Susan de la Vergne

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that electricity in Europe – “on the continent” – is the same as it is in the UK. True, it’s all 240V, but the resemblance ends there.

This becomes a problem when you bring the wrong adapter for your laptop. France, Italy, Spain have rounded two-prong outlets. But if you take your continent-ready two-prong adapter and look for a similar outlet in your UK hotel room, you can forget it.

That wasn’t the least of my problems when I went to the UK recently to teach “Effective Technical Presentations.”

My trouble actually began when an airline (who shall remain nameless, except to say it was voted the Best Airline in the World in 2007) lost my only piece of luggage. Of course I had my laptop with me as a carry-on. At the last minute, I’d tossed in my class props because I’d had a passing thought: What if, for some reason, my bag didn’t arrive with me?

And then it doesn’t.

So I file a lost luggage claim at Heathrow airport. The clerk says my luggage got as far as Chicago, then disappeared. “Disappeared in Chicago” sounds ominous to me. I picture my black wheelie bag wearing cement overshoes, slowly sinking to the bottom of Lake Michigan.

But I shake off the thought and engage a taxi, and head off to a small town north of London.

At the hotel, I let the front desk staff know about the luggage which will follow me here. They’re gracious and sympathetic. I do a bit of shopping to hold me over and then attempt to fire up my laptop. It’s then I discover the mismatch between my laptop converter and the wall outlet. Despair starts to set in: I not only have nothing to wear, but I can’t get online either.

It’s late. I go to bed. This will all be better at dawn, I’m sure. But, being eight hours off my usual SHED-ule, I awake at 3:30 a.m. So I switch on the telly and settle in to watch an old re-run. It’s a one hour drama, but it’s over in 45 minutes. No commercials.

At 4:15, I start to piddle around but before long I can’t stand it anymore, and I go to the lobby bar in search of coffee.

A man with a familiar accent is also in search of coffee. He asks me how I am. I tell him about my lost luggage and the laptop plug-in problem. We’re standing in the hotel foyer, and to my happy surprise, he asks to join me. He’s either very nice or very brave, offering to hear more about one lone woman’s plight abroad. He tells me he’s been in the UK a month, and he works in flight safety. He knows something about power conversion and offers helpful advice.

“Ask at the front desk. I bet they have a converter.”

They do, but their adapter, while it plugs into the wall okay, doesn’t accommodate my laptop’s grounded three-prong input. When I take it back, the front desk clerk looks at my connector like I brought it here from outer space.

“That’s a tough one,” he says, staring at it.

It is? I ask myself. It’s standard issue where I come from. But I pretend he’s right.

“Yes, I’m sorry it’s strange,” I hear myself saying.

“Try Asda Market,” he suggests. “They may have one.”

But they don’t. The guy at Asda Market recommends another store. No luck. They guy at the second store recommends Maplin’s Electronics.

If you’re lost in the UK without a suitable adapter for your technology, take your cable to the nearest Maplin’s, and helpful people there will “sort you out” – after they recover from their amazement that you have a three-prong grounded plug. (“I’ve never seen one like that!”)

Meanwhile, back at the hotel, I check at the desk every hour or so about my luggage. The front desk staff begin to regard me as if I had intentionally arrived without a suitcase so I could stop by their desk every hour and talk to someone. Especially after I tell them the airline has promised it by noon. Noon comes and goes, no bag. One o’clock, then two, no bag.

“There she is again,” they say to each other, “pretending she has luggage coming. It’s sad, really.”

At six o’clock, the phone in my room rings.

“I’m pleased to let you know your luggage has arrived. Shall I have someone bring it to you?” (They’re not afraid of long sentences here. They didn’t say, “Hello, your bag’s here,” which is more what I expected.)

I’m sure, in this case, they are actually pleased my bag arrived because it proves there is luggage and they can stop worrying there is a sad case in room 132, waiting for a suitcase that isn’t coming.

The bag arrives intact. I’m delighted.

The internet and the whole electronic infrastructure we’ve put in place in the last decade or more led me to believe that the world is, in fact, pretty seamless. We chat online easily. We swap everything from serious ideas to idle chatter. We partner up in virtual teams that span the globe. All that is possible today, in real-time, and it’s fast and easy. Sometimes it’s even gratifying.

The physical realities of connecting our global economy are, however, not quite so well worked out. Jet lag and baggage handling, language and cultural differences, combined with simple things we don’t know about each other’s countries (how many prongs?), will trip us up for awhile yet. We’ll just have to be patient and remember what we learn about other places, other practices, and share it with others who venture far from home.
 

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