Guatemalan "Efficiency"

My day was pretty boring. I went to work a bit late. I ended up eating lunch there and I tried to pay Doña Ana but now she is not accepting my money. She is grateful I'm going the extra mile to help Calin (her son) with his internet business, and I think Calin told her to. Anyways, my counterpart asked to go to a useless meeting at the Centro de Salud with him today. Well, useless for me. Don't you just love the idea to go to a reunion, sit down for 3 hours, and plan another reunion to actually do something about it. Gotta love Guatemalans and their "efficiency". I was walking with my counterpart (the manager of the coop), the lady who runs the farmacia in our town, and the president of the cooperative. We started talking about getting the purchase orders tomorrow from our 5 farmacias. I asked them when they think we should do inventory in the farmacias, but he doesn't seem to care. My reasoning is, they should complete inventory first, and use the data from inventory counts to help them create the POs. Well, he doesn't care about that, since he thinks the ladies just know this stuff. It was a mini-argument, which he finally agreed with me, and then he called the farmacias and asked them to do POs for tomorrow anyways. If I had been really frustrated about this mierda I'd probably have quit PC by now. I guess I've still got time to try to convince them otherwise. So tomorrow we get to run around to 4 different towns starting at 7am to pick up POs from the farmacias, while comfortably sitting in-between 2 seriously super over-weight old dudes (my counterpart and the president) in a standard gear shift pickup truck who say the dirtiest things that I never even imagined I could hear to pick up POs from the farmacias. Otra aventura. Could be worse, could have to be in between these guys in a chicken bus seat. That would be painful. There is a fax machine in the coop that could be used to receive faxes of the farmacias' POs, but no, that would be too easy for these guys.

I'll digress on this topic of "efficiency" for a second. Back in November, we were filling out POs in the coop for 3 of the farmacias we hadn't opened yet. My counterpart asked me to write down the quantities of each product exactly the same as the one he filled out. These POs are 5 pages long. I asked him, why doesn't he just make copies and leave the address blank, so all we would have to do is enter the address of the location of each farmacia and we'd be done. Less manual work, less time - efficiency. He looks at me with a puzzled look on his face and said, "Tarush, ¿dónde tenés que ir? ¿Cuál es la prisa? ¿Vos tenés pereza?" This translates to: "Tarush, where do you have to go? What's the rush? Are you just lazy?". And he laughed, like he always laughs at his own jokes, but he really meant it. He just didn't get it. You're prolly just shaking your head like I was doin that day, eh?

It looks like they are planning the asemblea general (annual meeting of everyone in the coop - Board of Directors and all >400 associates) for a Sunday, either the 12th or the 19th. This sucks, since my birthday is on the 18th, and I wasn't planning on spending it here in my town (I'd rather be in Antigua for my bday, ya know what I mean?). I was hoping to be in Antigua with a beer in hand celebrating with my peeps. The General Assembly meeting will start in the morning at 8am (on a Sunday) and last all day long. Maybe they will change their mind and do it the week earlier.

I decided to cook tonight, and I've been craving these Indian-style potatoes. With some bread, and some real yogurt (it really is hard to come by) I had bought from Hiper Pais (the Guatemalan version of Super Wal-Mart in Guatemala City), I was a happy man about to start my dinner, until there was a knock on my door. Sighing, I went to see who it was. Calin showed up, and what a good man, what a good man. He brought tamales. He is learning. If you're gonna interrupt my dinner, especially during my alone time and my homemade meal, I hope it's a good reason. A tamale is always a good reason. :)