Minutes in action |
Minutes on a personal level are one thing, arranging nights out and such is made a bit more complicated by having to nip in and out to ring various people, but you get used to that. However, I learnt the other day that the phone package at the language institute where I work is also minutes based, and that they have run out for the month.
So a bizarre situation currently exists where a business cannot ring anyone and just hope people call them for the next week or so. I asked the obvious question of why they don't just get some more minutes, and how this would be just inconceivable in any developed country. A business nowadays just couldn't operate or survive without a phone or internet, but it appears possible in Colombia (at least I hope it is possible here otherwise I might be looking for another employer soon!). I was then told that they only gets 500 minutes a month anyway which I found bewildering. 500 minutes?! That's about one Colombian working day, and seen as a fairly menial quantity even for personal use, and this leads me onto a more general topic of how businesses work here.
Foreign businesses often get a lot of stick in South America, especially the big transnationals, where they're seen as a capitalist threat to the established businesses of a country. But on another level I can understand how they do so well here. Foreign owners and managers obviously impose their own policies on efficiency, organisation and communication. Colgate have a big presence here in Cali and I can't imagine they ever run out of minutes, and when you're in a competitive market these things obviously work in your favour. Hence if someone wants to learn English at one institute and they don't contact you, they'll just go a few blocks away and enrol there instead.
I do often think about opening my own business and whilst it's never an easy thing to do, no matter what country you're in, if you imposed certain things on your employees in Colombia, you'd already be a mile ahead of the opposition. Punctuality that means you open on time, respond to emails and get a phone package with minutes and you're onto a winner. This is all part of living abroad though, there's some things from a different culture that'll you never understand, but add a novelty and variety to your everyday life that you'd never get at home, but make you appreciate those ever so basic things from your own country all the more so.
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