A second post - in one day!

As I mentioned previously, my little sister is in Europe right now. And nobody has heard from her. Which doesn't seem too big a deal to me, but my mom is another story. She called M's hotel in Paris a couple times to try to reach her. It was pretty funny listening to her. At first she used her Talking to Foreigners Overseas voice - you know, really loud and slow, and you have to ask if there's someone you can talk to who speaks english. She was amazed to find that the english-speaking clerk had no accent. "And it was so clear, it was like she was in the next room." Funny, that's the same comment she made when I'd call her from New Zealand. Then she explained what she wanted. In the most roundabout way and adding a good number of unnecessary details.

My mom is a very nice person. She's also the kind of person who feels compelled to tell you her life story when she calls for the simplest thing. For example, if she ever calls any place for appointments, she tells the person on the other end that she's from out of town. Including the exact distance. Several times during the call. Also, she likes to explain the events leading up to the need for the appointment.

"I'd like to bring my car in to get the bumper fixed. I'm from out of town, 45 miles out, and I can only come in on Wednesday, it'll be between noon and 1:45 because I have a dentist appointment at 2, and I have to run some errands before. I can't bring it in earlier, I'm from out of town and I have to work the next 3 days, I work an hour and a half away. You see, my son was driving out to the field to pick up my husband from combining, and he was passing a slough and a deer crossed in front of him, so he swerved, but he still bumped it. There wasn't a lot of damage, at least I couldn't see much, and my husband looked at the truck and said it doesn't look too bad, and ..." Well, you get the picture.

So you see why she got transferred to the wrong room at the hotel. And didn't get a hold of anyone there, luckily for them. If she had, she would have explained to the person that she was trying to reach her daughter, who is there on a trip for a university class, and she was only going to be there for a week, and was that the right room? She's usually pretty good at asking irrelevant and rather irrational questions in those situations, such as does the person at the wrong room know which room her daughter is in?