The heat is back. So far we’ve enjoyed a slightly higher temperature in the day and cool nights, but two days ago I had to turn on the fan to sleep. But I’m not going to talk about the weather, I referred to it in passing because yesterday I spent the day outside. I was at the dentist because the day before yesterday, eating bread, I bit into a stone and something in my mouth which was not the stone went CRACK!
Don’t think the responsible party was a roll of the kind they sell on the ration book, oh no. It was ten-peso bread that brought one more stone!
“Elsewhere you could demand that you get to eat bread free for the rest of your life,” my husband told me.
But here you can to to see the dentist at the polyclinic where the attention is free.
They fixed it after torturing me with that infernal machine dentists have, and I have return next week to restore the damaged tooth. The wait time wasn’t too bad and nor was the care, for those who say I always say bad things. As I went in the morning for the tooth, by nine I was in the street with the taste of cloves in my mouth, so I went to the bank to buy — to try to buy — a credit transfer.
Here it was not fast, but the wait was comfortable and the air chilled. When my turn came a pleasant employee typed my data into her computer, and at that moment, BLAM! A transformer exploded and the power went out. It was instantaneous, but “the system went down and you have to wait a moment,” (in reference to the intranet of the national bank).
During this wait, an outraged citizen entered the bank branch. He was making a withdrawal from an ATM in the lobby when the power went out. When the power came back he saw the amount had been deducted from his balance, but he didn’t have the money in hand. He waited in the cashier’s line, which was not short, to get the cash and, given that the outraged citizen wasn’t lying, they gave him his money.
My transfer didn’t appear, the pleasant clerk gave me a card with phone numbers to call to find out when it will appear, and I left behind one outraged citizen and a considerable group of frustrated people waiting for cash from the ATM.
Other systems fail, but the one that should fail, nothing.
May 11 2012
