25% of people unemployed in Spain, it could be worse....

Yesterday we had an early start as we had gotten an e-mail on Friday from the Mercedes Truck Service station in Malaga that the new ventilator had arrived.

 They asked us to be there first thing on Monday morning. This was our second trip to the Mercedes dealer, the first time we learned the lesson that if you do not upgrade your three year old Garmin (GPS) you are going to drive around for two hours before you find the Mercedes dealer.

Specially in Spain where the EU tax money was very well spent on building new roads (corruption and bureaucracy at work: there is a 20 km new highway between Coin and Malaga that has been finished for over a year except for the “stripemarks”, the project ran out of money so this new road is still not in use).

Anyway we arrived at the Mercedes dealer at 9am after a nice  sunrise morning drive.

Javier, the guy at the reception who helped us the first time to get the new ventilator ordered, registered our car and the three things that we requested them to do: change the oil of the gearbox, replace the ventilator and check the electronics of the dashboard.  First three printouts were made of the planned services that we needed to sign. Once signed, new forms were printed and copied and printed again for the mechanic, the supervisor (who had been standing around all the time doing nothing (as we found out the rest of the day that was his job))and for us. So 45 minutes and one tree later we thought they were finally ready to work on our car. Wrong….. We were asked to sit in the waiting area. So we did as we thought it is not 10 yet and based on their estimate it should all take about two hours so we will be out of here around noon. In the mean time we evaluated the registration process and came to the conclusion that fortunately the Spanish are so inefficient, imagine if they introduced efficiency in their workplace, the unemployment rate would jump to 50%.

Supervising...

At 10.30 Rosana went to ask when they would start working on our car. The answer from Javier was as soon as the mechanic was done with the truck he was working on. Obviously we wanted to know when he was going to be finished with it, so Javier went to ask the mechanic. The mechanic said that he needed another 30 minutes. So at 1pm he finally started to work on our car (yes right that is 2.5 hours later). Very nice guy and he seemed to be very good, not in English though. Since Marc does not speak Spanish nor is his English (or Dutch for that matter) truck mechanics vocabulary very big he had to ask Rosana to translate. So now Rosana was trying to tell in her best Spanish the things Marc could not even explain or ask in English. We felt very sorry for “Manuel from Barcelona” For those of us who do not remember Manuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6EaoPMANQM

Anyway, so  we thought we will be out of here by 3pm. Wrong…….At 1.25 Javier came out of his office to let us know that at 1.30 everyone will go for lunch/siesta until 3pm. By that time we already expected anything, so we decided not to grab Javier by the ears and not to stuff his head in an oil drum.

In the end we left the Mercedes dealership at 5.30pm, wondering if Spain is really in Europe or is it part of North Africa.