VISITING
AUTHOR/EDITOR ARTICLE
JANUARY
2011
St.
Louis German Cultural Society
My
First Business Trip
By
Nikolaus Messmer
Forwarded
From German Cultural Society, St. Louis
When I came to this country in 1958, I had already nine years of
English in Austria, so I was sure, I should make it without too much
trouble. Little did I know about the intricacies of English, the many
idioms and local expressions of the spoken language.
Within two weeks of arrival, I found a job with a small family-owned
manufacturing firm off South Broadway starting as a draftsman in the
truck-body business which in German is known as Karosserie- und
Fahrzeugbau. The owner and his wife worked there in the office, and so
did three other relatives. There were also five non-relatives,
including me, the guy with the heavy non-Irish brogue. The company
structure was simple: the owner ran the company, the relatives did the
accounting work, and the outsiders ran Engineering, Sales, and
Production. They were all extremely nice to me, and things worked out
well.
But it didn’t take me long to run into some trouble. They all
addressed the owner’s wife, who was about my mother’s age, by her
first name, and that is how she was introduced to me. I should have
caught on at that time, but it sounded disrespectful to me, and I
simply could not do that. I felt much more comfortable to address her
with the French title of honor, Madame, followed by her last name, as
in Madame Curie, for instance. That form of address was at the time
quite customary in Europe in situations like that. After addressing
her a few times in that format, she looked at me over her glasses and
waved me over to her desk. “Nick”, she said smiling, “I know you
mean well, but would you please stop calling me madam?” There were
only a few people in the office at that time. She must have chosen
that moment so that she could tell me something that not everybody
else would hear. “Would you do me a favor and call me by my first
name?” After I got home that evening, I grabbed my dog-eared
Langenscheidt Dictionary and looked up that word, the French and the
English version. It was, as I knew it, in the first and second
definition a polite and respectful term of address for a woman, but
the third English definition read something like “the woman in
charge of a house of prostitution’. That part I didn’t know. They
must really have kidded her about the title that little Kraut had
bestowed upon her. When on the next day she came by my drawing board
and said, good morning, Nick, I turned around and said, good morning,
Catherine. She smiled, and we got along beautifully ever since.
The company was building a plant in southern Missouri and I had to go
along for a three-day visit. There were three of us: The man in charge
of Engineering and Production, his assistant, and I came along for the
ride without a specific assignment. We left after work in one car and
stopped at the halfway mark for dinner. They ordered T-bone steaks;
one ordered his rare, the other medium-well. I had no idea what that
was all about. They didn’t have steaks in Sacklas. The cows were
primarily raised for the production of milk. Only after they were
beyond that stage were they sold to the butcher and used for meat.
That was one tough cut of beef. But I have to say that after boiling
it for a few hours, it made very good Rindsuppe (beef soup),
especially when served with homemade noodles or Grießknödeln
(semolina dumplings). But the meat was tough. Franz Dimster coined the
appropriate term, Gummifleisch (rubber meat). Yet, when served with
boiled potatoes and an abundant supply of ‘Gappersoss’ (dill
sauce), it made a delicious meal. The waiter wanted to know how I
would like to have my steak done. The boss had ordered his rare (which
I translated as selten), his assistant medium-well (halb gut), so I
reasoned why not go all out and order mine very well (ganz gut). The
waiter grinned. He said that their cook had unintentionally burned a
few steaks beyond recognition, but officially their highest degree of
doneness was well done. That was fine with me. The steaks looked and
smelled great when they served them sizzling on hot platters with
baked potatoes on the side. We were hungry, and we dug right in.
My steak was a little darker than the rest of them, but I ate the
whole thing, fat and all, ‘rumps und stumps’ as they would have
said in Sacklas, only the bone was left over. That’s how we were
taught at home: you eat everything on your plate. My mother would have
been proud of me. Not much was said during dinner. I watched my
companions finish their meal and could not help to observe - what
seemed then to me – their awkward and inefficient way of eating.
They cut one or two bite-size pieces of steak off, laid the knife
down, transferred the fork to their right hand, and ate. Then, the
process started all over again until they were done with their meal.
The German procedure is more direct and efficient: The fork is held in
the left hand, the knife in the right, and they stay there until a
particular course, requiring both utensils, has been eaten. Of course
today, my visiting relatives from Germany must have similar thoughts
about my eating habits.
After dinner, we continued our drive to the small town in southern
Missouri where our new plant was under construction. We checked in at
a local motel and went right to bed. We were to meet at 6:30 for
breakfast; wake-up calls were set for 6:00 a.m. I got up on time, but
regardless how many knobs I turned, the shower produced only cold
water. I didn’t call the Front Desk because I did not know the
English word for shower and I didn’t have my dictionary with me. In
German, it’s Dusche, and in French, it is douche. Surely, they
wouldn’t use the German name, but French had some possibilities. I
showered in cold water, and went downstairs. My companions were
already there. I told them what had happened. They just laughed: This
guy is something else! Last night, he ate like Jack Sprat and his wife
(I learned later, this was a reference to a nursery rhyme which goes
something like this: Jack Sprat could eat no fat / his wife could eat
no lean / and so betwixt them both you see / they licked the platter
clean), and this morning, he took a douche. They still laughed as we
drove to work, and I laughed right along with them. There is no better
way to defuse a situation when the joke’s on you.
This can only happen in America. Despite of my obvious shortcomings,
they gave me more than an equal opportunity to learn and to work, to
fail and to achieve. I rose through the ranks and eventually became
President of the corporation, which by then had an impressive product
line and had grown to about 500 employees.
By
Nikolaus Messmer