Down, but not quite out in Spain
When we came here the financial situation worldwide was precarious. In Spain it was downright appalling, but in one respect it worked for us. The glut of Brit-ex-pats who’d moved here in the boom years of the 80’s and 90’s, buying up cheap property, selling at huge profits and moving on, had come to a rapid and almost complete stop, with the vast majority returning ‘home’ rather than sticking it out (the reasons for this being many perhaps, but with, I believe, an underlying causality which I shall return to at another time). The price of property fell 50% in some places in a matter of months giving us a window of opportunity that had previously been shuttered by our under-strength purchasing power. Spanish developers who had gambled everything on a continuing boom came badly unstuck and now you can see whole estates of half-built, or even completed villas, that sit empty, boarded up, fenced in, either awaiting completion (that will never happen) or buyers (that will never arrive) and so they just rot. It’s amazing to see! Literally, whole suburbs of towns and cities built to satisfy the needs of non-existent foreign buyers sitting dormant, not dead because they’d never been alive; just frozen in suspended animation, scaffolding intact, piles of bricks, cement, sand and other building materials, half used, part-built, on permanent pause like a broken-down cheap DVD.
The Spanish government also invested heavily in an infrastructure that had been backward by the standards of other Western-European nations. They gambled on a never-ending influx of Brits, Germans and Scandinavians who wanted roads, hospitals and shopping malls like they had at home. But they lost that gamble. Spain now has the highest unemployment in Europe and is effectively bankrupt. The black-market economy here thrives (like nowhere else in the EEC I would guess) and the snails pace of legislative change and the general apathy of Spanish voters in this regard mean that Spain is fast becoming a 2nd or even 3rd world nation while presenting to the world a 1st world face. Innovation and enterprise here are stifled by bureaucracy and red-tape. There is no encouragement whatsoever from a Governmental system that does everything in it’s power to make it a difficult and costly undertaking to start a business, thereby forcing people into the black economy because they simply cannot live any other way. Old timers here will tell you that it’s always been this way and the under-25’s who exploit the system illegally and constitute the vast majority of the officially unemployed, working, selling, ducking, diving, beneath the radar of the tax man see no reason for it to change at all. The system allows them to earn, buy houses, new cars, go on holidays, avoid taxes and in many cases, claim benefits as well. They are simply not motivated to see a change which might, in the short-term, see them worse off. I empathise whole-heartedly.
By way of illustration. I was offered a job just a couple of weeks before Christmas. Whoopy-do!!! All my problems over with. Or so I thought. It was with a new and expanding company. The Boss is English (luckily for me) but he was doing everything legally and above board and quite rightly so. He had taken on me and one other as a starting point, hoping to end up employing another 8-10 people if things went as expected. But right from the off it was a doomed exercise. He had applied for his S.L status; the equivalent of having a Limited company in the U.K.. This was probably his first mistake, ie. In trying to do it legally. The Spanish telecom company found out that he had applied for his S.L. and so they cut off his telephone lines because they considered him to be an unnatural risk. Okay, said the Boss, I understand (which is more generous than I would have been under the circumstances) and offered them a deposit as security and a show of good faith. The telecom company duly accepted and put 2 of the 3 lines back on. The 3rd line was mine - last one in and all that - so he asked me to wait a few days till it was sorted, which the telecom company assured him would be only a matter of days. Whilst he waited they, in their infinite wisdom, decided that he still to risky, so they cut off the 2 lines again and for good measure, also his home phone and his mobile line. Again, the Boss, showing admirable restraint, offered to pay what was outstanding on all of the lines as a show of further good faith. The telecom company again accepted. The Boss coughed up over 2000 Euro in payment for telephone lines whose first bills are not even due until the end of January 2011. Unbelievable! But even after that, they still refused point blank to reinstate even a single telephone line. In the meantime, the Government agency to whom you apply to in order to gain your S.L. discovered that his office was not functioning and told him that his application was on permanent hold because they did not believe that the business was legitimate. “You don’t even have a telephone line,” they told him!!! Aaaaargh!!!!! To cut a long story short, the would-be Boss has now given up the ghost, has taken his family and moved to Madrid and is now setting his business up on the sly because this is the only way he can get it done. How’s that for Democracy in action?
I am married to an African woman and have myself, spent many happy years in Africa and the parallels between the Spanish and many Africans peoples are blindingly obvious if one cares to look. Spain spent over 700 years as an ‘African colony’ and maybe this is just the worlds longest hangover! The climate here is mild in the winter and tropical in the summer, as we all know, the same as much of Africa. Latifa, my wife, tells me that the Spanish are Mediterranean in their looks and African in their attitudes. It is a ’mañ ana’ culture, as it is across much of Africa. Of course, there are exceptions; there are always exceptions. But it is the generalisations that make the people and in the main the Spanish see no need to change.
Latifa is working on temporary contract for a ‘customer service’ operation for a large, well-known (in Spain and France) website similar to Amazon. She has done similar work in the U.K. previously and had every expectation that it would be similar. How wrong she was! Right from the first day things started to go awry. She had her interview one day and they asked if she could start the very next day for her training. Somewhat taken aback by the rapidity, she gratefully said yes and duly cancelled other work she had (she works P/T as an aerobics instructor). She came home very happy and delighted to be working full-time. I was happy for her. The training was supposed to be 3 days long and about 3-4 hours each day. Great! On the 5th day of training they were all told (there were about 10 training in all) that the training was unpaid after all, but not only that it was now going to be only 1 hour per day and would last another 2 weeks. The reason, they were too busy dealing with all the customer service requests to spare anyone to train them!!! There’s a logic of sorts at work there!! When finally she did start work and was getting paid she found she had 3 supervisors, one of whom would tell them to deal with clients in one way (not the way in which they had been trained incidentally), which they then did, until such time as the 2nd supervisor came along and fined them all an hours pay for doing so and told them do things differently. They then did as requested. The 1st supervisor then arrived, saw that her instructions were not being obeyed, fined them again and told them to revert to the her method!! This yo-yo-ing continues to this day. Latifa has now been there almost 3 months and the supervisors still cannot decide how they want things done! Bear in mind, this is the biggest shopping website there is France and Spain!!! But not only that, if a customer phones up to find out where their item is that they purchased, and the computer is unable to find out what is going on with it they are told to hang up on the client.
To hang up!!! They have got the clients money and so now they just don’t give a fuck! Can you imagine if that happened to you in the U.K.?
But that’s not the end of it, oh no! Before Christmas, when understandably such websites are very busy, they falsify their stock lines and numbers of items available to get the clients business knowing full well that said item is no longer available and that the clients children will be without a gift this Christmas. If such a client phones up they are told to pacify them by lying that it is on the way. If satisfied and the client hangs up, thinking all is okay, they are told to go quickly to the next phone call and to do precisely nothing about the previous caller. If said client then calls again, which inevitably they do, they are told to offer the client a refund which will take over 2 months arrive.
I have never heard of such blatant disregard for basic business practice. One evening Latifa came home in tears because one particularly irate customer had asked to speak to a supervisor, who flat refused to deal with person and instead stood over Latifa whilst instructing her to tell the client to ‘fuck off’ or lose her job. Nice people eh? Luckily it is only a temporary contract that is shortly coming to an end and she cannot wait to leave, despite being asked to stay because she had dome such a good job! We might be hard up but I’d rather eat shit than take more money from a company like that.
Spain is a 1st world country with a 3rd world mentality and an even worse administration. Nothing here is computerised. After all, why store info quickly and easily on a hard-drive when you can employ 2 or 3 people to write everything down in triplicate and take all day about doing it and then lose it or misfile it? This is a 1st world country where you cannot get a mobile signal in many places once outside of a city. By comparison, I travelled to Mali last year. Officially the 4th poorest nation on the planet. I could connect to skype, phone home and send emails from the middle of the Sahara, literally over a weeks drive from what we might call civilisation. Fantastic! But do you think I can do any of those things from my house only 45km from Valencia? The answer is ‘yes,’ but only if the wind is the right direction! And you think I’m kidding, don’t you? This is a 1st world country where my neighbour, nearing bus-pass age in the U.K., cannot get any help medical help from the system for his chronic back and neck problems, or any medication for a slight psychosis that results from over 20 years of daily stress from living so far below the poverty line that he makes most Africans seem positively wealthy by comparison. His house has no electricity, no running water, no telephone line, no nothing. His bedroom ceiling collapsed some years ago so that when it rains at night he gets wet in his bed. In winter time he has an ancient old ‘estufa,’ a wood burning stove, that chokes his rooms with pallid, unhealthy smoke but it is his only source of warmth. He is not entitled to any financial assistance whatsoever from a system that does not recognise infirmity as a handicap so he spends his days traipsing over the mountains looking for wild herbs, mushrooms and plants to flavour the rainwater soup he makes. If he’s lucky he may be able to trap a rabbit or a small bird occasionally to liven things up a bit. He beams with delight if he catches a starling or pigeon, from which he will cook and eat every last, unappetising morsel, the bones he gives to his scrawny dog, his only company in his harsh world. He weighs considerably less than my 11 year old son who is built like a beanpole and sways in a strong wind, as I did at his age. But Juan, for that is his name, can always raise a smile and for all his hardships he says he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. And the same is true for us. For all it’s problems, for all it’s frustrating, backward ways, it’s red-tape and endless bureaucracy, Spain is a wonderful place to live. The culture and lifestyle are vibrant and colourful. The people, friendly and open. It really is wonderful place to live until you have to try and deal with the system. Or get a job.
We help Juan when we can. We buy him bread, a drop of vino and a bit of tobacco when we have the money ourselves, but I already worry for him (and for us by proxy) about what will become of him in a year or two. What happens when his health truly fails? What if he breaks an ankle on the mountain? Who will know? Who will care for him? Of course we shall do everything we can to help, but I’m not a rich man and I have my own family who must come first. So, do we just let him die when he cannot trap his rabbits anymore? Tell me, someone. Please?
And this is in Spain. A 1st world country we are told.
And the strangest thing of all. Juan tells us of another man, younger than himself, who lives like a hermit further up the mountain than we are, in the wilds of this region and in the middle of nowhere. Juan says he has lived up there for longer than himself, so that means he has been there for over a quarter of century I would imagine. This guy lives in a house (if that word adequately describes it) with holes in the wall (in other houses these holes would be called windows, but windows have glass or shutters or something to keep the weather out) which are open to the elements. We live at an altitude of just under 500m, which whilst not high, is high enough to make the winters very cold and biting - Spanish houses are not well insulated and lack any sort of heating. The hermit lives at near 800m where deep snow and strong winds are regular event and must make the winters seem interminable. This guy must be as hard as nails because he rarely comes down from there, finding all his food and fluids by foraging across the mountainside. Amazingly, Juan takes pity on him and when he has more rabbit than he can eat he takes what excess he has up the track to give to the hermit. Such generosity of spirit a rarity in the money-grabbing, money-obsessed, selfish world most us occupy. But that’s just how Juan is.
As a little aside, I would just like to relate a funny story. For all his lack of’s Juan is a mad footy fan! Aren’t we all? When he goes into town, which is not a frequent occurrence, he tries to home in on a newspaper and then sits in a café drinking a café solo (espresso to you and me), generally donated by a kindly proprietor, where he dives avidly into the sports pages and devours all the results, news, etc, which dominates the pages of most dailies here - because Spain is not football mad as the Brits are, but is completely football loco in a completely obsessive way that British footy fans could only dream about - and so he thereby keeping abreast of all the footy goings on. On talking to him, his football knowledge is impressive considering the gaps in his media relations. Anyway, I digress. When we first arrived and could still afford satellite TV, I invited Juan in to watch a few matches. “Who’s your team?” I asked in French. Juan had grown up in Strasbourg just after the War and he speaks French like a native, and when we first arrived our Spanish was dodgy to say the least, so conversing in my schoolboy French was the easiest way for us all to attempt to understand one another. “No-one,” he replied. “I just love football.” Fair enough. I can go with that. But it soon became clear to me that Juan’s impressive knowledge of the game was not as in depth as I’d previously thought. I’d talk about such and such a player, such and such a team, as you do when enjoying the match but Juan seemed totally out of touch with what I was saying. I was confused. Then, after having watched 3 or maybe 4 matches with me he finally said one day, “So, which one is Messi?”
‘Which one is Messi?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. The worlds greatest player and for all his supposed knowledge of the game, Juan couldn’t tell who Messi was. What on earth was going on?
Upon investigation, it turned out that he’d never seen a match on TV before and had no idea what team played in what colours, what any of the players looked like, how old they were or anything. It turned out that he never looked at the pictures in the papers because he didn’t see the point! Even the graphic in the top corner of the TV screen showing the score was baffling for him. “What is BFC?” Barcelona Football Club I told him! “Oh, now I understand!” he said. “I didn’t know who was playing who (me, being the selfish Brit had the English commentary on!) and who was whom. Now it becomes clear!”
There’s a lesson in there somewhere. If someone can wheedle it out then please let me know.
So, to summarise: I will be blogging when I can get to an internet café to do so or when one of other of us manages to secure employment with a legitimate and conscientious company. We are having a hard time of it. There’s no point denying it. But in the end, I’d rather be having a hard time of it here than in the U.K. There are many things here that I do not agree with, most of which I have found out since moving here. After all, you don’t really know someone till you live with them and the same is true of nations too. But we won’t be running for home even if things get worse before they get better. We left the U.K. because we didn’t like many things there, but what you realise is, that nowhere is perfect unless you’re rich. Money can smooth over any amount of difficulties and whilst we came here with money in the bank, almost 2 years of not working makes a sizeable dent in any amount of savings for a most families. We are no different. So, if you are thinking of moving to Spain like us, then come here with your eyes fully open and your bank balance sufficiently in the black, because over here you have to help yourself, no-one is going to help you.
Until next time.
Peter
P.S. Feliz Año Nuevo.
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