The speed of life and Marks Crib

There are a lot of Expat groups on Facebook, for expats here in either Jakarta or the whole Indonesia. Many expats express their frustration with how slow the Indonesians are. I can see what they mean in some cases. For example, the traffic being still most of the time or in the Grocery stores the cashiers not only scan your items, but they also are ordered to pack it for you in individual bags, which takes time. If you then pay your items with credit card, you will not only register your card once in the credit card machine, they will also manually register your whole credit card number in the cash register, which takes time. If something goes wrong by the cash register, the cashier must call a supervisor to grant permission for fixing the problem, and sometimes the supervisor must call his supervisor.

But so far these things have nothing to do with the people being slow. When it comes to the traffic a lot of the problems start with poor road planning and lack of enforcement of laws from the local police authorities.

And in the grocery store case, it is rather bureaucratic routines put there by the management of these stores, that builds on mistrust towards the floor staff and the credit card system.

I would rather say the Indonesians are much faster than us in many ways. When we got here, we had to buy Mark a crib. We found a used one on the Expat Facebook group which was in our area. Me and Mark went to the guys house by taxi. At this moment neither me or Mark had any idea on how to transport the crib back to our place. Luckily the seller ordered a pickup truck by some app. 15 minutes later the crib was on a pickup truck, and me and Mark in the front seat with the driver going back to our house. The whole transport costed 150 000 Rupia (89 SEK or 9,9 USD). Now think on how this would be solved in Sweden, if you don’t have a car. Have you ever tried to book a transport by DHL or Postnord? I have – and believe me this would take days to sort out in Sweden, and it would cost way more.

When we got back to our place with a pickup truck and a crib on top of it, the bureaucracy started again. The guards forced us to drive to the basement of our parking lot, because you can’t unload a bed in the lobby. Fine that’s okay. While in the basement another staff member comes running with a long form and wants us to fill it out and sign it. I just laughed and told him to fill out himself. And so, he did, but he still wanted a signature. So, I put the pen in Marks hand, and let him sign it. The staff member was fine with that, realizing the stupidity of the form. And Mark got to sign his first form.