A cautionary tale

After my sublime experiences of swimming with whales on Thursday, Friday was considerably more mundane. That afternoon, I made the idiotic mistake of plugging a printer brought from the United States into a French wall socket. There was a loud popping noise, and the smell of smoke. For those of you who are fortunate to have not learned this the hard way, American appliances run on 110 volts; French appliances run on 220. The printer was broken. It wasn't my printer, either--it belonged to a TA who had brought it down for the two month field course and had kindly let me use it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon driving around Mo'orea. The first electronics store I went to sent me to a second, which sent me on to a third. The third store gave me a phone number of the Dell representative in Papeete, so on Monday morning I called the number, found it didn't go through, looked up the store in the phone book, and finally got through on a different number. Today on a rainy, humid morning I carried the printer over to Papeete on the ferry and paid a charge of 4,800 Pacific francs (US $56) to see whether the printer could be fixed. Indeed, it could be, but only after a further charge of 44,700 Pacific francs (US $525), and a 15-20 day wait for necessary parts to arrive from France. Any new printer I could buy in French Polynesia would cost several hundred dollars, and could not be plugged into 110 volts after returning to the US without the use of an adaptor. I reported these charges to the owner of the dead printer, who told me just to go ahead and buy him a new printer, and send it to Berkeley. This ended up costing me only about a third of what repairing it here in French Polynesia would.

Consider yourselves warned.