lost in translation...just google it

This evening, while my husband and I prepared dinner (bratwurst, mac-n-cheese and steamed green beans), we both smelled something burning.  We initially thought it was the food we were cooking and quickly checked on it.  Seeing that the food was ok, we both noticed that the switch on the wall for the ceiling fan had smoke billowing out of it...not a good sign.  I quickly turned off the fan and my husband opened the windows to help ventilate the rooms.  Since the switch did not burst into flames, we decided to go ahead and eat our dinner before contacting our landlord about the situation.

After dinner, my husband sought out the landlord and maintenance man and all three return to our apartment, toolbox in hand.  Given that my husband and I do not speak Khmer and they do not speak English, informing the two of them as to what the problem was became a bit of a challenge.  At first, my husband tried to explain in simple English that "the switch for the fan was smoking".  Looking at their confused faces, he begins gesturing "smoke...coming out of box", yet two confused faces continued to stare back at him.  He then grabs a notepad and tries to illustrate what happened, still the man seemed confused.  He looks to me for help, but I am clueless as to what to do.  He then gestures a person smoking a cigarette.  This gesture causes one of the two men to leave and quickly return with an ashtray.  Although he understood "smoking", he failed to see the connection between the ashtray and the fan switch on the wall.  Finally, my husband turns on the laptop and goes to Google, types in "smoke" and searches for a translation into Khmer.  After just a few seconds, he finds it and shows the screen to the two men.  They instantly know what he means, excitedly exchange a few words (in Khmer) to each other, and the one man opens his toolbox.   Within moments, the switch on the wall is opened and we all are looking at a melted circuit board.  A few more sentences are exchanged between the landlord and my husband about coming by tomorrow to fix the switch and then the men are leaving.  On the way out, the landlord (who ran to retrieve an ashtray) looks at me, then the ashtray and kinda chuckles to himself, smiling and saying "smoking".  Although we struggled to communicate with each other, we all seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor about it.

Lesson: "just google it"

Here's a picture of the fan and light switches.  The fan switch is on the left and obviously not smoking.  At the time, I was not thinking "get the camera", although that would have been a pretty fun pic.

Inside the fan switch - burnt!

The dinner that did not get cold - green beans, bratwurst and mac-n-cheese....yum!