Damn Costa Rica!
I could use stronger language, but you get the idea: I am mightily pissed off. Costa Rica is a great place to live, if you don’t mind living in the Middle Ages.
This morning, for example, I tried to install my new Internet modem. This is a great new model, with all the bells and whistles. All you have to do is insert the CD and follow the instructions. At one point it asks you for your country, and there must be a hundred countries on the drop-down list provided, but Costa Rica is not one of them. No problem, it asks you to fill in the blanks for six DSL parameters (DSL is a technology that provides high-speed Internet on telephone lines).
Here is where the blood pressure starts rising. The Tico telephone monopoly is totally, and I mean totally, inept. When you get your DSL service, which I already have, it should give you these parameters—or better yet, act like any other civilized country and made them readily available so anyone could install a DSL modem easily just by sticking a CD in their computer.
But this is not the Tico way. Down here, any bureaucracy makes it as difficult as possible for the persons who have to use it. The idea that they are supposed to serve the public is an idea completely foreign to them. The overall result is a severely dysfunctional country. Dragging themselves out of this mess is far more than they can handle.
In the case of DSL service, this means you have to request that someone come to your house and install the modem for you. If you try to get this appointment using the listed number, you get put on hold forever. So you have to do what everybody else does: use your contacts—and hopefully have one who has a direct connection to someone in the telephone company. This may require a bribe. And then they may come when they are supposed to, or they may not.
Just yesterday I heard owner of the real estate office here, a retired American, state that of all the countries he had worked in, over two hundred of them, only Burma and India were worse.
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Comment from James:
If you put all cultures on a continuum, you could place “time-oriented” cultures on one end and “event-oriented” cultures on another.
In a time-oriented culture, the most important thing is efficiency and linear activity. People are constantly checking their watches, saying “I’m running late” and insisting on doing “one thing at a time.” (This is me.)
An event-oriented culture doesn’t worry about being on an exact schedule and is not overly concerned with efficiency. The important thing is that they are focused on the current project, that they are following the correct procedures and relating harmoniously. (This is my Puerto Rican wife.)
With the event oriented culture, the quality and type of relationship is much more important than finishing the task at hand on any timetable or in any specific order.
As an example, in Costa Rica it is very common to be driving and have the person in front of you stop in the middle of the road to talk with a friend on the street. You and everyone behind you wait a few minutes while they work out the details of watching the Seleccion Nacional (National Soccer Team). Or you might be driving through downtown San Ramon and a delivery truck will park and block both lanes while he unloads a couple of cases of Pozuelo cookie products.”