Chilean Bureaucracy- Part 2

Adrian sent me a comment on my Chilean Bureaucracy post by e-mail. I decided that it could quite easily lead me into a blog worthy rant on Chileans in the work place... so here is his question and my slightly elongated answer.

Adrain: Why were you treated so nicely? Is it the institutions or is it the culture that made the difference? No reason why I'm asking this, I'd just like to hear your thoughts about this.

Allie: To be honest, I don't know why they were nice to me. I thought about it for awhile and I decided that it probably had to do more with the general workplace culture than anything else. Productivity isn't Chile's strong point. People work incredibly long hours and seem to get a minimal amount of work done. Since no one accomplishes anything, there doesn't seem to be much pressure on anyone to accomplish anything. It seems to me that a main reason that people in the U.S. are cranky at work is that there is a lot of pressure to get things done. If you are in a work environment that involves customer service, this usually results in being nice and helpful to people, because thats how you keep and expand your customer base. When you are working in a non profit environment, such as a government office, the incentive to keep customers is lost. You are just expected to do a lot of work if you want to move up the chain towards a coveted position of more powerful bureaucrat with a bigger desk and corner office. In Chile, its seems to be understood that in any type of office, not much usefulness is going to happen. Without this pressure, people can just take their time and be nice to you. Like everything, this has its ups and downs.

Ironically, Chileans love bureaucracy. Why you might ask? Well, my over simplified theory I believe that excessive documentation gets them out of doing other things normally classified as work. For example, Chileans love receipts. You get receipts for EVERYTHING here. I mean the bus, a bottle of water.... like absolutely everything. And they often hand write them... and stamp them and give you a carbon copy. This rant deserves to be longer and funnier and it also needs to talk about the national obsession with plastic bags and the impressive quantity of cajas (cash registers) per capita. How is it possible that you would have to visit two cash registers and interact with three people in order to buy a bottle of shampoo you ask? How is it possible that you have NO CHOICE but to take the plastic bag? Well... I'm getting to lazy to continue... and I need to plan my classes for the week, so maybe later.

This blog is starting to suck.... sorry.

Allie