The other day we needed to buy expanding foam (you know the stuff, comes in a spray can, squirt it out and it expands and then goes hard, fills in gaps, whatever).

Went to builders merchant and did impressive mime for “expanding foam”.  Failure.  Blank looks all round.  So we phoned our engineer, told him what we wanted, no problem, he will explain to the shop keeper.

Sadly our engineer had thought we said “extending phone” and so asked for a phone extension lead.  The shopkeeper came from the Black Sea and couldn’t understand our engineer and so tried to sell us a letterbox.

I remember I used to be a professional person and things like this didn’t happen to me.

Anyway I found the expanding foam at the back of the shop next to the spray paint (of course) and the thing I called our engineer on the phone, well it obviously means the same in Turkish, because the whole shop found it very funny!
posted 07-02-2007