Customer Service, Part II

This week has been the source of some anxiety, because next Tuesday, we fly to the United States.  No, not for a nice little vacation that will become a blog post on here, but for good.  We will be going back to our real lives.  The Kid is ready to go.  He wants to see his friends.  He wants to sleep in his bed.  Zoë and I have mixed feelings.  You see, while the Kid had to go to school here in Madrid, and thus had basically the same responsibilities as he does back home, Zoë and I have been living a more carefree life.  Readers of Zoë's blog have read her complaints about shopping, cooking, and laundry.  They may be unaware that she has also had the time to read 120+ books, most of them acquired free on the internet and read on her Kindle.  Not a bad life, really.  Ask her what she thinks of D. H. Lawrence, Truman Capote, Dickens, the Bronte sisters, Hardy, etc.

I, as you know, have been on sabbatical, writing what I am sure will be an epoch-making book on the Spanish in the Pacific Rim, 1520-1640.  You'll know it's done when you see the long lines at bookstores nationwide.  This has been hard work, but also deeply enjoyable work.  As any academic will tell you, no matter how much he or she likes to teach, being on sabbatical is much better than not being on sabbatical.  Especially when that academic is willing to break up his/her archive/library time with ample professional-development experiences, as I choose to call the many trips we have taken.  Now, I must face the horrifying reality of putting together syllabi, answering email, and eventually - gasp - grading papers.  NOOOOO!!!!!!!

But a more practical challenge lay between us and our so-called real lives back in C'ville, and that was packing.  We are now on day three of the great packing extravaganza, and I am happy to say that everything that can be packed right now has been packed.  Astonishingly, we have one fewer bags to check than we had coming here.  How have we managed this astonishing feat?  I will tell you.  We sent winter coats and boots home with my mother in March, and we got rid of a lot of our clothes.  We had brought little to begin with, and much of what we brought either got worn out, no longer fits us (we lost weight!), or we got so sick of it that we can no longer bear to see ourselves in them.  So bags and bags went off to the local equivalent of Goodwill, making ample room for, among other things, several pieces of ceramics, new clothes (some of them Moroccan), new books, an astrolabe, and a five foot Moroccan trumpet.  Are you surprised that we have an astrolabe and a five foot Moroccan trumpet?  Not if you know my son and me.

Today's task was shipping our books.  This was a colossal waste of time and money.  We all shipped books from the US to Spain at great expense, thinking we could not live without them.  Santiago read his.  Zoë did not ship that many.  I simply could not be without certain work-related books.  Of course, they sat on the shelves all year, as I spent time with archive and library collections I had come here to see.  Now it was time to ship the books back, once again at great expense.  We boxed them up.  Santiago and I lugged them downstairs and into the trunk of a cab, and we went to the post office at the Plaza de la Cibeles, where we experienced the sort of customer service that we, sadly, have grown accustomed to.

"You know how much this is going to cost you?  You're going to have to fill out so many forms!," the post office lady squawked.  There's this particular intonation that people around here put into remarks like this that you just don't get in Latin American Spanish.  It's a rising tone that sounds to my ears like a level of alarm completely disproportionate to the situation.  Rationally, I know that it does not indicate this, but it still puts my nerves on edge.  It's like they're saying, "Oh my god, I can't believe you would be so stupid as to actually ship this!" or "I can't even imagine having the time and energy to fill out the enormous pile of forms that you are going to have to fill out, you poor stupid jackass!"

A small douche-off ensued, as they weighed my boxes and quoted me prices that were much higher than what I had gotten using the internet tool for calculating shipping rates were.  "Well, you must have used it wrong!  Did you say you were shipping to the US, or Spain?  Who knows what you did?!"  OK, OK.  I was told I would have to pay in cash, that the post office did not take credit cards, that it had never taken credit cards, that everyone knew this, that it was part of the Natural Law!  OK, OK.  I had not even mentioned my hope of paying with a credit card.  I left the Kid with the boxes, and headed out of the post office, intending to hit an ATM I knew of two blocks away.  But - Lo and Behold! - there at the entrance to the post office was an ATM, which no one had thought to mention.

I came back to the counter to find they had scolded Santiago for not starting on the customs forms.  "Why don't you get going with the forms?  Don't you go to school?"  Santiago had just fumed quietly, eager to avoid a douche-off.  I started filling out forms, and told Santiago to get a pen and do the same.  I was scolded for including information on a line that I was not supposed to fill out. "What?  Why did you put something on this line?"  She consulted with her colleague, who had been the one to inform me about the credit card policy.  She shook her head vigorously.  When I pointed to the written directions I had been following and expressed my confusion, I was shushed, and told a refrán, or popular saying, that said, more or less, "When in doubt, hold back."  I hadn't had any doubts!  The written instructions were quite clear to me!  But I refrained from insisting on this point.  Why escalate the douche-off?  After 11 months, I had learned that much.  I filled out the forms all over again.  I had Santiago fill out a form.

Packages were weighed.  Forms were completed.  There was much typing and asking of questions and spelling of names and addresses.  She declared all my books to be "gifts" because she couldn't find the button on the computer program for "books,"  and I shuddered, thinking about what this might mean in terms of tariffs on the other end.  A woman tried to interrupt so she could find out about a telegraph she was waiting for (a telegraph?), and she got douched off.  I was charged an exorbitant amount, but there was an issue about my payment.  "Don't you have a €5 bill?," she asked, clearly inconvenienced.  "No, sorry."  I was owed €8 in change, and the attendant had to walk all over the post office looking for the freakin' €3 she needed to provide me with my change.  I gritted my teeth as I thought that we wouldn't have this problem if they just accepted credit cards.

My boxes were off.  My customs forms, with the tracking numbers, were in hand, and I thought - mercy me! - to ask a question!

"How long, more or less, do you think it will take for my packages to arrive?"

She looked at me bewildered.  "Oh, I really have no idea whatsoever.  I know that letters to France take a week or two, but I don't know anything about the United States."  Oh.  I realized that everything she knew about the time it took things to reach different destinations was based on her personal experience sending things to friends and family, but that she knew nothing about shipping times in her capacity as a post office employee.

"Vale, vale. Gracias," I mumbled, turning away from the counter.