Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow

Val and I ate dinner at a new place in town, just down the road from where we live.  We each had a glass of wine and shared a third.  No big deal.

Or so we thought.

On the drive home we came to a roadblock where the police were putting drivers through a sobriety test.  In France, this means blowing into a tube attached to a machine that tests your blood alcohol level.  Val has been doing all the driving because of my broken wrist, so she got to take the test.

I thought this was would be easy but then found out that Val was “feeling the wine just a little bit.”  Hm, I guess she had more of that third glass than I thought.

She told me later that she was afraid she might be handcuffed and hauled off to jail.  This made her so nervous that her usually reliable French went right out the window.

To make it worse, she had no idea how a French Breathalyzer works or what she was supposed to do.  This made for some interesting back and forth.

First, the cop told her to blow into the tube.  Val understood “blow” but not “into the tube.”  So she sort of puffed in the general direction of the tube.

The cop was not amused.

Then he told Val to do it again, kind of pantomiming with the machine how it worked.  This time she understood.

But Val didn’t know that every driver gets a fresh, new tube.  She figured that other people had been using it before her.  And there’s no way she was putting that icky thing in her mouth.  So she just got closer to the tube and blew harder.

Now the cop was getting agitated.  And he had a gun.

Finally, after more gesturing and pantomiming, Val understood what to do and reluctantly blew in the tube.  The cop looked at the machine, very seriously at first, then smiled and said “parfait !” and sent us on our way.  I think he was glad to be rid of us.

I found the whole thing hilarious.  Val, mmm, not so much.  And she’s told me in no uncertain terms that next time I’ll be driving.

KVS