Volcanic Panic

While walking back to my apartment on this beautiful clear sky evening, I saw two men talking, one was tall and lost and sounded and looked German, the other one was an average height Queens guy. The German was asking for help and the Queens guy didn’t understand him, got frustrated and fled. I decided to turn around and help…Hell, I took one semester of German.

I asked the guy what language he spoke and he said German and I said, “Ich kanne ein bichen Deutsche sprechen.” After that he spoke rapidly and with some distress and I didn’t understand a word he said, unless he massacred a little English, which he did. Something about his son in Miami. Then, he showed me his cell phone and was asking if the number displayed was a Miami number. His son lives in Miami. This man had just left Miami, “Where it was nice and warm and the people were nice.” He was unhappy with being in New York. Had no plans to be here. And he asked me three different times if, “This is Chelsea.” I said, sadly, “No. Queens.”

He was staying in an apartment in our building with two women with a small common area, which distressed him. Sounds like they got on some sort of help-and-we’ll-give-you-cash list by some airline. We do not live far from LaGuardia. We are also close-ish to JFK.

So this German guy (from Frankfurt) left his son in Miami, flew to New York and was on his way to Frankfurt when the plane turned around and dropped him back at the airport. Volcanic ash trouble.

But I still did not understand what he wanted. At first, I thought his son was on some sort of lam and this man was trying to figure out, by looking at the area codes, where his son was hiding. But that was not the case as I realized not only had he been to Miami looking for his son, but he actually had been with his son. But what was the deal about this Miami phone number? Basically, it was all about this area code problem and I was trying to look up the area codes on my cell phone web browser but my not-state-of-the-art Samsung Blackjack phone had trouble, so clearly we needed to get to a computer so I could check out this area code, though my phone did show on a googled site, for a second, that it was Miami. But we needed confirmation even though I had no idea why.

So I invited Mr. Deutschland up to my apartment. He was Euro-polite and did not want to intrude and also maybe afraid I was going to chop him up in the bathtub. But we proceeded. I fired up the computer and I looked up the area code and sure enough it was Miami. Then we got to the heart of the trouble. He showed me his phone and he showed me what he had been doing---sometimes placing a 0 in front of the number, sometimes a 1, sometimes a 01. He indicated by deleting numerals that he did not know if these other digits should be there in order to make the dialing go through. Ah! He needed to stop all that. So by miming, I told him to delete the 0 and the 1 and just dial with the area code and phone number and that would work. (Attention all international travelers. Usually when you go to another country your cell phone gets zapped into the local cell system. So dial as if you live there. When in Rome…)

Anyway, he dialed just the area code and phone number and started to hear a ring on the other end and was pleasantly surprised. His son answered, the German language flew, I got every thirtieth word…and I started putting away the day’s stuff, mail, paper, etc. Clearly, there was much talk about flugs, which are flights or planes. His son and he were figuring it all out. The deal: This man had just been in Miami with his son, had left Miami to fly through NYC to go to Frankfurt, came here, got stuck here, got stuck in a small apartment, and wanted to get the hell out of here but could not and so he had to speak to his son in Miami, using the right phone number, who is fluent in German and English to take care of all this.

In the middle of his German conversation on the phone, he shook my hand so as to say goodbye and Danke. And he was out the door and into the elevator.

Volcanoes. Affecting the streets of Queens.