Dieu merci pour Google Translate

So, it took me a week to try to wash clothes because the washer/dryer scared me to death. The microwave also was a complete mystery but I did use that right way – not necessarily correctly, but it worked.

I had an instruction manual for the microwave, in …. guess …… French, huh – really?, ha!, (many of the other appliances had manuals in multiple languages – so that made it much easier for me) and there was no instruction manual for the washer/dryer, they kept the registration paperwork but for some reason not the instruction manual.

Let me start with the microwave. The face of the microwave is not user friendly and it had various picture buttons that no matter how hard I pushed on them (you know, how when you’re in a foreign country and they don’t understand what you’re saying so you repeat yourself – only louder!) they seemed to do nothing. I ended up using Google Translate for every single line in the manual, just so I could figure out how I was supposed to use it.

Microwave (click on picture for larger view) 

 

Come to find out that first you have to tell the microwave what temperature you want it to cook at (what???????????), then you set the time for cooking, in increments of 20 seconds. And the picture buttons don’t do anything – instead you have to memorize what each is (ie: poultry) and their position (1 – 10) and if you want to use the ‘pre-set’ heat/cooking times then enter that pre-set number …. where you ask? At this point I have no idea, so far I’ve only got down the temperature and manual time entry functions.

Okay, now for the scariest machine I’ve ever encountered. Just looking at all the choices was enough to wish I’d brought enough clothes for a year without having to do any laundry – but can you imagine toting 365 pairs of underwear across the Atlantic. Knowing my luck, if I had it would be the one time Customs would pick me to search the luggage, open up the suitcase – see all those ‘unders’ and wonder if there was a black market for underwear! But no, I only brought 10 pair so I had to figure out how to use “the monster”.

 

Washer/Dryer Combo (click on picture for larger view)

First let me explain – in Europe the most common type of washer and dryer is the COMBO washer/dryer (saves space, duh!), so that’s what I have – you put in your clothes and it washes them, once that is done the washer turns into a dryer … it’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, that and it takes FOREVER to do one load of laundry, normally (depending of course on your settings) it takes 3 ½ to 4 hours for one load of laundry. I asked a girl I know here if she did laundry every day just to stay caught up and she said “yes” … ugh! No more having a clean the house/laundry day … instead I get laundry day/night every day of the week (or close too).

My washer/dryer holds 5 kilos (using the wash/dry function) or 6 kilos (wash only function) of laundry (yes, it weighs the clothes) – which in my mind sounds like a lot … ha! 1 queen size bottom sheet and 2 pillow cases, or – if you cram as much in as you can, 1 duvet, 1 bath towel and 2 tea towels. So you see why it takes every day to do laundry, both the time it takes and the amount the washer/dryer holds.

So, back to the story … here I’m trying to figure out what all the different settings mean (well, I did recognize the word ‘pause’ [yes, the English word] and ‘froid’ [cold]) and really don’t want to lug my laptop into the bathroom (where the washer/dryer resides) to use Google Translate – anyway I may be able to translate each setting but it still doesn’t tell me HOW to USE “the monster”. I try Googling (is that a word?) the make and model of “the monster” and you’ve probably already guessed, with my luck, the manufacture hasn’t made that particular model’s manual available online. Ugh! I looked for other manuals where the control panel looked similar to my model and read them but still felt a bit lost (understatement). So back to Google I go and instead of looking for a manual I just put in the make and model and get a number of hits for You Tube videos. I found that a company in England (yippee – English!!!!!!!!) seems to like to provide videos for various appliances and how to use them. Phew! If not for that video I think I’d be out buying ‘unders’ for the next few months until I found someone to help me.

With all that said, I have found that the French are really into conservation – of all kinds – and these types of washer/dryers do that in a number of ways: 1) saves space (remember, my apartment is only 538 square feet and I know a girl who is living in one just over 100 square feet), 2) water – it weighs the clothes and from that determines how much water it will use and adjusts as needed during the cycles, and 3) electricity – well, I can’t think of how it saves that since it takes a couple of hours to ‘dry’ a load but you do have other options, as example, of only drying until damp (for ironing) … but it’s weird to know it’s drying, then it stops spinning because it has to dump the water it’s sucked out of the load, then it starts spinning dry again.

The thing I learned from all this – is that I’m a bit dumbfounded on how people, before ‘the Internet’ and especially Google Translate, took leaps of faith to move to another country without speaking their language and made it using only a dictionary. I cannot imagine having to need to translate the microwave instruction manual one word at a time, or being able to translate the words on “the monster”, but still not knowing how to actually operate it!

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