I am now going to attempt to use allegory to tell you the story of my week. You see I've done my best to keep the details of my professional life off the Internets. Most of the time this is a struggle because at times it feels like I've stumbled into some kind of alternate universe. It's not because I have a dearth of material that I don't write here more, often I can't because of the nature of my business.
The people across the street acquired two puppies recently. Our street is narrow. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 hours a day the dog is either whining like it's being savagely beaten, or it's barking a bark that vibrates your brain. In America houses have things like "yards" and "insulation." This is not the case in our neighborhood. Their front porch is about twelve feet from our front door even though they live across the street. When I lived in the US and a dog barked incessantly I would think to myself, "maybe you should take that goddamned dog in the house." And then I would wonder how they were able to live with themselves, let alone sleep soundly, subjecting the wider world to the hellish racket at 3am. I've never been inside their house, but I'm willing to bet it has a lot less bark-worthy stimuli than the outside filled with nocturnal creatures. Also consider the fact that even if I was the type of guy that yells out the window to shove a sock down the throat of their shitty pet, they don't speak English. Besides, even if they did bring the dog in, then they'd have to sleep in the same room with a dog that whines and barks 22 hours a day. Currently the neighbors all want to stomp on the dog's face with a hobnail boot*, but for the owners there is at least a pane of glass between the offending animal and them. Pane of glass is preferable. This speaks to a wider mentality. Even if what I'm doing drives you completely insane, or is highly unethical and wrong; if it's easier than doing something the right way, then that's the way it will be done.
When I went across the street with our neighbor to translate that we couldn't sleep because of their dog, the exchange went something like this.
Me: Hey, I was just wondering if there was something you could do about your dog. It barks a lot at night and we can't sleep. Neighbor-With-Dog-I'd-Like-Dead [Roughly translated using my own understanding of the gestures and tones Vietnamese people employ]: What?! Me: Umm... Well your dog... it barks.... all night. NWDI'dLD [Smiling]: What the fuck is your problem? You knew when you moved into this neighborhood that people keep annoying pets*. Suck it up, white boy. This is your problem. Deal with it. Any other neighbor that comes here and complains I'm going to tell them the exact same thing. Fuck off. Me: Ohhkay.... I didn't realize this was something that involved yelling. NWDI'dLK: I said FUCK OFF!
*There is some truth to that statement -dogs and chickens being the most common, but you don't have to be a dick about it.
I suppose my only hope is that the dogs are only being kept for consumption sometime in the very near future. It is Mid-Autumn Festival time here in Vietnam...
The End*.
*Part of this story was made up to make the allegory a little more...allegorical?
I feel compelled to tell you a story that didn't happen to me. Reyna might write about it, but I don't think there's a lot of overlap in our respective blog audiences. I'm certain that my details will be inaccurate, so we'll call this fiction, but the central action of the story actually happened. Here we go.
Imagine that you're sitting at an airport gate waiting for your flight to board. It's been a long day of travelling. This is the final leg of the trip after, not one, but two eight hour layovers. One in Athens, Greece and one here in Bangkok. All in all, it's been a thirty-plus hour day of flying and you feel like you might be coming down with a cold. Morale is rather low, and you just want to crawl into bed and sleep for 14 hours before you have to get up and go to work tomorrow. Only a two hour flight and a thirty minute taxi ride stand in your way. Also, once you're on the flight, you'll be away from the mother and her chubby 4-ish year old child sitting next to you at the gate. The kid has been messily chomping on a bag of potato chips, talking with his mouth open, spraying chip crumbs around the seating area, licking his greasy fingers and whining at his mother since they unfortunately sat down next to you.
People are starting to stand and mill around the flight attendant desk, like they do when a flight is preparing to board. You check around to make sure you have your belongings policed and ticket prepared for scanning or ripping while you wait for your zone number to be called. Just then you hear the child redouble his whining to his mother. Even though they aren't speaking English, you can tell what the child is trying to say. The language of a child needing to pee is pretty much universal. The translation aided by the child, who is standing on the seat adjacent to yours holding his crotch as he bends and whines. You can see that Mom is doing mental time calculations as the scene unfolds. This is the moment where you begin to regret the fact that you hold a coach ticket.
The mother digs in the seat next to her and retrieves the recently emptied chip bag. You feel a fear that what was once a benign, if noisy, chip bag destined for the nearest trashcan upon rising to board is now being prepped for a new purpose. You hear the foil crinkle as she un-crumples the bag and sticks her hand in to open the top as wide as possible. She holds it in front of the child, still standing on the adjacent seat, who pulls his pants down to his ankles and proceeds to piss in the bag.
At the gate.
Of an international airport.
In the capitol of Thailand.
You hear the pitter-patter on the foil packaging as it accepts its new cargo and cringe in your seat. You try to block from your mind the thought that a child's bare ass hovers less than a foot from your face. If he was startled by gunfire or one of those beeping people movers and suddenly turned, your eye or ear could be in the line of fire. The mother wears a focused look as she attempts to minimize the splash-back, but otherwise appears perfectly placid --a mild look on her face. This is perfectly normal.
When the boy finishes his business, Mom carefully folds the bag over neatly to keep the contents from spilling. She then walks over to the garbage can and chucks the bag in. When she returns, she takes the child's hand and goes to wait in the boarding line, leaving you with a new experience and a story.
Here are the questions I asked, in order, after Reyna told me this story.
"Was it a Big Grab* bag of chips?" Apparently it wasn't. It was one of those tiny bags of chips like they hand out in elementary schools; or the one that comes in your office boxed lunch and contains about six chips. You have to admire the conviction of the mother on this point. She had the stones to hold a vessel that was potentially too small to perform this new and unintended function.
*Is it just me or is the Big Grab in the US now what was once a "normal" sized bag of chips? Am I crazy on this one? I remember in high school a Big Grab would pretty much max out my chip threshold. Now it's like a warm-up. I swear they've gotten smaller. Or... maybe I've gotten bigger. I suppose that's possible too.
"What kind of chips were in the bag?" I'm not sure why I needed to know this information. It seemed relevant at the time. For some reason, it seems funnier with Fritos, or Funyuns. I'm not sure why.
"Did anyone say anything?" No. No one said a word to mother or child. I spend a fair amount of time in airports, but not loads, so I can't speak with much authority on the subject, but I've never seen this before. I have a hard time believing that this is a behavior that people assimilate. I've gotten used to a lot of weird shit since moving to Aisa, but a child pissing in a potato chip bag at an airport gate is not one of them. I suppose there's nothing you can really do about it. I mean, by the time you realize what's going on, it's really too late to stop it. The last thing you want to do is interrupt a peeing child. That's just begging to have your day, shoes, or pants-suit ruined.
"Did any spill?" Sadly and somewhat inexplicably, Reyna didn't stick around long enough to inspect the area. I can't imagine any child has the aim to hit an opening that small. But I didn't ask about the particulars of the way the bag was being held. I choose to believe that the mom held the bat at the bottom and the child cut loose.
I mentioned in the last post that I spent two weeks in the US. While I was there, I thought some thoughts that I don't think I would have thought if I didn't live in Asia. Here are some (with the usual long-winded and odd digressions):
Only people of a certain age know all the words to Oye Como Va by Santana. I thought this while drinking beer* in a bar with some of my brother's friends. He lives in Florida, so most of his friends are, well, old. While we were drinking, the mid-fifties-one-man-bar-band played that song, and a mid-fifties couple we were with jumped up and danced to it. While they were dancing they sang the words to the song to each other. It was actually pleasant to see a couple that age appear to enjoy each other's company. I couldn't help thinking this has something to do with the fact they don't have children. I don't suppose there is really any correlation to the above-stated fact and living in Asia other than I hadn't heard the song in a long time. It's one of those songs that speaks to the time it was popular. There is no way that song would be popular today (the slanderous mambo simply isn't on the radio these days), but it encapsulates nicely what I imagine 1970 was like. When I think of the year 1970 Oye Como Va is the soundtrack that plays in my head while people of all races walk around with afros, tinted glasses, obscenely large bell-bottoms and dashikis. Just like Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm by the Crash Test Dummies could only have ever been popular for people who were plugged in in 1993, Oye Como Va has a certain transportive quality that appeals to people in their mid-fifties. Dun da-dun da-da-dun.
*Miller Lite! Miller Lite so cold it makes your teeth hurt. I never thought I'd be so thrilled to drink icy cold Miller Lite, but they don't have it in Vietnam. It does taste great, but I'm going to go with less filling as my favorite thing about the blue and gold. All the beer here makes you feel like you swallowed a swimming pool after about three.
Wal-Mart offers the same level of convenience as a series of specialty stores. While in Florida I went to Wally World with my brother. We went there because we needed two things: Air Conditioner Filters and Candy for me to bring back for the local staff. In Vietnam it would be unthinkable to have both of these things in the same store, but in America it's every other block*. The Super Wal-Mart is completely out of control. The store we entered covered the area of at least two city blocks. This is not an exaggeration: the Wal-Mart parking lot was bigger than our neighborhood in Vietnam. Once inside**, we spent around 10 minutes just wandering around getting our bearings. I'm actually surprised these big box stores don't have kiosks with maps yet like shopping malls because the place is enormous. As we hiked, I started to realize that it was taking longer to find the two things we needed than it would have to simply drive to two different stores -one that sells HVAC accessories and one that sells candy. Alternately, I suppose going to one humongous store keeps you from getting wet on rainy days. Beyond that I don't see how it's more convenient. Once we found what we wanted (of course they had it all) we then had to walk to a register. It was so far my legs actually got tired and my feet were sore. I was wearing flip flops and hadn't really planned on walking as far as we did. I noticed the beaten down parents dragging their kids through the store and for the first time thought, "It's not the kids, they're exhausted from trekking through the damn store." It doesn't help that dragging your kids through a Super Wal-Mart must be something like dragging them to the top of a mountain -a smoothly paved, zero-grade, climate controlled mountain. Next time I go to Wal-Mart I expect to see a gaggle of old ladies in white nurse sneakers doing laps for exercise. It gets hot out in Florida. The whole experience begged the question, "Will there ever be a box store in America that is considered too big to be convenient?" I welcome your input on this question.
*I think this is mainly due to the fact that every store in America sells candy. I can't think of single store I entered in the US that didn't sell some food product. The vast majority of which was candy. Does anyone other than me find that odd? News flash -this is why your fat, America.
**Here's another one of those uniquely American things. Stores here only have one entrance. At Wal-Mart we went in the "Nursery" entrance rather than the Main Entrance. The Nursery Entrance was complete with lonely checkout aisles and everything; both inside and outside. When did that happen? When we checked out at the indoor Nursery Checkout I didn't see a single shopper buying outdoor items, including us.
American excess is no longer disturbing. It makes me giddy. I had a pretty specific shopping agenda on this trip. I needed half a dozen parts for a bicycle I'm having made here in Vietnam* and a bunch of stuff for Reyna's classroom. The thing that struck me is the options. I went to two bike shops, neither of which carried the right wheels for my bike. So I went to the manufacturer's website. They couldn't ship me the parts in time. So I went to Ebay. Bingo. Wheels are now mine**. This only happens in America. At least that's been my experience. There's only one bike shop here in HCM (a city with a population roughly the same as Manhattan) that special orders parts. If they don't carry what you need, you're looking at a six week to six month wait. In America I went to three stores, and half a dozen online shops to find what I was looking for in the span of about two hours. The wheels were at my house a few days later. Don't take that shit for granted people! There is so much stuff in America and it's so easy to get, it's no wonder people have $100,000 in credit debt. No wonder people feel constantly compelled to buy stuff. It's all RIGHT THERE. And everything is super sized. It's not just Wal-Marts and Targets. All the bars we went to had like 20 or more taps for beer. Even the cigar bar had ten or so, and that's a place that makes money selling cigars, not beer***. Most bars in Vietnam have one tap. Even if they have two or three, the beers are Tiger, San Miguel and/or Carlsburg. And let's be honest here, those are all basically all the same beer.
*This will have it's own post. I about pee my pants with excitement every day just thinking about how awesome it's going to be. That is pretty awesome.
**I feel compelled to tell more of this story. When I ordered the wheels on Ebay, I was concerned they wouldn't arrive in time. The shop had a phone number on the product page. The guy actually answered and spoke English. He also understood me when I spoke, answering confidently rather than pausing and then saying, "okay" in that I-have-no-idea-what-you're-saying-but-don't-want-to-be-rude way that happens in Asia all the time. He then changed the shipping details on my order to make sure the package would arrive in time. If you think that happens everywhere in the world, you are sorely mistaken. Amazing. Thanks Chicago Bike Shop Guy.
***As stinky as the place was, I did like their t-shirt slogan: "A Non-Working Smoke Environment." And the cigar shop doesn't have a humidor. The entire bar is a humidor. American excess? Yes, please.
American politics are completely out of control. The Republican National Convention took place about 100 miles from where I was staying in Florida. I followed politics when we lived in the US. I don't as much anymore because seeing it from over here made me realize that both sides are completely full of shit. Political campaigns are run entirely based on passion rather than policy. Whoever can get people stirred up the most will win. No wonder nothing ever gets done. The thought that a convention could actually sway voters worries me. It's all theater, people. It's all a scheme for rich people to get more of your money. That goes for both parties. For the first time ever, I've considered not voting. In this election I'll make my decision, not based on the policies of a particular candidate, but rather on which administration will make America look less idiotic in the eyes of my coworkers. In that light, there really isn't a good choice.
The world may actually end this year. When I sent this video to my friend in New York and he'd already seen it, I knew we were in trouble. It's possible the Mayans were right. Seriously though, if you haven't had a good laugh today, I highly encourage you to watch this. And then teach your friends the dance. Everyone will know you're on the cutting edge of what's hot in America right now.
And that's a little foray into the twisted mind of your friendly TatVeg. What will the next trip to America bring? Who can know? One thing I can expect from my next visit is to add around one to one-and-a-half Fat Babies (FBs) to my waist line. That appears to be a recurring theme.
And yes, I got paid (finally); and no one has attempted to kick my ass (yet).
Has it really been more than a month? The TatVeg has been a busy guy lately. At some point in July the people I have been forced to work beside for the last 16 months realized that my part of the project was actually somewhat critical and needed attention. It only required three meetings and a snarky email -one which threw multiple people and companies directly under the bus- to get us there. According to their logic their failure to understand what I do or to take my warnings seriously for more than a year is my fault. This was made clear to me when a project manager got in my face a few days after he'd begged on the phone for me to send my email to him and said, "If you ever send another email like that, I will personally fuck you up." He then went on to explain that emails like mine were "unprofessional." He also told me that he would have me fired. I resisted the desire to explain that threatening a colleague with physical violence over an email was considerably more unprofessional than sending an email consisting of facts and dates chronicling a year of missed opportunities and failures to act. I also resisted telling him that since we work for different companies it would be difficult for him to get me fired, especially since I hadn't done anything but my job. Unfortunately for him, my job was exposing his incompetence. The lesson here is that even though a person might have tattoos, dress badly, have a questionable haircut and diet does not mean that guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
So it was on that note I boarded a plane for Orlando on August 20th for a little R & R. America was pleasant and not nearly as bizarre the second time back. I pretty much knew what to expect this time. Toilets that flush with almost frightening force and efficiency and an hour of hot water in the shower. I enjoyed seeing the family, but it also brought up a small amount of depression. You miss so much when you live abroad. When it takes 30 hours to get home by plane, and you live on an 11-12 hour time difference you don't get home enough. No one made me feel bad about or anything, it was just on my mind a lot.
The day before I was scheduled to fly back I got a panicked email from the head of my office. Apparently things that were my responsibility had been installed on the project and looked bad. A meeting was thusly called by the guys that had threatened to "fuck me up" in order to yell, point fingers and assign blame. The meeting was scheduled for the evening of the same day I was to return to Vietnam. I declined the email meeting invitation citing that I wouldn't have time to get home and make it to the meeting with a fully functional brain. I was told this was not an option because it was an emergency situation. Attend the meeting or else.
So I arrived home at 2am, tried to sleep, then boarded a car at 2pm that same afternoon for the three hour ride to site. When I arrived for the meeting I was shown a photo someone had taken of the offending installation. It was taken outdoors, at night with a camera phone. No less than three people looked me in the eye and said, "this thing looks like shit." I had to agree. The photo looked like shit.
So I waited for dark.
Even though the meeting was not scheduled to begin until 7pm, it gets dark at the job site at about 6:15. So I walked myself out to the offending installation to have a look. It looked fine. I quickly arrived at the conclusion that the freak outs over the past four days had been in response to the photo. Not one person had actually waited until dark, walked the 75 yards out to the installation and looked at it. You see the work day ends at 5:00, and to stick around until dark would mean sitting at the job site for a whole extra hour. Instead they waited for me to board a plane, travel more than thirty hours, take a three hour car ride and walk with them to look at what was actually a non-issue. While they were waiting for me to arrive, they took the time to call everyone associated with the project to tell them how badly I'd screwed up. As we stood and looked at the non-screw-up they had a brief, but comical, conversation where they discussed who would make the phone call to the owner to let him know how the catastrophic problem they'd spent the last four days blaming me for was, in fact, not a problem at all. I managed to sleep a little on the car ride home.
When I got into the office the next day I was informed by a coworker* that the company accountant and human resources manager had resigned. No one told our office. She had been gone for more than two weeks before I found out. One would think that it would be a good idea to let the employees of a company know when the human resources department quits. Perhaps I'm naive on this point. Once I learned this information, I hastened to my desk to find that I had not been paid. My paycheck is now a week late, which is why you have the pleasure of reading this post today. I have lots of work to do, but am refusing to do it. I would have left the office already, but I rode my bike this morning and I just stopped sweating from the ride in. Plus our AC is broken at home.
*Not the office head. Not by email from my boss. I learned from an assistant designer that is over here from Vegas to help out for a couple weeks.
I've already raised my hand about this issue and was told that we're awaiting payment from the project and they expect it any minute. I suppose that's the good news. The frightening thought is that the company that employs me is functioning paycheck to paycheck. I also try not to think about what kind of anarchy would go down in the home office if paychecks came a week late. Our office appears pretty quiet, but I don't see a lot of people working. It's been five months since I was switched from being paid twice a month to once a month. In those five months I have received an on-time paycheck once. It was nice that they paid me on time on my birthday.
Can I go back on vacation? Night sailing was considerably more enjoyable than this.
That was a pretty bitter post, so here's a photo of a Hello Kitty plane I took in the airport in Tokyo for your amusement:
Would you feel safe flying in this aircraft? That's what I thought.
