Like Maverick in his
first game of poker watching to learn everyone’s tells I have been making observations
of everyday life.
But before I get started, here seems a pertinent place to tell you about Tamenji and Mash. Tamenji is a friend Steve and I met when we lived in Watford. Her family had moved to the UK and obtained
indefinite leave to remain, all except Tamenji, who after four years of waiting
decided it was time to come home.
She has been back in Zambia for six years during which time she has
married Muunda and had two children, Judah who is four and a little girl called
Muunda who is 18 months. Tamenji
being Zambian but having lived in the UK is a constant counsel, intermediary
and local expert to us. She has
sympathised with me over our misfortunes, provided insight to the culture and
shown me round Lusaka.
I met Mash when I
first came here with my last job.
He was our local contact and would have been the procurement agent had
we won the job here. Coincidently
he and two of his brothers went to sixth form at a boarding school in
Dorking. We met up each time I’ve
been here and have become friends.
He, like Tamenji, is that local link with an understanding of the
UK. When I told him about one
particular episode with the house he provided me with the invaluable advice
“Embrace the chaos!”
 |
| Tamenji munching lunch at one of our favourite câfés, The Blue Moon Cafe, Woodlands |
Customer service
Do not be fooled -
shops exist to provide employment for employees, not to provide service to
their customers (who provide the income to pay the employees – but you’re not
the ones who need reminding of that logic). This is evidenced by the many employees hanging around their
favourite part of the store whilst you wait 20 minutes to be served. If you ask where a certain item is
located you will be told “over there” with a vague hand waving gesture and they
return to their task or chat. Or
they might concede that “we don’t have”, which could cover not having it in
stock, not stocking it at all or just not understanding what you want.
In supermarkets shelves
are to be stacked at times guaranteed to create maximum inconvenience to
shoppers, and knowledge of a product on a shelf is limited to the blindingly obvious.
Me: “What is the
difference between these two mosquito nets?”
Most knowledgeable
sales assistant: “That one is more expensive than this one.”
 |
| I know it looks empty but the shop was actually packed, people had just given up trying to get down this aisle. Note the hair net, and the bottles which line one side of the aisle, sometimes both. |
Some stock advertised
in the window is actually not for sale.
You might be lucky and
get a helpful sales assistant, who will serve you but then drift off at the end
of the transaction seemingly as if they’ve gone to do one last thing for you
but actually they’ve moved on to the next thing.
When you do get good
service it is such an unusual occurrence that you text all your friends the
name of the assistant and their mobile number to ensure service by them
too should said friend ever happen to need something from that shop.
And should you par
chance, decide to part with large quantities of your hard earned cash, beware
that you have absolutely no consumer rights if anything is amiss with your
purchase. It will have been twice
as expensive as at home and more than twice as unreliable. You rely on your network of friends to help you
find helpful, honest places, but even then if it is for repairing say a car or a phone then
you absolutely never part with the item until you’ve agreed a price and got it
written down because there’s nothing to stop them charging whatever they fancy.
This pervasive poor attitude
towards the consumer extends to the utilities; ZESCO who supply the nation’s
electricity and LWSC who supply Lusaka’s water. If you’re lucky they might give you an hour’s notice of
an outage. Sometimes there’s no
notice at all and there’s nowhere to find out what’s happening. Tamenji, living
in Olympic Park Extension lost water supply for 3 days. LWSC offered no explanation or idea of
what might be wrong or when it would be fixed, much less compensation for lack
of water.
 |
| Trying to do homework by candlelight - first power outage |
 |
| Dinner by candlelight - 9 hour power outage |
Banks
Setting up the bank account seemed
uncommonly difficult but talking to colleagues our experience wasn’t unusual or by
any means the worst, in fact it was relatively pleasant. The bank didn't lose any of our money for a
start. It did however take several weeks, phone calls and visits to the bank to
sort out, culminating in a two hour visit with both of us to get our debit cards
and set up our on-line accounts.
Although we had an appointment to collect our cards they didn’t have
them ready for us. They had to
print them there and then. First the person who did that was on lunch break, then he couldn’t find any blank cards and finally couldn’t get the card machine to
work. All that overcome, we had
multiple forms to sign, and each form had to be stamped a total of four
times. The bank clerk rummaged in her drawer
and selected 3 stamps apparently at random, then looked round to her colleagues in mild panic and reported that she could not find the final one. She had to write in each of the stamped areas. All the forms then had to be filed,
probably never to be seen again.
The bank charges for
everything you can think of and more but they don’t have to lay out what the charges
are. You can only draw a
maximum of K2,000 a day (£200). Often
there’s not enough money in the ATM so you can only draw out some
inconveniently small amount.
There’s pretty much always a queue to get money from the ATM and it’s
not uncommon to have the ATM take your card or debit your account without
giving you your money.
Money
This is still very
much a cash driven society (as opposed to card) and there are a lot of
notes. You can easily hand over 10
or 20 notes in one transaction.
The cashiers like counting the notes, for which there is a particular
method firstly involving getting all the notes facing the same way (I applaud
this fastidiousness), then counting.
If you only give them a few notes they will straighten, count, recount and count again,
presumably to gain the same satisfaction as counting a lot of notes.
The majority of transactions
will not be rung through a till because there is no till. Money must be counted and the item/s
individually itemised on a hand written receipt. Finally you mustn’t forget to stamp, hard with a stamp
announcing PAID. I tell you, any librarians missing stamping books with the advent of self-service in libraries, would feel sated here!
 |
| Hand-writing receipts - yes, that is a computer you can see on the far right hand side |
And if I sound unnecessarily harsh, then know that I’m working on “embracing the chaos” with
the best of them!
No comments:
Post a Comment