Every expat in Geneva has laundry horror stories; blogs are full of them.
- Washers are tiny, and hold about a third of what they do in the US.
- Sometimes, entire buildings share them with each resident receiving 3 hour slots each week (or every other week) during which they are permitted to use them.
- Doing laundry at a laundromat is astoundingly expensive (give or tai $5 for a tiny load).
In November, I opened our dryer to find broken glass in with our
clothes and a wire hanging down into our dryer. During the cycle, the bulb had come loose, been tossed around and broken. I called the
repairman who came to fix it.
We bought our dryer when me moved here and it is still under
warranty, so I was shocked when I received the significant bill for the repairs. Nothing gets under my skin like wasting money, so I prepared myself for a giant test of my
French skills and called to dispute the bill.
My repairman didn’t have a snazzy uniform like the one above. Ladies, don’t you want to get your man one of those?
I was transferred around from one
customer service representative to another. Finally, I got to speak to someone with some authority. Their first question was “what did you do, that doesn’t happen.” They may as well have asked when I stopped beating my wife. Of course I did something, I used the dryer to dry my clothes. Try explaining that you didn’t do anything wrong (a) in another language, (b) to someone who doesn’t want to hear it.
Yep, that’s me. Cheap. They told me that it wasn’t covered by the warranty because it didn’t render the machine inoperable. I told them that although, in theory the machine might still have been able to dry clothes, no one will put wet clothes in a place with wires hanging down and turn it on. Therefore, you can’t operate it and it should be covered. Seriously, we went around and around on this for about a half an hour. When I hung up, I burst into tears (probably from suppressed anger as I remained polite and did not use any of my nice collection of French naughty words).
The next day, someone from the company called me. As I hadn’t conceded defeat the previous day, my file landed on their desk. I went through the whole story once again and…success!!!! We don’t have to pay. When I asked them to send me something confirming this, they replied, “this isn’t America, we don’t go around suing people.” 
I only wish I had spoken to them on a hamburger phone…
In the US, this would have been a single item crossed off a “to do” list. Here, this was a huge victory for me. First, I’m super cheap and would rather spend the money on something else. Secondly, it was hard to figure out a way to tell the story (including describing all the washing machine parts) in French and persuasively explain my side. I felt like shouting “I made fire” a la Tom Hanks in Castaway.
schwingeninswitzerland 