To fit the prompt I was going to take a quick photo with my mobile phone in the appartment to show a chaotic place. I mean we all have them, it is a human thing to have that little place where everything piles up what you do not know what to do with. Not if you are Swiss. I discovered this very quickly.

When I was a working woman, I did the job and went home in the evening, leaving my documents ready for the next morning. This was wrong. The Swiss office is a tidy office. you do not make unorganised piles of things, you make organised piles and nicely piled, not with corners turned and pages poking out. Look around you, everyone has organisation all the time. It was a mystery to me how they achieved this. I really tried my best, but eventually I managed to convince my co-workers that it might look like chaos on my desk, but it was an organised chaos. My boss gave up trying to train me and finally discovered that I always found everything. After 30 years in the job, you sort of get used to finding stuff.

At home it was a different kettle of  fish. I married Mr. Swiss and he married me “for better or worse”. Discussions occur now and again who got the best part of the deal. After 48 years we are still together, so we probably just grew on each other. The word “chaos” in the Swiss dictionary does not seem to exist. I searched for it, but never found it. Everything has its place, according to the law of Swiss housewives. You do not see things that are looking for a place to stay. They disappear in various cupboards and drawers, or they have their own container. There is a problem in this system I discovered. We are all human and even the Swiss forget where they put something. I am now integrated in the system and often spend time planning new systems and hoping that I do not forget why.

Of course, I was influenced by my London cockney background. System was a foreign word and we had none. I do not remember once that my parents had a place where they stashed away receipts or gurantee documents of bought articles. It was probably all done by handshake or fell off the back of a lorry, so there was not a great point in doing it. The only documents they kept were birth certificates and I still have my original copy, now 70 years old. Being now Swiss I decided to organise these life’s documents and now have a file containing all of them packed in plastic envelopes, each one separately. I once indulged in a genealogy study of my roots. Altough I no longer do it, I kept the certificates to give to son No. 2 and for future generations. You see, I do not only have a Swiss passport, but it has infiltrated my brain.

Today we had a small chaotic drama after lunch. We discovered the we could no longer unlock the main entrance door to the apparment. The key refused to be turned, it was adament and we were locked in our own property. Luckily we live on the ground floor, so made an exit through the window and entered in the main entrance. We discovered that the key could be turned from outside. We again tried to unlock the door from the inside but the key refused to budge. Thoughts of being trapped and not being able to leave our property came to our mind. After our golden oldie sleeping session the first duty was to call a locksmith. There was a small discussion about him arriving at once which eventually resulted in an hour waiting time. This was not problem, it was the Swiss system. We were not going places in any case.

The locksmith arrived, took one look at the lock and sprayed it with some sort of magical substance. The key would still not budge. He sprayed again, many times and eventually it it could be moved. It seems that after almost 20 years these super resistant locks become resistant to your own keys as a certain amount of dirt collects, blocking the fine mechanism. After 15 minutes everything was working again and another problem was solved. We had visions of having the lock replaced, meaning that all the locks in our appartment house would have to be replaced, which would be quite a heavy financial matter.

Why worry, we are in Switzerland and chaos does not exist, at least only organised chaos.

And now I have something more important to do. I decided that I really do not need a fruit bowl on the kitchen table and have now shifted the fruit to the fruit bowl in the living room. There are still the binoculars on the kitchen table, but when I find a place for them, which I will eventually, my kitchen table will be perfect with only the my Christmas poinsettia and christmas cactus. You have to be organised if you live in Switzerland. On the other hand if you have no chaos, life becomes boring.

Daily Prompt: Chaos cures boredom