If any country was going to turn me into a whoop a**, this country would’ve done it. Examples:
- taxi drivers, upon hearing the price you’re willing to pay, immediately add 100 soum for no reason (that’s only $.10, but still…)
- a waitress brings you the wrong salad, knowing it’s the wrong one, but doesn’t say anything, thinking we wouldn’t notice
- a shop sells me almost rotten crab sticks, insisting “no, they’re fresh! they’re fresh!’
- you get stories like this about landlords: “Often we were willing to make repairs at our expense to make sure the job was performed timely. The landlord refused to allow this and often took days to fix repairs needed to maintain a quality standard of life. Any problem with the house is automatically considered as caused by you.”
- a vegetable seller sells you pears (selecting them him/her self) and when you get home and wash them, ants start crawling out of them!
- after being transported mistakenly to the transit lounge, a man asks me repeatedly “so you are sure you live in Tashkent… you are sure… you live here… in Tashkent, Uzbekistan”
- I order a cheeseburger, and get a chicken sandwich, but instead of taking it back, I start eating it anyway because I’m hungry and would have to wait another 30 minutes.
- my friend, who works in an orphanage, told me that a gov’t office would not issue a “certificate” to allow one of the kids to be adopted because he was “not mentally disabled enough“.
As most of you can guess, I am nowhere NEAR being whoop a**, except with taxi drivers, occasionally. But recently, there was a situation like this:
One of our guards broke our microwave because he cooked something in there at full power for WAY longer than he should’ve. And we had to get this microwave fixed at a cost of 60,000 soum (around $48). As punishment, we docked his pay for the cost of this repair, 30,000 soum at a time. Pretty harsh, as his monthly salary is only 40,000 soum! (so imagine, if you’re the average American, having to give up 75% of your monthly salary, twice!) Anyway, some of our other coworkers, being very compassionate and understanding, asked that we forgive the rest of his debt. Hmph – dilemma. He DID break it out of his own negligence. He HAD used the microwave before and he IS known to be a bit… spacy sometimes. What to do… the REALLY compassionate and understanding thing would’ve been for those coworkers who were speaking on his behalf to help cover some of his debt (see the analogy here?) but they didn’t offer that. So we decided to ask him to pay ”just” another 15,000 soum (still 50% of this salary!) and let it go.
In this case, I did have the desire to be a *bit* more whoop a** (after all, if you break something, shouldn’t you be responsible for paying for it to get fixed?), but had to remember the circumstance … and the fact that this was A LOT of money for him. Well, at least we know he’ll never break the microwave again. Or more probable – he’ll never use it again.
