Irish Post Office

Last year I had lamented over the Italian Post Office, and its brazen, unabashed incompetence.  So now we're here in Ireland, and things are different.  

For starters, the Irish Post Office has grabbed Christmas by the horns.  Barely three days had passed since Ireland's weeklong celebration of Halloween, and they have pulled out all the stops with mechanised Santas, nativity scenes, and general holiday mayhem all splayed out in their voluminous lobby.  It is clear they do not intend to play second-fiddle to Marks and Spencer or Arnott's or any other high-falutin' department store when it comes to the holiday spirit.  

The employees are very personable, in a next-door-neighbor kind of way: there is no faked smile, or the pretense of them being overly excited you have appeared at their window, but once there will happily chat with you and answer your questions.   And while no one would accuse them of being on technology's leading edge they have their Italian brethren beat hands down when it comes to knowledge and execution of their jobs.  There are still anachronisms for sure--this week we bought 140 holiday stamps, and the clerk printed out a receipt with 140 line items for each individual stamp--but at least they had the stamps at the ready and didn't have to meander for 15 minutes in the back room looking for them as if they worked in a hardware store and not a post office.  (I don't mean to denigrate Italians, by the way--they are wonderful people, except for three of them in the downtown Bergamo post office who, if there is a god, will soon be burning in hell.)

So good on you, Irish Post Office, you represent your country well.    

 

Where I've Been So Far

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Although it is not necessarily below me, I keep records of my whereabouts not for vanity but for the IRS, who takes a keen interest when I leave its immediate jurisdiction.  My time in France has all been for work, in Ireland all for pleasure, and Italy and Germany a mix of the two.  We traveled to Greece for our big birthdays this year, to Barcelona prior to the Catalonia independence movement troubles, and a brief stop in Switzerland on the way through to Germany.  The UK was a mix of work and vacation too, and includes our big trip to Scotland for the Clan Macnab International Gathering.  In August we traveled back to Kentucky, Ohio and DC for a wedding and to catch up with friends and family.  

The rest of 2017 will be in Ireland, with Stewart's brother and sister-in-law arriving for the holidays, and me traveling to the U.S. and Caribbean for work beginning in November.  More on that later.  

Holiday 2016 Reader Recap, Part 2

(Part 1 is further down the page)

8.  I have recently started genealogical research on the McNabb family line.  What I have learned so far is that U.S. Federal Census field representatives and County Clerks who record marriage, birth and death records, pride themselves in tweaking names, ages, and locations just enough to make the identified individuals seem like your relatives, but not without placing a nagging doubt that you're being conned.  

9.  We are headed to The Netherlands tomorrow for a couple of weeks.  Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, with a two day diversion to the Isle of Man in the middle of it.  

10.   Next February we are looking to celebrate our 70th and 50th Birthdays, and our 20th Anniversary.  If we can hold our bodies together by then.   Stephen's Dad turns 80 next Summer, so the celebrations may continue for most of the year.

11.  Next August we are attending the Macnab Clan reunion in Killin, Scotland, and we're participating in Edinburgh's Military Tattoo as a part of it.  

12.  Stewart's son Chris still lives in Spokane, daughter Caroline still lives in Melbourne.  Stephen's parents are still in Lexington, his sister Lori and her extended family in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.  

Holiday 2016 Reader Recap, Part 1

Greetings all.  A quick recap of the last 18 months: 

1.  Stewart and I moved to Europe in the summer of 2015 after I was offered a serendipitously cool job.  We are currently living in Ponteranica, Italy, in the foothills of the Italian Alps.  If you have a map, find Milan and then look to the north-northeast.  

2.  I'm flying a private client to and from his yacht and here and yonder around the Mediterranean.  If you're familiar with The Game of Thrones, "the client has no name."  Even if I told you, it wouldn't help:  he's a non-celebrity amongst us common-folk.  

3.  Stewart is still retired.  You'll find him most days either on Facebook, at a Toastmasters meeting, or at the grocery store in the Italian meats section. 

4.  Life in Europe is quite different from the U.S., in many ways.  They're not big on ice cubes here, for example.  Plus you run into some amazing 500+ year old piece of history about as often as you'd run into a Starbucks back the States.  

5.  We try and travel as much as we can.  Northern Italy is often the destination, although we've been to Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland over the past year (and to France quite a bit for me, for work.)

6.  We still have our home in San Diego, where we will return some day.  Our Italian landlords are our American tenants.  

7.   We are moving to Dublin next summer.  On a related note, Stewart is now an Irish Citizen.

Quote For The Day

“One of the saddest lessons in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
— Carl Sagan

Poste Italaine

Having had the misfortune of interacting with more than my fair share of them, I generally take a dim view of government bureaucracies.  By extension I also find myself reflexively suspicious of those who work in them, although I try not to pre-judge, pre-judger that I am.  

I have also noticed the beauracracies of other countries never fail to disappoint in this regard.  I thought the California DMV set an exceptionally low bar for customer service, but they never made me cry the way French Immigration can.  I thought the TSA took the cake for being able to simultaneously humiliate and infuriate their customers, but then I was introduced to the Cannes Airport Bureau of Badges.  

Here in Italy we have been able to minimize our interaction with most Italian bureaucracies, which may fuel our slightly prejudiced view that Italians are wonderful, engaging people, across the board.   But there has been one glaring exception:  the Italian Post Office.  

It is a terrible institution.  It performs many in-person services that in a normal western country no longer exist, due to the internet.  They are inexplicably incompetent, and/or inexplicably ill-prepared for their jobs, which fuels an anger in Italians you often don't see.  Last night, the guy ahead of me in the queue became unglued, unleashing a stream of vitriol at the clerks.  Up until that point they had been too busy to serve any of us, but they stopped pecking away at their keyboards long enough to scowl right back at the customer, and then went back to whatever it was they were doing.  

In order to pay the bill for my leading-edge cell phone, whose service is provided by a leading edge wireless company, I have to go to the Post Office with my paper bill.  The clerk spends a minute or two seriously contemplating it, enters what appears to be a hundred or so separate data elements into her computer, and then runs the bill through a reader that was built some time in the late 1980's.   To cap it all off, I am then charged for the privilege of appearing before her and extinguishing my cell phone debt.  

And you still have to lick many of their stamps.   How is that still a thing? 

Outside the Post Office, there are hordes of wonderful Italians.  Inside the post office, an alternative universe lays waiting to grind all the happiness out of your day. It is Italy's curious doppelganger.  

 

 

Take It Or Leave It

Stewart and I use Airbnb almost exclusively when we travel, for a number of reasons involving cultural experiences and, because we are mostly frugal, cost.  (If you aren't familiar with Airbnb, they are essentially a vehicle through which ordinary folk, not otherwise professionally connected with the hospitality business, can rent out their extra bedroom or home for short-term guests.)

They have grown quite large and influential for an internet startup, and their impact on the hotel business has been likened to that of Uber's on the taxi business.  

This afternoon I received an e-mail from them, stating they have a new "Community Commitment," which reads as follows:  "You [the guest or the host] commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias."  They continue to explain, in a very nice way, that if you cannot abide by such a community commitment then you are not welcome.  Please cancel your account and stop visiting our website or using our app.  Buh bye.  

It is sad that in 2016 Airbnb felt compelled to have to state that, and even more sad that their community commitment was aimed squarely at religionists who fail to grasp the fundamental, core principles their savior tried to emulate.  But in any case, good on you, Airbnb; we'll be staying with you even more often now.