An Exquisite Delicacy

My nice apartment came with promises of good cable television and DSL internet. It took a few weeks for them to get connected, but they have finally arrived and they are awesome My cable tv includes all of sorts of programming from Kazakhstan and Russia, with a few English-language channels thrown in as well. So I now get CNN, Fox News, BBC World, as well as an American movie channel and an American tv channel. The American tv channel is great, but would be even better if they didn't show American Idol reruns 5 times per day.

My DSL internet is also working, so I am no longer stuck using an expensive dial-up connection. The DSL took some patience to hook up, and required me to stay home most of last week waiting for the technicians to arrive, then eventually spending 2 hours on Wednesday morning at the central office of Kazakh Telecom (the communications monopoly), where they finally got the connection working. The Kazakh Telecom experience was amusing in itself. The strangest people kept wandering through the waiting room, including a guy who at 10am was walking around with a bottle of whiskey and some coffee, and came back 30 minutes later conspicuously hiding the whiskey bottle in his jacket and looking rather guilty. (For the record, I suspect that he actually worked there.)

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to my point. The DSL modem that we purchased was made in China and came in a box that advertises its selling points in English. Most of the points are standard-- high speed, convenient to use, safety features, etc. But one of the points advertises the modem's "Exquisite Delicacy: Fashionable outfit that meets modem heimish trends." I'm not sure what "heimish" means, and I had no idea that a modem could be exquisitely delicate. This is obviously a case of something getting lost in the translation.