Spanish Efficiency

The hardest thing to adjust to about a new country is its standards of efficiency. While living in Argentina, I learned to be perpetually late. (This would seem a blessing as the threat of being late had once been an anxiety trigger for yours truly, but sadly the fear of arriving late has now been replaced by obsessive consternation over arriving too early). Spain’s norms for this type of thing is only plus five to ten minutes, so this does lend itself to a lot less standing on dark street corners for twenty minutes wondering where the hell your friend is.
Spain’s particular brand of disorganization leaves your average frustrated American thinking that as everyone’s economy heads into the shitter, Spain might take a bit longer getting out. Example 1. A friend of mine had to go to a town about two hours away and use a special instrument to measure a river. The instrument itself was dying the slow death that all things that use batteries die and therefore couldn’t last for more than four hours on any given day. This meant that my friend now had to take this trip twice as many times in order to get the job done. His company pays him an extra stipend for each travel day in additional to what he normally makes, plus gas money, and they lose his day in the office. Instead of replacing the faulty equipment, they’re paying an employee more to do less work.
Let’s try a better example. Recently, my friend Raúl needed to sign a new contract. Since the head office is in Madrid, only a three-hour train ride away, instead of sending the contract here to Málaga, the price of postage being so expensive, they opted to send him there, pay for the trip and the day of work. Raúl in an enterprising manner I did not expect of the typical Spaniard, took the opportunity to go to Madrid to schedule an interview for another job.
Examples three and four are both weather related. My personal favorite would have to be this. On Sunday, Málaga was hit with a furious rainstorm. I understand it included a bit of a twister, which took off the roof of the bus station and sent it flying around the city. This little tidbit of information made it into the local paper yesterday, Tuesday.
My last example nearly landed me in a hotel room with one of my students overnight. A few weeks ago, a couple of my students decided to invite some Americans they knew to Granada for the day. They showed us the city, and during our drive back, it began to snow. Albeit that this is a rare occurrence in these parts, but the roadway practically came to a stand still. Alberto wanted to stay in a hotel for the night because practically everyone was pulling off the road, I was marveling at the way the flakes rushed at the car as we drove forward, and Chris, from Chicago, was coming up with some pretty colorful language to describe the stupidity and ridiculousness of people that refused to drive in one inch of snow. In the end, we got off to check into a hotel, and when the girl before us got the last room, we were told to drive back 3km to another hotel nearby. As we sat in traffic going back in the direction of Granada, Alberto finally decided to call the road service (I say road service here, but there is no road service department in Spain. He basically called the national guard), and discovered that although they had decided to wait a few hours before starting, they said they would clear the road and we would be able to drive home. Now, we just had to wait for an exit that actually allowed us to get back on the highway going the other direction. So, 40 minutes of traffic and two exits later, we turned back towards Málaga, our two-hour drive now totaling five hours. All I have to say is that if the Pilgrims had been Spanish, those fuckers never would’ve made it.