When I left for my trip back to the U.S. three weeks ago, our air conditioner was broken. It had been for about two weeks. As I sit here typing, there are currently five men involved in the replacing of the air-conditioning unit.
This brings me to my topic: the little differences.
In most large apartment buildings in New York, there is a general maintence staff. If the toilet breaks, you call them. If a light doesn’t turn on, you call them. Refrigeration problem? You guessed it – you call them. Just one number for everything. Unless it’s a specific issue, you see the same people every single time.
So far, I have had a few things go wrong. The toilet was leaking – this involved at least 8 different people in different stages. First, we had the team that made sure the bathroom was not flooding. Once they ascertained that there was no immediate danger to the building, they contacted our landlord. Then, a representative of our landlord brought another two people along to inspect the toilet. At this stage, they were just making sure I wasn’t some nutter who likes calling in false leaking toilet alarms. That being done and the leak being verifiied, we moved into the “fixing” stage. This involved two separate visits: one for initial fixing, the other for final fixing with the correct equipment.
At some point, I thought about have refreshments set out for all of the visitors. Iced tea, anyone? Cookie?
As for the air-conditioning unit, I have lost track of all the people I have seen. The estimate is somewhere between 15 to 20 different individuals. And, no, this is not a bold-faced case of a gweilo who keeps seeing the same faces and cannot tell the difference. I swear to you, these are completely different people. Which makes me wonder . . . are meetings being held somewhere else about us? How can so many different people be involved and know everything about the situtation? Has there been a memo? And if so, why haven’t I gotten one?
My husband has suggested that it takes so many people to fix something because China has a shortage of viable jobs. They have to invent different levels of one job in order to make room for everyone to have a job. I thought that maybe in the jokes about screwing in the light bulb, we just got the nationality all wrong. Like the game of telephone – by the time it got to us, we heard Polish.
Now, I’m fairly certain that these people consider me the biggest idiot in the world. They have to send a translator along just so that they can communicate with me. That is a fairly big sign of my inadequacy in dealing with the situation. So perhaps I shouldn’t judge.
And, actually, at this point, we’re getting used to the sweating. It’s like having your own private sauna with a bed in it. Sweating out the pounds while you sleep. It could be all the rage on the dieting circuit.
At any rate, I find it more amusing than annoying. I like finding out about these small differences in culture. On the surface, they seem baffling, and I’ll probably never understand it. But you don’t go to China to have american experiences, then, do you?
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