When shit goes wrong

Hi guys, apologies again for the looooong break.

I’ve wanted to update this blog for a while but there was one thing stopping me (well, to be honest, it was stopping me from June to July. Since July it's just been sheer laziness on my part... sorry). But don't worry, it’s definitely not any indication that weird stuff has stopped happening in this country (if that happened I’d be on the first plane out of here). So here’s a little post that kind of explains my absence and I'm hoping now I can get back to blogging every Friday. So, I hope you enjoy.

You’ve probably guessed that Indonesia isn’t the easiest place to get stuff done. I guess considering it’s still a developing country, it’s doing okay overall but some things still don’t quite work efficiently.  And, that may be an understatement because sometimes I find it so frustrating when something goes wrong that I feel like giving up and fleeing the country is a better option than say- working out how to solve the problem. I know that's very dramatic, but  seriously this country is crazy sometimes and I don't even know what's going on...

If you've ever read this blog before, you've probably noticed from the earlier entries that bad things sometimes happen in this country (obviously bad things happen everywhere but somehow it's easier when you're at home). Mostly though, things will be going well for a while and then for some reason everything seems to fall apart at the same time.

For example, earlier this year, both our satellite TV and our internet were broken at the same time. This basically meant that we had absolutely nothing to do (we're a house of people whose weekends revolve around watching football on TV and considering we didn't have internet we couldn't even stream the games). We called both the companies and asked them to send technicians to fix it. Coincidentally, both technicians arrived on the same morning. The internet technician spent 5 minutes fiddling around with something, then claimed he was done. I checked and there was still no connection and told him to try again. He said he had to go somewhere else to check on something and proceeded to spend about 2 hours messing around without really doing a lot. Sometime in the middle of all that, the satellite TV man arrived. As I let him in the gate, he stood there kind of awkwardly (because I’m a foreigner I’m guessing). After a few seconds he finally asked: “So, where is the TV?”

Where is the TV? Where do you think the TV is? It’s not in the front yard.

“Ahh…inside?” I replied.

So we went inside and the satellite TV man actually worked quite well and had the satellite functioning within a few minutes which was great. He commented that it was likely that a cat knocked over the satellite and knocked over the satellite and that was the cause of the problem. My housemate Ika said “Yeah, actually there’s a lot of cats around” and our housekeeper Parmi added: “Meow meow!” Another useful contribution from Parmi.

But this post isn’t really about useless technicians. The real story happened at the end of May I believe when despite the fact that it was supposed to be dry season, Surabaya rained enough to flood my house and kill my laptop (a shopping mall and a hospital also flooded).

That morning I had packed up for a trip to Thailand, flown out of Surabaya locking my bedroom door behind me. When I arrived in Thailand and I checked Facebook I saw that my housemate Adam had posted pictures of a flood in my house, which is just excellent because I'd left my laptop on the floor. What can you even do when your house floods and you’re in a foreign country? I guess the best I could do was be grateful that I didn’t have to clean up the dirty, flooded house. I decided not to get stressed about it.

picture by Adam

picture by one of my housemates but I don't know who

If I'm being honest, I probably shouldn’t have left my laptop on the floor but you hardly expect your bedroom to flood. I mean, I could have really expected it because our house already flooded once before but who knew it would happen again? Especially considering it was the end of May.

pretty cool right?

 So, I came back from Thailand to find the full extent of the damage. The laptop was off being repaired by someone at work. I also found my teaching certificate floating in folder full of water which my housekeeper must have missed when cleaning up my room. My first reaction was “well I don't have a TEFL certificate anymore so I guess I’m staying at EF Surabaya forever now” and I accepted that and felt fine about it. Then, I realised that if I went in to a job interview and showed them what remains of my certificate and said “So, one time I was teaching English in Indonesia for 4 years and my house flooded, so this is my certificate now…” it would probably be quite memorable for the interviewer. I decided it was actually a good thing. A few other things were quite broken such as my banking security device but mostly everything was fine.

The next day I had to go to the bank to get a new security device. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with Indonesian banks, going to the bank is definitely not an enjoyable thing. Actually I hate it more than I hate most things. I try to only go there once a year, to transfer money back to my Australian account when I go home. So I forced myself to go to the bank but I didn’t realise that you needed your passport and your bank book (yes bank book, we still use bank books here afdkfdfkff) to get a new machine and the bank couldn't do anything to help me.

So, the next day I was back at the bank, this time bringing everything I needed. Ugh, my 3^rd visit to the bank in 2016. It took about half an hour to get my new machine- half an hour of filing in random paper work, them taking photos of things with their webcam (including pictures of me, my bank book, irrelevant pages of my passport etc.) and snacking on the free candy the bank provides. 

While I was waiting in the bank I messaged my mum to tell her that whenever things like this go wrong it makes me wish I never moved to this country. She reminded me that things go wrong in Australia too but I still think blaming your problems on Indonesia is better than accepting that everyone has problems in their life, no matter which country you live in.

And the last step of recovering from the flood was replacing my laptop which couldn't be saved unfortunately (the laptop was about to die anyway and was probably going to need to be replaced this year plus I had backed it up about a month before so it wasn't a really big deal). I felt like buying a laptop was also one of those too hard things as it involved a trip to HI-TECH Mall. HI-TECH Mall is possibly the lowest tech mall in the city or even the world but it is surely the place to go when you find yourself in need of a new laptop. I'd never actually been to HI-TECH Mall but based on what I'd seen when I'd driven by I imagined it being like a dirty market, full of people staring at me. I tried to get the IT guy at work to help me but he seemed too busy to help. I considered asking him on a date and suggesting we go to HI-TECH Mall, but using someone for their laptop expertise doesn't really seem nice to me.

So I went alone.

I had envisioned HI-TECH Mall as an awful place. You might think I was being dramatic (and I was) but actually being negative worked well because when I got there it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I went straight to the Lenovo dealer and picked up this laptop. As soon as I’d paid, the lady in the shop advised me to go “tukar hadiah” ("exchange gift"?) which I had no idea what she was talking about, she walked me outside the shop and pointed at a desk with a sign that said “redemption” and told me to “Just go there”.

So I did. And then the most amazing thing happened. They made a mug. With my face on it. I take back all the bad things I’ve said about HI-TECH Mall. It’s clearly the greatest mall ever. Buy a laptop, get a free photo mug.

I made a collage of my visit to Hi-tech Mall to send to my Dad

So now I have a mug with my face on it, I spend my classes talking to my students about how beautiful the mug is. It's an amazing conversation starter really ("My brother has that mug too" "Your brother has a mug with my photo on it? That's weird" "Miss! No!"). Actually the mug went missing for a few days and I freaked out and thought I must have an office secret admirer who took it home but then it turned out that the cleaning staff just put it somewhere else and I got it back. The secret admirer option would have been more interesting though super weird. But -probably more importantly- I now have a laptop and can continue this blog (I know it seems like I'm more excited about the mug).

So, I apologise for the long delay, hopefully I'm back on track now. Thank you for continuing to support this blog.
See you next Friday!