Pictures and Power Outages

We are very excited because a new Irish Pub is going in down the road from us. It is called Waxy's (real Irish huh?) and it is taking over the Hard Rock Cafe that was there. The good thing for us about Waxy's is that all Irish pubs English speaking staff! We were walking by the other night and noticed that they had a Help Wanted sign up. It was in english so we were reading it. At the bottom it says "please drop off a CV (resume) and a recent photograph". I thought this was particularly weird that they could request a picture. Matt laughed and said that he had a conversation with his co-workers the other day that explained it. They were talking over lunch and his boss asked Matt how old he was. Joking, Matt said he could be sued for asking him that. He then had to explain that in the U.S. you can't ask about race/religion/age etc. in the work place or before/during an interview. They laughed and said 'oh, let me guess, you probably don't have to put a picture on your resume either'. They were very serious. They then proceeded to all show Matt their resume's and pictures. Matt said that wouldn't be allowed back home and their response was "but, what if someone is being hired to deal with customers, how would you know if they were ugly." I thought that was hilarious. So, of course a new restaurant would want a picture, they wouldn't want an ugly waitress!!

We also had a power outage today. They are working on the sidewalk in front of our apartment and cut the power. This required them to get into our cellar and get through a locked door. Took awhile for them to do that but before we knew the source of the outage, we called our land lady to see what to do. Now, just a back story before I tell you what she said. When we first moved in to the apartment we were getting used to all of the appliances etc. I was doing some laundry, washing dishes and microwaving something. Now this would normally be fine except that all of these items are in one room on one breaker. So you can imagine that pretty soon, the washer, dryer, dishwasher and microwave were all not working. I had not been shown where the circuit breaker was and so I wasn't sure what the problem was. We called the landlady and she brought over a "worker" to check into the problem. well it was just the fuses that needed to be flipped back on, but I also got a talking too about using to much water and electricity. Ah well. So back to today. When Matt (who was home sick) called the land lady and told her that our power was out her first response was "what did she do". That's a fine how-do-you-do! Luckily we were able to tell her that I in fact had done nothing wrong this time! Around 3:30 here we got power back!

Oh, and I did make it to the pharmacist today! Now that we are both sick I figured it was worth the trip. They are very nice, but everything is behind the counter. So I had to ask for the "extra large" pack of Tylenol which is actual a pack of thirty tablets. And then he showed me how to correctly use the cough medicine! Quite funny to think that at 26 they are explaining it to me, but I guess that is their job!