Mas Floor, Por Favor!

So, last night we were called and notified that the flooring guys would arrive "first thing in the morning", right? So, we got up this morning to wait for them. And we waited, and we waited. Around 11:30 (which, by the way, is NOT "first thing in the morning") there was finally a knock on the door. It was a floorer(?). He spoke little to no English. Great. ::sigh:: He gestured to the small patch of linoleum in the foyer. "Floor here?" Thinking he just meant in this apartment in general, I said "Yeah, come on in!" He stopped in the door and looked at the vinyl square again. I said, "Come on, it's back here." He looked confused, but slowly followed, still casting longing looks back at that tiny bit of flooring in front of the door. I started to get a feeling that he may not be clear on what the parameters of his job were. We got back to the sewing room and he saw the concrete square where they had filled the hole in the floor. To say he looked surprised would be a gross understatement. "No, no... es problemo," he sputtered. "What? What's the problem?" He just stood there, looking at me blankly and gesturing to the square of concrete. "Problemo." "That's where you're putting the new floor." I gestured to include the whole room, and then pointed in the kitchen, which was also supposed to be getting new flooring. "All this. New floor." He blinked. I waited. He blinked again. I could see he was not at all prepared for this level of work. He was struggling to find the words to explain to me that this was not what he was told he would be doing today. "Problemo. Uh... uhm... vinyl? Piso? Uhh..." He was pantomiming with his hands in a rectangular shape, about 3X2 yards. Then he pointed at the hole in the floor again... "This big... es... uhh.... ::something in Spanish:: no es.... Es problemo." I'm not stupid, so I gather that he only had a small peice of vinyl on hand, and that it was not enough to cover the hole in the floor, let alone all the space that was supposed to be covered. I scraped my brain for the Spanish I once knew so well. None of it covered construction terms. Were we to be ordering food or naming the members of a family, I'd be fine, but how to tell him that he needed to go get enough linoleum to cover the floors from the bar to the window was beyond me at that moment. Finally, he got out a cell phone and called who I assume was his boss. He talked for several minutes to this person (in Spanish, of course), and I picked up enough to understand he was telling them that his work order was for the wrong room and he didn't have the right flooring and that I was mad. I distinctly heard "La senorita esta angriada." I felt kind of bad, 'cause he was getting flustered and embarrassed, but dammit, if you want to work in a country, learn enough of their language to get by. Come on! If I moved to a foreign country, I would learn their language if I wanted to succeed. It's really rude to make me (the customer) stress and try to communicate in your language in my country.

Anyway, he eventually hands me the phone and says "English?" The guy on the other end spoke only a little more English than the contractor himself. I kept having to ask him to repeat himself, and finally just said, "Look, I'm going to call the apartment office. You guys figure it out." He said they'd be back 'later.' At this point, I called the office and they were really upset. They said that they had a ton of trouble getting the guy his receipt and work order when he first came in, and had already struggled to explain what he was going to do. We had to leave so I could go to work.

I spent the whole day worrying about what was going on back at my apartment. Did I have any floor? Did it cover wall to wall? Was it being done right, or at all?? Finally, after getting off work, David and I got back to see the damage. Well, we were pleasantly surprised to find very nice, (better than the old, in fact) new linoleum from the window in the kitchen to the bar of my sewing room. The moulding had been lifted and reset correctly, and the lines were matched perfectly. It still reeks of flooring chemicals, so we can't bring the ratties back down yet (sensitive respritory systems, you know) but tomorrow the furniture will all be put back, and soon life will be back to normal.