One of my favourite articles ever on the topic of intercultural relations was a collection in the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit of prejudices of Germans against Americans and vice versa, some years ago. I read what the Americans thought about the typical Germans, and there was an unpleasantly high number of things that I could identify with.
I’ve forgotten almost the entire list now, but one point that stays with me is that Americans think that Germans will always walk about knocking on walls, shaking their heads, and saying, “You shouldn’t even be allowed to build something like this.” I was shocked when I read this, because I do that all the time. I try to hide it better these days, but sometimes I just can’t resist.
Take this week’s experiences with my apartment, for example. It is getting pretty cold outside, and so people have started turning on the heating. Now heating in New York is typically done by water steam; incidentally, those pictures you know from movies where they have a hole in the street and steam comes out come from water evaporating on the underground steam pipes. Apparently the heating system of a house needs to “let off steam” every once in a while, and so they have these steam pipes that go up through all the floors of a house and end in a tiny chimney. I have two such pipes in my apartment. They can get very hot, which is good when it’s cold and I want heating and not so good when I find it too warm for heating, but you can always make like an American and open a window. The real catch is that each has some kind of valve which will periodically start clicking and hissing quite loudly for a few minutes until it falls silent again. This is annoying, because New York isn’t the quietest city in the world to begin with, and it would be nice to not have more noise pollution than necessary, but I guess there’s a perfectly good reason why those valves have to be there. Perfectly good from the perspective of American engineers, that is.
And then, my Internet connection just stopped working on Friday afternoon, between sending one email and another. I called the cable company to have it fixed, and they sent a technician over on Wednesday. It turns out that the boxes that connect the cable in the individual apartments of this house to the general grid are kept on the roofs of the houses. As a consequence, there is a thicket of cables lying around on the roof; I had never actually noticed them because they do keep them along the sides of the roof, but it’s quite amazing once you become aware of them. Furthermore, because you can go up on the roof and walk to the roofs of the adjacent buildings, you can (although you’re technically not supposed to) “borrow” a cable from your neighbour’s box. So what happened to my Net connection is that a neighbour from 338 put a splitter on my cable and set up his own cable connection by way of a really long cable that goes down into his window on the third floor. The cable guy will now have his company do an audit of the whole building to get the mess sorted out, but why they don’t just put the cable boxes into basements where they belong is something that you probably need to be an American engineer to understand.
There is one redeeming element in favour of American engineering this week, however, and that is my ooh-the-shiny new Macbook Pro that was delivered on Tuesday morning. I’ve waited a very long time for Apple to finally release the Core 2 Duo laptops, but I can say this: If I had had the chance to spend two days with a Mac like I have now (i.e. not removed from it except by physical force), I would have bought one years ago. This system is at the same time really pretty and feels almost a bit like WIndows in that you get to run professional applications with smooth GUIs, and almost a bit like Linux in that you have a real command line that’s integrated with everything else and not a weird addon like Cygwin. A lot of the things that I’ve wanted to do so far have just worked (once I found the secret documentation that tells me how to install X11 and gcc and things like this). The one thing that I’m a bit unhappy about is that the trackpad has only one button, but there are way too many function keys; it’s a Memory game to keep track of when you have to press Control versus Command versus Alt versus Fn. And then I managed to make one of my external hard disks incompatible with the Mac by unplugging it while the laptop was asleep. No idea what’s going on there (finding tech help online seems to be much harder for the Mac than for Linux or Windows), and I can still access the HD from my old Windows laptop, but it sure is annoying.
