The Week from HELL

Oh. My. God. I am so blissfully happy it’s Friday. I don’t care how those little boxes line up on the calendar, I’m marking today–THIS DAY–as the end of my week from Hell. Dante doesn’t know shit. To type it all out would take forever, but I’ll just hit the highlights.

One of the most frustrating things living in Mexico is how slowly everything moves. For many, life is like a permanent vacation, with few consequences for tardiness, because practically everyone else is the same way. It’s not trying to get away with as little as possible or being lazy, it’s simply at an ingrained cultural level, there’s no hurry unless there really needs to be one. Regarding a pending problem with school administration, I spent two days shuttling from office to office talking with people, each of them telling me their very reasonable side of the story, but always ended with, “But because of [problem with next-door office's issues], I can’t help you.” Repeat 5x, try to talk to person in charge but get met with secretary who specifically says they remember explicitly a phone conversation that was had for 90 seconds two months ago and how I’m incorrect. Oh, and I can’t see “person in charge,” because nobody knows when she’ll be back. Not her secretary, certainly not, who can’t (or won’t) even confirm if she’s in town.

But compared to what I had to deal with financially, the above was a cakewalk. I was trying to get things set up to rent a house and do the signing, etc. on Wednesday. Tuesday, the day before, the realtor tells me that the owner wants everything paid in US dollars in cash. I don’t have a bank account here in Mexico; the US account we’ve always used does just fine here for ATM purposes, and there’s always the credit card route. However when you’re talking in the thousands of dollars, pulling it out of an ATM (in equivalent currency that’s worth 10x less, mind you) is just not possible. For a crippling 2.5 days, I was figuring out how to get money, ready to go in my account, here in my hand. I couldn’t do a standard wire transfer, since you initiate that in person. Online, there were rules about either being with the same bank in a different location or if a different brand of bank, I had to own the account. Both strikeouts. Adding insult to injury (but good to know), my bank has ALWAYS had a service to send money to Mexico for free. LOVELY! Thanks for letting me know, now that I am in Mexico and can’t go into a US branch to paper-sign the agreement form. The whole reason I agreed to pay the landlord in dollars was so I could write a check; in turn, he got paid in a much more stable currency. Only 36 hours prior did he discover that his bank’s terms for foreign checks were unacceptable (they were), and that set off the mad scramble. Since we’d already given notice here and they’re waiting for us to move out next week, the prospect of potentially scrambling for a place to live vs. not being able to change bank/international trade rules became a rock vs. hard place squeeze.

In the end, many phone calls with lots of small but incorrect details that cost me serious time, and energy. Just as I was going to explode, the last person I spoke to at the bank said, “Why don’t we just up your daily ATM limit? I can approve an increase to $2,500 per day temporarily for 14 days.” Um, last time I checked, I wasn’t moving kilos of Columbian snow, but THANK YOU for pointing out what had always been the easiest option that everyone else missed. Unfortunately, I still had to pay in cash dollars, which means pulling dollars out of my account via ATM into cash pesos, then buying dollars (at an obviously less-than-favorable rate), twice taking transaction/exchange-rate hits. But this is the last time this will ever happen, because when I go home for the holidays, I’m adding some services to my account–including the one I mentioned above that will allow me to wire rent money down here monthly so I don’t need to walk around with a briefcase full of multicolored Mexican money.

This is primarily being shared so all you would-be foreign medical students out there in the US–make sure you understand: you are NOT going to be in the US–whether it’s Mexico, Israel, Poland, or the Carribean–and how you’re used to dealing with things will change dramatically. No matter how much you think you can get acclimated, or you speak the language there, the reality is that there will always be serious, unforeseen events that can potentially make you reconsider if it’s all worth it.

On top of all that, work takes a turn for the worse when I find out that the application I was developing for one academic entity is really for an executive member of the Univeristy, because he wants to make sure it passes muster first before showing it to them. I find this out 36h before it’s expected. I’m a part time employee with some vague instructions on this and no feel/inference that this is a politically sensitive project, or I’d never have accepted it. (Large state universities are typical of malignant bureaucracy just like above; things have to filter down and percolate up in “the proper chain of command.”) Last night, I pulled an all-nighter and I got it done (and billed appropriately), but I still haven’t slept. I feel like hibernating, but I have to pack this weekend/week, Grand Rounds is Tuesday (compilation is on Monday, though), and movers come on Friday. HELP!