Brushed off

Kneeling on the garden slope, with a half finished job and the sun fading fast, is not the best time to try and understand how to swap the end of the strimmer for the brush cutter blade. However, we hadn’t predicted we would run out of wire, and we definitely hadn’t predicted the swap would be so complicated. According to the less-than-perfect instructions we were missing two very important parts, and could do nothing about it. So work stopped, and we were forced to plan a trip to the shop we bought it from, to hopefully work things out there. We’d had a good experience buying the strimmer, and could only hope we would have just as good an experience going back.

The next day at the shop we were greeted warmly, and before we knew it the two staff at the counter were reading manuals, taking things apart and working hard to understand how it all went together.

Within minutes they had worked it out. Apparently the two missing parts are found by taking even more of it apart, then reassembling them in a different order. I don’t think there’s any way we would have worked that out for ourselves.

We were already delighted with the service, but when we went to pay for the new wire the lady looked at me and said, “Votre nom est Simpson, oui ?”. Now we had only ever visited the shop once, at the beginning of summer, and yet she remembered our name. Incroyable !