What are the chances?

We went to both supermarkets in Atlántida today: Disco (which gives a 10% discount on the purchase of ten bottles of “fine” wine) and Tienda Inglesa. For both, I used the Alaska Airlines Visa card we’ve had since 1986.

We lived in Oregon from 1986-1995, and often flew Alaska. Charging all office expenses to the card gave us significant mileage rewards – as did showing up early for the 8:00 AM flight from Portland to New York, insisting they start a “voluntary bump” list, always to their objection, predictably getting bumped and a free ticket. After a leisurely breakfast at the airport, we’d fly out on the 9:30 AM flight. Those were the days, my friend….

I generally check receipts soon after purchase, curious about the exchange rate (great right now as the USD has “strengthened” – which, alas, cost me USD 14 as a result of the retrograde Mercury mattress purchase and refund; stay tuned for that quintessentially-Uruguay-business [and retrograde Mercury] story).

I sat down at my computer, placed the receipts in front of me and – holy something! –their totals were within 1.1 pesos of each other! (Prices are still calculated with centésimos and rounded, though the last coin smaller than one peso- the 50 centésimos – ceased being legal tender in 2010, shortly after we arrived.)

supermarket receipts

There’s the difference in USD from Visa online – three cents!

I find that rather remarkable, but then my attention was drawn to the digital clock* today at 3:33 and 5:55 today, so maybe Universe is saying something.

*on the computer; our only other two clocks on the house are analog. Speaking of which (we were?), did you catch this? — Schools are removing analogue clocks from exam halls as teenagers ‘cannot tell the time’

Seems like the teens are stressed, but the accompanying photo suggests a more quintessentially teenaged reaction: whatever.

teenage girl looking at an analog clock

It begins…

This summer (we’re now into autumn), we have been plagued for the first time by incredibly annoying acoustic pollution. Maybe as a kid, you loved hearing the piercing electronic truncated version of Für Elise, because it meant the ice cream truck was coming! Which maybe it did, once a day.

But not all day long, every day. Which is what the apparently-otherwise-respectable-in-terms-of-service gas company Acodike has been doing. When I wrote to complain, they responded that they can’t turn down the volume, because otherwise customers complain that they don’t hear it.

To which I responded, you have not been here the last eight goddam years, so how many customers, seriously, complained about not hearing something that didn’t exist?

End of conversation, needless to say. (I have a bit of a track record when it comes to ending correspondence using logic. A certain attorney in British Columbia comes to mind, but that’s another story.)

So fast forward, and the first deployment of anti-Akodike stickers has begun.

Sticker on trash container, Atlántida, Uruguay

Shut up, Acodike. It’s 2018. We have telephones.

Alas, these are just laser-printed paper labels. They won’t last long. I’ve got some high school kids, equally annoyed by this 1980s-era “marketing,” who may help post these. I say “may” because I delivered them to a couple houses  but not directly to the kids. Ya veremos. We will see.

This label stock is not sold in Uruguay, as far as I can find. I spent $30 to order 100 sheets @10/sheet, plus $7.95 shipping to Gripper, a Miami-Uruguay delivery service, and another $30+ to Gripper to get them here. And promptly trashed a couple sheets learning how to get them to print properly.

But it fits the characteristics of projects I like, such as freelance mentoring of at-risk adolescents in North Carolina, and adopting a bright and funny, but seriously socially disadvantaged 12 year old boy, also in North Carolina:

  1. I (we in the latter case) can maybe pull this off;
  2. If I/we don’t try to do it, nobody else will, and;
  3. It’s worth doing, even if it doesn’t end as you hoped (because it probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean you failed).

FWIW, the 12 year old boy is now cooking at Applebee’s in Prescott, Arizona, and has been awarded MVP (Most Valuable Player) status numerous times, and is training to be an instructor. I’ve lost contact with the others, but that’s OK: I didn’t want be a hero. Helping them navigate a little was enough. As far as I know, they are all doing well.

I stand corrected (trash collection)

I usually let loose dogs Benji and Mocha (aka Choco Mocha Latte) to run with Syd and Gundy’s five dogs in the Villar Wilderness,1 but Benji’s still limping a bit from the accident, so I like to give him rest days. Which means walking each individually a few bocks around here on a leash while the other, forced to stay home, howls and cries and whimpers incessantly. Hard for Susan, and hardly a rest for me: after ten minutes, Benji finally ceases to be the equivalent of trying to restrain a runaway garden tractor. Mocha, on the other hand, is like a turbocharged small garden tractor with defective steering: slightly less forceful, but constant veering from left to right, making choking noises, and of course the classic back-right/cross/forward left wrap-the-walk-human-in-the-leash maneuver. Exactly what Benji did, but not something he taught Mocha. I thik that move is more instinctual.

Point is, I took them different directions, carefully selected rocks in pockets for the occasional loose and aggressive (if only playfully) neighborhood dog.

So I saw new stuff. After commenting yesterday on how often the trash containers have been emptied, in contrast to the recycling containers, this:

overflowing waste bin, Atlántida Uruguay

While it is true that most of the “dumpsters” near us have been well serviced, obviously some haven’t . Another day for this one, a few blocks from here, and no doubt there will be bags on the ground, eagerly torn apart by dogs, cats, and comadrejas (possums).

May be there was extensive waste from a party (as in this post), but it doesn’t look like that. Seems like one “they” forgot about. Notice the sliver of white in the lower right – that brush is piled on top of a discarded refrigerator. Maybe that has something to do with it?

1 In case you’re new here, this refers to 100+ hectares of no-man’s land, sandy scrub brush, islands of pine forest, seasonal water holes, cow pasture, burnt eucalyptus trunks, sand roads used by horses and motos/quads, punctuated by inexplicable trash deposits I have documented often, all north of the Ruta Interbalnearia in Villa Argentina.

Funny thing happened at the recycling bin

I don’t recall when “they” introduced the recycling bins, probably 2012 or so. I see no particular pattern in emptying them; frequently, as recently, they become so overfilled that I simply throw recyclables in the trash bins. I’m sure “they” still go through trash as I documented in a post on 24 March 2012, which appears to have disappeared (500: internal error – bleh).

Where Syd and Gundy live, “they” have done away with the corner “dumpsters” and assigned each house two wheeled containers. One day a week “they” pick up trash, another day recyclables. I question the logic and economics , but no one is asking my opinion (especially the guy who sold the town council 1,000 wheeled household containers).

recycling containers, Atlántida Uruguay

After the last recyclables overflow event, these signs appeared in the bin near us: “Please only recyclables. No trash!”

sign on recyclables bin, Atlántida, Uruguay

Which raises a question: when the recycling bins are consistently overflowing and the trash bin nearby is not, what exactly transpired to evoke this response?

A further question to ask is what Ave Fenix, an organization addressing drug addiction, has to do with the recycling program?

I guess the answer is, it’s a different Ave Fenix. (Ave Fénix=Phoenix.)

Unrelated, I also learned today (via an article from 2014) that given RGB images for print projects, best not to convert them to CMYK before placing in InDesign documents. Fascinating, no?

For these two revelations, you are – from the bottom of my heart – most welcome.

Revisiting a pet peeve

Yes, I have written about this before: here and here (with a cute catch at the end of the latter).

Retrograde Uruguay supermarket checkout

Once again, we’re forced to leave a wide space between us and the customer before, because the cashier is convinced the only function of the “next customer” divider bar is its use as a switch to stop the conveyor belt.

Even after eight plus years here, I still find this incredible.

Situational awareness (lack thereof)

I was talking with a woman in the feria (street market) yesterday, who wanted to know where I was from and what I thought of Uruguay. It’s very tranquilo, she said, a common theme and indeed what made the country so attractive to us, especially after the noise and chaos of Mexico.

But there’s a flip side to that tranqui attitude, which is a lack of situational awareness. People block the entrance and exit of the supermarket as they stop to chat, completely unaware of anyone else; drivers at speed follow the car before them at a distance of 1/2 second, guaranteeing catastrophe should anything unexpected occur; pedestrians step into the street and then look to see if there might be approaching traffic.

And I don’t know if this is uniquely Uruguayan — I can imagine it’s more a Latin American thing — there are the supermarket aisles. More than once I’ve tempted to tap the shoulder of a Tienda Inglesa employee stocking shelves, and point out that if they moved their shopping cart just 20 cm this way they could block the entire aisle, instead of just 75% of it. But alas, sarcasm is not a thing here.

Here’s a recent gem.

supermarket

A store employee has lost interest in stocking shelves, and despite the wide aisles of Tienda Inglesa (unlike Disco), manages to leave the shopping cart in exactly the place where it can maximally obstruct traffic. The fact that the store was relatively empty at the time might have influenced this “thinking.”

But more likely, there was simply no thinking at all. Just wandered off to some other task, or mate break, or ….

 

Another single-car crash

Several years ago, I saw a scene where a car had left the Ruta Interbalnearia  eastbound at high speed.

Today, another.

single car crash scene, Uruguay

single car crash scene, Uruguay

I was cruising the frontage road looking for a mechanic’s shop. Rather sobering, considering how many people I passed on foot or riding bicycles, not to mention the thought of a car flying off the highway into your vehicle.

What’s also interesting is how close this is to the crash in 2012.

crash locations, Uruguay

And the speed limit? Close as I can tell, 60 km/hr (36 mph). Maybe 90 (54). Either is clearly considerably less than this car was traveling.