A few weeks ago, our fridge broke. No matter what we did, we always had a thick layer of ice on the walls and half of our food was freezing. When the repairman came, the problem was diagnosed as irreparable. Since the fridge and the freezer are connected, it was quite a big kitchen item that hence needed to be replaced.

Last week, two technicians were supposed to deliver and install the new fridge and freezer. Now, as you might remember, there is construction work going on around our buildings. A lot of construction work. Actually, there is no direction where you don’t see diggers, front-end loaders, circular saws, hills of digged-out soil or big piles of stones. Since two weeks, the way from our door to the street was being worked on and there was no possibility to get to the street without climbing hills of soil or carrying the stroller over deposed gravel. And, to make it even more fun, it has been raining for the last days.

(before the rain started)

So when our fridge-freezer arrived, the technicians called me and asked (slightly worried) how they were supposed to manage the way from the street to our door. I was worried too: on that particular day it did indeed look like a hopeless undertaking to get a 2 meter high fridge/freezer to our doorstep. I halfheartedly suggested to ask the construction workers to help them carry it over the construction side or, alternatively, carry it all the way over the muddy grass/garden.

The answer was a very Swiss one:

“Oh, there won’t be any problem carrying the fridge. That we’ll manage easily. The problem is that we will carry dirt into your flat!!”

(My response that it shouldn’t be a problem since I could easily clean the three meters that lead from our door to the kitchen didn’t impress them. Instead they were wearing blue plastic bags on their shoes when they rang. And they were not wearing them in the flat, like I would have done, but they were wearing them outside to make sure that their shoes stayed absolutely clean)