Equinimity Test

Posted by James

Have you ever noticed times in your life when reality keeps throwing a particular type of unpleasant event at you, like a theme? That happened to me over a few days last week. The theme for me was getting locked out.

It started like this. On Wednesday last week (April Fools day as it turns out), I walked to my first day of work at the TU. I spent most of the day settling paperwork, meeting some of my new colleagues, and following up on my lost luggage (see previous post). On the way home, I stopped at Karstadt to do some grocery shopping since the fridge was completely empty. Karstadt is a department store that has groceries like Target in the US. I left Karstadt with a completely filled plastic grocery bag and a few items in my computer backpack. Since Karstadt doesn't carry fresh bread, I stopped by a backer and bought a loaf of multi-grain bread, putting it in a separate bag. With the grocery bag in one hand, the bread bag in the other, and the umbrella I had taken along in the morning because it looked like rain tucked under my left arm, I headed home.


Back at the apartment, I negotiated the 8 flights of stairs to reach the apartment with the two grocery bags tightly in grip and the umbrella tucked under one arm. Our apartment is in a building under historic preservation and has no elevator. We live on the 4th floor above the ground (3rd floor by German reckoning, since the first floor is always called the "ground floor") and each floor has two flights of stairs because the apartments have high ceilings. By the time I reached the apartment, I was ready to sit down and have a nice hot cup of tea.

I set the bags down on the floor. Grabbing the door handle, I opened the deadbolt lock on the top, then turned the key in the bottom lock and pressed on the handle (see picture of the door above). The latch on the bottom lock opened and the door opened a crack but then stuck. I pushed but no progress. I could see into the apartment through the crack. I removed the key and tried again. No luck. The door seemed to be stuck. Was reality pulling an April Fool's joke on me? What to do?

My phone rang. It was my brother-in-law wanting to know whether I was coming along with them for the 4 day Easter weekend to an island in the Baltic.

"Look, I don't think I can make it," I said, "My suitcase isn't here yet and so I don't have any warm cloths. And besides, at the moment, I'm locked out of my apartment. If I can't get in, I'll have to sleep on the doormat."

"You're what??" he replied in alarm.

I explained the situation and asked him for advice about what to do. He was silent for a moment.

"Why don't you try the key service?" he suggested.

Every German apartment building has the telephone number of a key service on the door, which you can call if you leave your keys inside the apartment and lock yourself out. That wasn't exactly my situation, but I figured it might work. I thanked him and wished him and my sister-in-law a pleasant vacation.

Then I ran downstairs and called the key service. They assured me that someone would be there within a half hour. I walked back up the stairs and sat down to wait. And wait. A half hour came and went and nobody appeared. I heard rustling in my neighbor's apartment. Could someone be there?  German locks are more complicated than American it seems, maybe my neighbor could help. I ran the bell and someone was indeed there. An elderly gentleman with grey hair and a grey beard opened the door. I explained the situation.

"Well, the locks open just fine but I can't seem to get the door open," I said, showing him the crack between the two doors.

"Let me have the keys," he said.

He walked over to the door, closed it completely, and relocked the deadbolt. Then he opened the deadbolt without pressing on the handle and unlocked the bottom lock. The door popped open!

"The trick is not to press on the door when you unlock it," he said.

I thanked him for his help, hauled the heavy grocery bags into the kitchen, and called the key service to cancel.

The next morning came Round 2. Up for breakfast around 7, I attempted to open the utensil drawer in the kitchen for a spoon to eat my musli but...it jammed and I could not get in. One of the utensils in the drawer had wedged up between the front inside of the drawer and the back, preventing the drawer from opening. I pulled on the handle but no luck. I peered into the crack between the drawer and the counter top, then stuck a bread knife and, when that didn't work, the butter knife that I had extracted the night before to try to jimmy whatever was jamming the drawer. To no avail. Opening the cabinet underneath, I looked at the bottom to see if any screws or anything were holding the drawer together or were part of the opening mechanism. I thought maybe I could unscrew the bottom or remove the whole drawer. Again no luck. Dried out duct tape along the sides of the drawer suggested maybe somebody had taken the bottom out at some point, but the tape was no longer fastened to the bottom, and the bottom was firmly fastened to the sides by means invisible. I sent my landlord an urgent email about the drawer, browsed the Web a bit, and then went to bed.

The next morning I had to eat my musli and yogurt using one of the large cooking spoons from the cooking utensil holder on top of the stove. That was a bit difficult but I managed it. I had an email from my landlord: try jiggling it. I figured I'd wait until evening since I needed to get to work. At the TU that afternoon, I found a couple plastic utensils in the coffee room and brought those home just in case jigglig didn't work. When I arrived back at the house, I went out to the kitchen, opened the cabinet under the drawer, and whacked the bottom a couple times.

Sure enough, that worked. But it still wouldn't open all the way. A short knife was still wedged up between the back of the drawer and the back side of the countertop. I reached around through the open part of the drawer and dislodged the offending knife. The drawer was stuffed with too many utensils and cutlery. That knife and four others were banished from the drawer and into the cooking utensil holder on the stovetop. The drawer seems now to work just fine.

And round three. On Thursday, the departmental secretary, gave me a key for my office  She warned me that the key had a small battery in it that sometimes went dead and if that should occur, I should let her know and she would have it replaced. I wondered at the time why a key needed a battery. Later I locked my office door and went down to lunch. After lunch, I came back up, inserted the key in the lock and turned. Nothing. It would not turn. I removed the key and tried again. No luck. Was the battery dead? The department sysadmin came by and I explained the situation.

"Did you wait a second or two before turning the key?" he asked.

"No, I don't think so. Why?" I replied.

"The key is electronic and it takes a couple seconds to sync up with the door. Try it again." he suggested.

So that's why it needed a battery, to keep people from turning it too quickly! I inserted the key into the lock and counted to four just to be sure, then turned the key. Success! I thanked the sysadmin* and sat down in my office.

The "locked out" theme seems to have played out for now, and I think I can say that I've passed the equanimity test, though I did end up wondering when I was locked out of the apartment what I would do with ten pounds of groceries and my umbrella if I had to sleep on the doormat.

* Note: for now, I am not going to use anybody's names in this blog. Germans are much more sensitive to privacy on the Internet than Americans. I could change people's names around and in the end I might do that but for now, I'll do the best I can without names.

Rocky Arrival

Posted by James

How do you figure out what to pack for a 6 month trip? I'm used to traveling for up to two weeks, on vacations and business trips, and there I know exactly what to pack. Obviously, at least two weeks of cloths, and of course all the books I'll need for my teaching job. But what about my favorite shampoo or chewing gum? Space in my suitcase is limited, as you can see in the photo above, so prioritization is essential. I've got only one carry on, one large red, to-be-checked suitcase, and of course my computer bag. Normally when I fly for business trips and even for vacation, I never check any baggage because chances are it will get lost. Since I'm usually not in any one place long enough for the lost baggage to catch up with me, it makes more sense to travel light.

In the end, I managed to figure it out and, after a long flight over the North American continent and the Atlantic, landed in Frankfurt. My connecting flight left out of Terminal A so I followed the signs to Terminal A and ended up...on the wrong side of the security boundary. Somehow, they had directed me out of the transit area and into the area for arriving passengers. Fortunately the lines were short and there was lots of time between flights so I quickly negotiated the security check and made my way to the gate.

On the way, my phone buzzed. Text message from United: my Lufthasa flight to Berlin Tegel would be late. When I got to the gate, another buzz: the gate had been changed to A24.  At gate 24 yet another buzz: flight delayed yet again ("leaving at 1:30 arriving at 12:50", how do they do that? Some kind of time machine?). Shortly thereafter the plane arrived and a stream of dazed passengers stumbled off the aircraft. The agent came on the intercom and made an announcement: a special cleaning crew ("Sonderreingungsteam" in German) needed 15 minutes to clean up the plane because the arrival at Frankfurt had been rough. Actually, our arrival had been a bit bouncy too, but apparently conditions had worsened and Lufthansa no longer provides air sickness bags.

The cleaning squad got the plane in order and we boarded. The flight attendants announced that they had closed the doors and we should shut our cell phones off. Then we waited for the plane to leave the gate. And waited. The pilot came on the intercom and announced that the flight would be delayed. The airport had shut down one of the runways because of high winds and the takeoff capacity was reduced to 20% of normal. Fortunately I had an Ian Banks science fiction novel to keep me busy. Over the next three hours, the pilot kept us informed of progress, but around 4:00 conditions finally improved and the pilot received permission to push back from the gate and take off.

Our takeoff was a bit bumpy but not particularly bad, nothing compared to one flight I had quite a while back to Arizona where the plane was moving up and down by several hundred feet. The landing at Tegel was also not bad again a bit bumpy, and nobody got airsick. But the airport authorities at Tegal had effectively closed the airport due to high winds and they had to round up a ground crew to get us a set of stairs so we could disembark.

Eventually, we made it to the terminal and baggage claim. I called our landlord, who was waiting since noon for me to arrive. She and her partner had been planning to leave for Thuringen for the summer. I told her I would be there shortly. But it was not to be. The luggage didn't show up and didn't show up and finally a woman from the baggage handling service came buy with some forms and was verbally assaulted by irate passengers from 3 flights that had landed after the airport had closed. She told us that we had to fill out a form and receive a tracking number, but she had no forms. Meanwhile the passengers waiting around for their bags were getting more agitated and starting to yell at the bagge handling agents. The airport security arrived and several of the passengers began to argue with airport security.

My carry-on had enough clothing and such to last for two weeks, so I waited around for more forms to arrive, then filled one out and tried to hand it to one of the baggage handling agents. But since they were surrounded with arguing passengers, I decided instead to leave the baggage return, find the Lufthansa lost baggage office, and turn my form in there. Once outside in the terminal proper, the Lufthansa lost baggage office was easy to find but there was a line of over a hundred people waiting to get in. At that point, I gave up and took a taxi to the apartment, where my landlord and her partner met me. It was too late for them to leave for Thuringen, so they stayed overnight in the guest bedroom.

As it turns out, there as a major storm in Germany just as I was arriving, a hurricane with 120 kph winds, what the Germans call an "Orkan". Many trains were cancelled, so it is surprising that I managed to get to Berlin at all. The airport at Frankfurt had shut down baggage loading and my suitcase had been stranded in Frankfurt, according to the United baggage agent who I called on Thursday.

In any event, on Wednesday afternon I returned to the airport and the lines were much shorter. I reported my claim to the Lufthansa agent and he said they would bring the bag to me. He gave me a tracking number, but when I checked the tracking number on the Lufthansa web site, he had indicated the airline as "VA" and not "UA", so I had to call the baggage department and request they fix it. But finally, yesterday, my bag showed up none the worse for having spent three days with Lufthansa.

Introducing An Expats Notebook

Posted by James.

After living in Silicon Valley for 30 years, Renate and I are leaving our house in the care of a friend and moving to Berlin for the summer. I've got a job with the Technical University of Berlin for 6 months teaching computer networking, working together with the researchers, and just generally hanging around, talking to people and seeing what's new in the academic world. I've worked most of my professional career in industry as a research scientist in information and communication technology, most recently with Ericsson Research. In the last 8 years, the technology has been changing quite rapidly in networking so I've decided to take a sabbatical to spend some time in academia seeing what's new. I'm really looking forward to it.

But in addition, this will be the longest time since 1978-79 that I'll have lived abroad. During that time, I lived in Karlsruhe, in the southern part of Germany along the Rhine and worked as a research assistant at the university, developing computer programs for hydrology research. In 1981, I spent the summer at the University of Stuttgart as a guest researcher working on my PhD dissertation topic. I did visit Berlin briefly at some point during the Cold War, and I remember the dogs sniffing along the train led by the hard faced East German police, and the grumpy officials checking our passports when the train stopped at the border with the DDR.  Since then, though, most of my trips to Germany have been short, a few days to a week at most. So it will be interesting to compare my experiences from back then to the way things are now, 26 years after the wall came down. I don't know if I'll really be able to experience the change, since in a way having visited for short periods over the years I have a perspective of Germany slowly changing, but I'm hoping to get some perspective on the new Germany.