Shortly before coming out here I traded in my venerable and slightly dented iBook for a shiny new and super sexy MacBook Pro. I’ll pause there to allow you the chance to gasp appreciatively…
Ahhhh, that’s pretty…
One of my main reasons for doing this, apart from the obvious goal of wanting to look really cool, was to avoid the situation in which my old machine kicked the bucket, gave up the ghost, or in some other way fell over in a terminal manner thereby leaving me sans computer. It will come as little surprise to fans of irony that my lovely shiny new laptop did exactly that last week (yes, that is what ‘irony’ means and don’t let anyone tell you anything different). Horrible grinding noises were heard, the screen flickered in an alarming manner and smoke curled delicately from the ventilation slots. Ok, the last one isn’t true, but I was left staring at a blank and alarmingly unfamiliar screen with a slack jaw and a growing sense of panic. I handled it very well for the first four and a half minutes. Shortly before the fifth minute had passed I was to be seen bursting out on to the street, wounded computer held out at arms length like a dying comrade, and shouting ‘She’s not going to make it, she’s not going to make it!’ as I made for the local Mac shop. People in Mac shops the world over are wise and good. Us Mac users are bound together by a sense of unshakeable superiority and coolness. We’re a bit like the men from UNCLE. You can walk into a Mac shop anywhere in the world, chuck your laptop on the counter and say ‘what do you think’s going on here then?’ with the full expectation of receiving a sympathetic, well informed and, above all, free reply. Try doing that in a PC shop and see how far you get. They’d slap a hundred pound cover charge on you for stepping over the doormat and chuckle cruelly in your face for good measure, or at least that’s what it says in my official Mac handbook. The guy in the Mac shop had no idea what was wrong with it. But he did lend me a hanky to dry my eyes with. The scary thing was that I had no idea what was wrong with it either. I’m no guru, but I’ve been using Macs long enough to recognize all of the common forms of temporary Mac loopiness, and this didn’t look like any of them.
A Mac guy in a Mac shop trying to get a Mac chick’s IP address
Cut to the interior of a deserted bar late that night. Our hero (that’s me!) wearing a pork pie hat (I bought one especially for the occasion) is slumped on a bar stool staring moodily into his empty whisky glass. The grizzled but kindly barman approaches, casually wiping the interior of a tumbler with a grimy dishcloth. ‘Hey buddy’ he barks ‘why dont-cha go home? Ain’t nothing in the bottom of that glass that can help ya.’ I slant the brim of my hat back with a single finger and fix him with a watery stare ‘Then you’d better fill ‘er up again, and keep yer opinion to yourself while you do it.’ He pauses in his endless cloth work and considers reaching for the thorn wood club he’s got stashed under the bar, but his face softens and he pours me another shot instead. ‘Now, you feel free to tell me to mind my own,’ he says ‘but I seen that look on a man’s face before and it spells just one thing – Mac trouble. Am I right or am I right?’ I down the whisky in one (man, they make terrible whisky in this country) and grimace from the bitterness. ‘Ain’t nothing to do with you old man, just keep the whisky commin and your mouth shut’ I growl. He grins broadly and resumes with his cloth. ‘I’m telling you son, they ain’t worth it. Every damn one of em’s not worth the silicon they’re printed on.’ I grunt noncommitally. Briefly he leans over me and says ‘why don’t you do yourself a favor son, forget about her and get yourself down to the PC hire place on 9th, they’ll show you a good time and I got their number right here…’ as he turns away to reach for the business card in his jacket I move fast. The .38 snubnose comes into my hand like a conjurers trick and I squeeze the trigger twice. The shattering crack of the shots is so loud in the closed, stifling atmosphere that my ears are ringing too much to hear him hit the deck. ‘You can keep your cheap filthy PCs’ I remark, and saunter off into the night.
Next morning I tried my computer again, but gunning down imaginary barmen didn’t seem to have helped, annoyingly. There was only one thing for it, open her up and start fiddling around with things I don’t understand. I’m sure many of my female acquaintances over the years will be familiar with the procedure. Actually, all I wanted to do was try swapping the RAM chips around in case one of them had gone bad – entirely within the bounds of normal user activity. I poured over the manual and did quite well in the initial stages. It was when I got to the words ‘unscrew the three small screws on the cover plate. You will need a Phillips #00 screwdriver’ that I began to suspect I might be facing problems. What exactly IS a Phillips #00 screwdriver and, more importantly, where does one buy one in Krakow? These kind of things are the basic building blocks of culture shock. I can think of three or four shops in London where I could reasonably expect to find out what a Phillips #00 screwdriver is and buy one in a single painless conversation. Here I had no idea if similar shops even existed. Clearly it must be possible to buy screwdrivers, I was fairly sure I had seen a number of screwed-together things around and one assumes this wasn’t achieved by sheer willpower. It turns out there’s an electrical goods shop about 50 meters from my front door. This was a step in the right direction, but it left me with the minor problem of figuring out how to ask for a Phillips #00 screwdriver in Polish. By a stroke of luck I actually knew the Polish word for ‘a screw’ thanks to an entirely different episode involving four loose legs and an abandoned table top that we don’t need to go into here. It’s ‘śruba,’ sounds like ’shrew-ba.’ I also knew the word for ‘to twist’ (kręcić) which sounds like ‘krench-itch.’ Surely, it has to be a combination of these I bethought myself (I find this less tiring that ‘thinking to myself’). Given the infamous double-entendre potential of the word ’screw’ in English (I’m sure some of you have been making up your own jokes already) I was a little nervous about banding these words around in Polish in case they had similar usages. The last thing I wanted was to end up in a police cell for causing a kindly old lady in a hardware store to pass out from shock. The Brits are already notorious in this town for getting absolutely hammered on cheap beer and organizing naked relay races around the old town square and I didn’t want to add sexual-innuendo-directed-at-old-ladies to our catalogue of crimes. I needn’t have worried. The guy in the shop was about 21 and built like a Stalinist steelworks. I had visions of fleeing down the street in an effort to avoid getting a 2-by-4 upside my head after I asked him if he could ‘twist around and give me a screw.’ The trouble with my Polish is that I know lots of words and phrases so well and can pronounce them in a fairly convincing manner that I tends to give the impression that I can speak Polish, at least a bit, which just isn’t the case. ‘Errrrm…’ I said – the internationally recognized phrase for ‘I’m about to try to say something in a language that I don’t actually understand,’ ‘śruba… errrrm… kręcić… son?’ I added (roughly: ‘a screw, turning, are there?’) with helpful hand gestures. I made ready to run for it. ‘Sure, what kind do you need mate?’ he replied in perfect English. I had forgotten of course that all Poles under the age of 30 have spent at least a year working as waiters/international commodity brokers in London. ‘I’m looking for a Phillips #00 screwdriver’ I gulped. It turned out that he had no idea that cross-headed screwdrivers are actually called Phillips screwdrivers amongst the cognicienti, but was grateful to find out, ’so that’s why they’re labelled “ph”!’ he said ‘I always wondered.’
Ridiculously long story short, the screwdriver he sold me was too big and I spent another 24 hours banging my head on hard surfaces and wondering what the hell use I was without a computer – anyone need any heaving lifting done? My only option, the next day being Sunday, was to find out where the local DIY superstore was and get myself down there. In my young and innocent days I worked in a DIY superstore for six months or so and I’ve studiously avoided them ever since. The evil but caressing grip of DIY has spread comprehensively to Poland in the past decade and it wasn’t hard to find one of these giant Sunday-Mecca sheds on my map. Watching the exterior of a DIY superstore on a Sunday is kind of like that scene in Logan’s Run where hundreds of people are willingly streaming into the deathly embrace of Carousel. Obi and Castorama (French company) are the big players. There’s a tram that takes you from my street directly to the local Castorama super shed, although it doesn’t seem to be aware of this since it unhelpfully dumps you in a semi-contsructed wasteland on the wrong side of the famous Zakopianka highway (a bit like the A1, but less friendly). I would have biked there but I don’t have a lock and D reliably informs me that an unlocked, unattended bike will inevitably be half-inched and converted into some form of WMD within 5 minutes (one day he’s going to brain me for these comments). Eventually I found the non-drivers entrance – a greasy rat-infested tunnel under the highway – and took my place among the Sunday worshipers. There is absolutely zero difference between a DIY superstore in Krakow and one in Croydon, so I won’t bore anyone with details. It is tremendously depressing to see how easily everyone, no matter what their culture or background, embraces this stuff, but that’s our world it seems. I intend to say a lot more about this in my next exciting-coming-soon-post entitled ‘What ARE Polish people like.’ The only way I could get my hands on a Phillips #00 screwdriver in the end was to buy a boxed set of ten, for about a quid. And there you have it, eleven screwdrivers, a fully operational Mac (Bwaa-ha-ha) and nine screws that I’m not prepared to discuss.
Maybe it’s time for you to go back to England…It doesn’t seem like you are getting what polish people are like, etc….
I don’t think most polish people believe that westeners imagine our country as full of polar bears etc. But the stereotype that definately exists is the one that you are presenting – “I had forgotten of course that all Poles under the age of 30 have spent at least a year working as waiters/international commodity brokers in London.” Hmmm…I feel a bit sorry for you…
Thanks for the comment K. It’s extremely difficult to write honestly about your impressions of a country without offending some people, especially when you are trying to do it in an entertaining way. I think the underlying point I was trying to make, in my clumsy way, was that Polish people often seem to underestimate their country. As I said, when English people do come here they are almost always pleasantly surprised at how great the place is and how gracious the people are – I’m afraid we are still the victims of many years of cold war propaganda. My point about the English-speaking guy in the shop was that I was a fool for not expecting him to understand English, judged against the monolingual standards of my own nation, this is extraordinary. It demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit of the younger generation and this country’s exceptionally high educational standards.
However, I have genuinely heard the Polar bear comment many times and I do think that Poles are extremely sensitive about the way they are perceived by the rest of the world. And I think the invitation to get back where I came from is a little strong.
[...] out in the same way. Ok so I HAVE freaked out in the same way. So head on over to read the post Eleven Screwdrivers and Nine Screws and check out his blog too, Wyspianski Unwinding. Its a pretty good [...]
[...] out in the same way. Ok so I HAVE freaked out in the same way. So head on over to read the post Eleven Screwdrivers and Nine Screws and check out his blog too, Wyspianski Unwinding. Its a pretty good [...]