed our sales rep (different from the accounting department email address).  No answer.  So I had Tom, who is in the states, call the number I had for the accounting department.  Guess what?  No answer.  So he called our sales rep.  I’ll give you $10 if you know what happened.  No answer.  So I looked up another number online for the company, which he called.  Still no answer.  Finally, after sending another email to a “service” email address that I found on the Better Business Bureau website, I got an out-of-office response.  Apparently, the company is relocating.  Today.  And will be closed on Monday for the holiday.  But things will return to normal on Tuesday.  Great.  Just in time for all of our belongings to be flung into the Hudson River.

I finally got a nice response from someone in the company apologizing and giving us his cell number to call, promising not to charge us anything extra, blah blah blah.  I suppose I should feel better but I don’t.  And probably won’t until our things arrive here.  In another 6-8 weeks.  In the meantime, if you see any of my clothes floating on the Hudson River, or in a Goodwill near you, please let me know!

It’s certainly a gelato kind of night.