Author: doug

Correa de secadora

Last Saturday, our clothes drier stopped spinning. Not entirely. Just when it had anything in it, the only time that matters.

I tore into it, took the breaking belt to find a replacement. Not happening in Uruguay, in a smallish town, on a Saturday. So Monday I went to the local appliance store. Nope. Have to go to Montevideo. How, I asked, do people in Rivera and Artigas (places several hundred km away) live, if everything has to be done in Montevideo?

The answer: telephone.

By now, I’m comfortable in person in Spanish, but I’m still a little hesitant to phone, because if you get a speed-freak mumbler on the other end (the phone company, a government entity, comes to mind) , you’re going nowhere fast. In this case, I was in luck. I confirmed datos by email, transferred money to their bank account online, and at 9 AM the next day heard a beep-beep of the truck delivering the belt.

Which was not the size I had ordered.

I emailed the company, and long story short, two and a half days later we’re up and running again. They paid the second shipment, and the return of the first.

Kudos to AMT Aspiratutto SRL!

 

 

Bags of shit

bagsoshit

Sheep manure, to be precise: the latest cargo of the pobre Meriva. It’s been very dry — too dry — for a while, so the abono is light and not smelly. I expected to do all the work, but the lovely Uruguayan couple insisted on helping. They have 120 animals. No shortage of shit 😉

My neighbor has offered to turn over the soil for a garden spot with his tractor. I may have a real garden this year, for the first time since the early 1990s.

Before internet. There’s a connection.

 

 

 

Wow — customer service in Uruguay!

I bought a bread maker from Tim and Loren, who returned to the Untied Snakes couple months ago. It’s been great, but of course had no manual (no used bread machine ever does), and I was too dense to figure out if it would do just dough (yes, of course), so I emailed the Uruguayan company through their web site asking about a manual. More then once. With no result. Months ago.

I figured I’d try one more time before resorting to the phone. I can manage most affairs in Rioplatense, the local bizarrely accented Spanish, just a couple days ago completing some legal affairs without any English backup, but the phone can be weird if you get someone who decides your obvious non-native status is reason to speak as fast and unintelligibly as possible. Which I find to be the norm.

Off went the email. And less than four hours later, a series of scans of the manual. JPEGs, not the original PDF, meaning someone actually had to make an effort to scan a physical manual, and did.

Bravo! Seriously. I’m profoundly impressed and grateful.