Category: Around the world

I was speaking with my colleague Zachary about a recent article about corruption in Europe. The statistics said that 12% of people had experienced corruption in the EU, but oddly there was a higher number in Sweden. I thought that this was a but unusual but my colleague suggested that perhaps people had simply reduced some of the numbers because they looked too awful. He said that assuming the correct age, ie excluding children, that perhaps 100% of the people have experienced corruption. Being the inquisitive, nosy, person I asked for an examples.

Rural development
I personally do not know what the attraction to horses is, but I have heard of more than one person whose ideal job was to have a horse farm. It seems that some countries in the EU have a fairly poor track record of using such rural development funds. My colleague was talking with his ex-girlfriend Mary who did have such a dream and she felt it could be possible with such a grant.

Zachary was a bit skeptical, but Mary was saying that she felt she could make a very good presentation. He said that one of the reasons that these funds were not so effectively used was that in addition to the EU rules other “local” rules and conditions were considered by the people who made such decisions.

Mary did not get her grant this doesn’t prove anything like corruption does exist.

Five door bus
One rather superficial example was about public transportation in Bratislava. It seemed that some new buses were needed and so the exact requirements were made available that companies could make an offer.

It is difficult to say if there was any official preference, but it almost seems that the specifications for the public tender were a copy from one of the bus manufacturers spec sheet. One of the requirements was that each bus had five sets of doors, vehicle weight, length and other technical specifications. Some of the other manufacturers cried fowl as there was only a single manufacturer who currently made such a bus.

The tender was canceled as the conditions did not appear to be fair, transparent and non-discriminatory.

http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/49268/3/70m_bus_tender_to_be_scrapped.html

Just a gift
I had read articles about how in Greece since the austerity cuts have been implemented there have been cases where medical care in the hospital may actually require a small “gift” to speed service along.

I was actually very surprised to hear that this has been standard operating procedure for quite some time in other European countries as well, in this case it was Slavakia.

My question “did that change things from all day waits to a one hour wait?

Nah, it is still all day. How much do you pay? I don’t know but you should just ask the nurse they will know what kind and how large the gifts should be.

First impressions
When meeting people for the first time it is always a good idea to be on your best behavior. Just as the saying goes, you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Well in Hungary, just like some other hospitals around the EU apparently when you meet with the doctor for the first time it is quite common to bring a small gift. That is what I heard from a male nurse working in a German hospital. This was the first thing he did when going to the hospital in Hungary he met with the doctor with a gift to help ensure that things went smoothly.

It is good to have friends
I have been told that in the not too distant past if you got pulled over for a speeding ticket, you might have a small chat with the officer who pulls you over. At the end of this discussion, perhaps the two of you could come to an arrangement and might involve a small gift and this little problem would just disappear.

It appears that this particular situation is becoming more and more difficult to change. When the policeman catches a speeder, it is saved in such a way that it cannot be deleted – well on-site. The only people who could do that would probably be back in headquarters and it is a much longer chain of people and the cost to “fix” something small like a speeding ticket is it really is not worth the effort compared to just paying the speeding ticket.

A friend of a friend, or victim in this case, got into a car accident with an intoxicated person and of course the police were involved, pictures were taken, notes were taken probably even a sobriety test was taken. Just to be on the safe side the victim also took a few photos with his phone. The accident went to trial and a very odd coincidence occurred, it seemed that the evidence of the accident was somehow lost.

The victims pictures were not lost and even though they were submitted as evidence it seems that the police did interpret them quite differently. With no other real evidence available the judge ruled against the victim who then had to pay the damages and fines.

What? How is this possible? Well, this took place in a fairly small town, it would of course be possible to appeal the decision, but even that result would probably have the same decision. Only if the case were appealed to the state level would it have a fair chance against “outside” influences.

Yet, if the victim would go through this effort, he would end up in a completely fair venue but there would still be no evidence, the process would have taken years and would have cost even more to get to that point.

Fit for human consumption
I was speaking with a colleague about how things were back home. It is pretty common that everyone has one or more complaints about how things are done at home. I was airing a few of mine but my new consultant managed to remind me how everything is relative. Back home for him he had a story about a food safety department. This department was responsible for testing various food crops such as wheat or corn just to mention a few.

I was told there were certain outcomes that would occur in the course of the testing of the food. When some sort of “gratuity” was not offered to the inspector before the tests were performed the odds of your food passing the tests were pretty negligible. Unsurprisingly when a gratuity was offered the food was always fit for consumption. I started to bring up the “B” word but I didn’t even get a chance when he clarified the situation.

It isn’t a bribe, its a gift.

The world is a wacky place and when regimes change, not all of the little rules change at the same time. When I was younger, I wanted to do some travel abroad and for that I needed a passport. I never really thought about what this in depth but this it not only allowing you to leave but in reality it is more permission to let me back into the country in the future.

In Uzbekistan you need the passport to travel within Uzbekistan and before you can leave the country, you need to get special permission in order to leave. This permission is a special form that will last for two years and is put into your passport. This is not directly connected to your passport. If this two year permission is exceeded the passport doesn’t become invalid, nor will this prevent you from entering Uzbekistan. However, when you enter the country with this permission and it expires you cannot leave until you get this permission renewed. Apparently this set of permissions has its roots in the olden days within the Soviet Union.

The good news, or not so good news is that if you are trying to leave Moscow and they see that your permission to leave Uzbekistan has expired they will show enough solidarity with the Uzbek government and will not let you fly to your desired destination but rather they fly back to Uzbekistan.

It is possible to get a more permanent permission to leave, but for that one you will need the permission from both of your parents.

In Germany they have a saying “sport ist mord” or loosely translated sport will kill you. I didn’t think it was true but recently I heard a story that made me change my opinion.

One of the reasons that companies will outsource their manufacturing is because it is cheaper to do it there. Perhaps it is because of the labor laws or perhaps the environmental laws but there is usually one or more compelling reasons to ship your factory elsewhere.

However, the reverse is also true. One of the great fears in some of the more developed countries in Europe was that other laborers from elsewhere in their club would migrate and take away jobs due to their lower costs. Well, companies can do the same thing in reverse, they can hire people from different parts of the world and ship them to where the work is.

It was this exact situation that caused a very nice Ukrainian woman to begin working on our project. The benefit for companies who hire contractors is that once the work is done they all go away. This particular gal loved to go running in the morning, and as she was planning on leaving the project and the region perhaps never to return, so she decided to take a few photographs.

It is understandable, but when you stop jogging in front of a gate to an American base in a foreign country to take photos people tend to get nervous. She didn’t get shot, but the authorities were called and took her in for questioning. Why? She was going jogging and didn’t have any identification with her and she did admit to not being German.

Perhaps it isn’t jogging that is so hazardous to your health as much as taking pictures.

I was more than surprised to hear that in Germany your first three years, grades 1 – 3, are half a day long. As most grownups work a full day they came up with a nice solution which is “the Hort”. The hort is a type of after school daycare where the kids can go to after school. They are not left to their own devices on the street, but rather are in a controlled environment where they can interact with some of their friends from school, do homework and depending on the Hort, crafts and field trips as well.

Wow, this sounds great. It sure sounds like solution to a latchkey kid spending his or her time at home alone and unsupervised. Hort’s are within walking distance of the school and the students who go there usually meet as a group and walk together in pairs or groups. However, as you might imagine resources are limited, so you have to sign up. Which sounds all nice and organized until you realize that you cannot sign up any sooner than six weeks before school starts and because there is no centralized authority you don’t know where there are free places and where not. This usually yield a bunch of parents signing their child up to multiple Hort’s in order to get a free place.

My favorite part of trying to find a Hort spot for my son was finding out what happens to the waiting list. After a reasonably short period of time and without any correspondence to the parents each hort pretty much throws away the list. From what I was able to determine much after the fact was the general consensus was that after a few months all of the students must have a place. So the only way to get a spot would be to continuously call the people at all of the horts daily until you get a place. Not a very nice prospect as there is a line between “following up on” and “badgering”. If I cross that line my child will never get a spot no matter what.

The worst surprise is reserved for those who somehow manage to get through their first year with a creative use of friends and family. Once the first year is over, your child will not be put into any of the Horts until all of the children from current year have found a place – yup if you can’t get a place the first year you are pretty much locked out of the system. Sure some places may show up but oddly enough that is usually at the Horts who have incredibly lackluster reputations.

It was actually a few years later that it became obvious why all of the Horts were full. I had managed to have a child during a bit influx of children which exceeded the amount of children when compared with previous years. This information came home in spades when we had to try and find a high school that was not overfull or one that was an hour away from home.

Well, I have lived in some fairly questionable apartments, most of which were in the USA. However, one of the most memorable situations was when my car was moved to another location from the one I parked it in.

We lived in a fairly ethnic part of town that sported its own Turkish grocery store, Turkish pizza stand and a Turkish bar. We also had a very trendy cocktail bar that was also less than a minute walk away.

This part of town had a lot of people, a lot of cars and virtually no legal parking places. We actually parked in illegal spots most of the time I lived in that apartment.

We actually parked our care quite close to the Turkish bar and as we didn’t use it every day it was actually parked there for a few days. We were planning on moving it next time we went shopping but we never got the chance.

One night we wanted to visit my wife’s parents and so we went to the car only to find it was no longer there. We were starting to panic when we found that it was parked in actually right up on the sidewalk. There was no legal way to move it out of there without moving about 10 other cars.

It seemed obvious to us that some of our neighbors didn’t like our car parked in a very prime spot so they moved it. If it happened to me today I may have taken a different approach, but back then I decided to go into the Turkish bar, I don’t speak Turkish, nor even hardly German and see if I can convince the entire Turkish bar full of men to move their cars.

I do have to give them credit, they did come up with a very creative reason how my car ended up in its new parking spot. They suggested that the wild people from the cocktail bar must have moved our car to this location. I tried to explain that we lived in this building and we needed to get our car but it was parked in. I had to stress this point as nobody who lived in this neighborhood liked that cocktail bar.

The guys, were not willing to admit who had moved our car there, nor where they willing to move their cars. But after they had their own quick conference one of them did assist us, he simply got into my car and drove it down the sidewalk (illegally) for perhaps 50 yards and out into the street.

We did learn a lesson from all this. The first was that you should not park that close to the Turkish bar, and the second was although using a parking break is a good idea, always leave your car in gear.

I was chatting with one of the other programmers from work when he told me a story about Paul and Tammy. They were a couple of Australians working in London. Just like most people living far from home there is a tendency for people to meet up with others from back home. So it was natural that the two of them went out to the bar and had a beer or two.

I have no idea what most of their evening was like, I only knew how it had ended. You see Tammy was a pretty good drinker considering she was both a girl and fairly petite, but the two of them ended up in a pub and apparently she managed to drink poor Paul under the table and then a bit more.

In fact the barkeeper took a look at Paul and suggested that it would be better for the two of them to sit outside as Paul looked a bit green. I don’t think that it was intended with malice but once they were sitting outside on the steps Tammy had somehow convinced Paul that he needed to take off his shoes. It was probably experience on the part of the bar tender that encouraged them to get a spot outside, as not to long after that Paul was indeed sick.

The next day there was some new gossip around the water cooler. Yup, Paul went out and was drunk under the table by a girl. That was embarrassing but what was even worse was that Paul was sick into his own shoes.

Nope, nobody at the office forgot about the night that Tammy went out drinking with Paul.

A guy I spoke to once worked in the former soviet union and was a real technical guy. The kind of guy you see at night with a haphazard pile of identical looking technical parts one night and in the morning you see a brand new piece of hardware.

Well, things are slightly different in a planned economy and yet I did hear some stories about how bartering and entrepreneurship did flourish in such an environment. It is all about seeing an opportunity. It is in this environment that this story begins.

He was a skilled man who had the necessary equipment which could be used to create real goods, and as an electrical engineer he had the knowledge how to reverse engineer, modify or create from scratch electronic boards. The mainframes at that time were running 3270 terminals and required special computer boards to support these terminals. How hard can it be to simply create our own boards and sell them must have been his thought as that is exactly what he did. In true capitalist style he did not do all of the soldering and assembly himself but rather hired people around him to help. He came up with the design and the boards and had assistants who in their spare time would work on the assembly.

Of course the assembly was probably the simplest part of the whole endeavor. How many small businesses or home users would have use for such a computer board? None really. It was the military or the government in the end who would be purchasing such boards. In the Soviet Union a regular person cannot simply approach the military complex and become their vendor. He needed a middleman who could help with this sale. The middleman did indeed facilitate the sale and the money was deposited into our “capitalist hero’s” account but the other problem was currency control.

The computer boards went for about 5000 dollars but when they were purchased it was not just a handful of cash but instead was deposited into a bank account. Part of the problem is that it is not possible to take out more than 300 dollars in cash from a bank account per month. So how to have a capitalistic venture where the money simply doesn’t flow?

Taking out the money from a single account for a single board would take all year and is thus not very convenient for purchasing components or paying people. So our hero actually had an entire armful of bank deposit books at banks all over the city. Every month he would take about 3 days driving around to each one to extract the maximum cash from each account and at the end of the month split the money up into “pay envelopes” for the employees.

How much money is this really? Well, the local car Zhiguli at that time cost about 5000 dollars so the approximate value of the board was similar to that car.

I finished my high school studies and trying to plan which college to go to. I wanted to study abroad and I had very good grades and one of the places I could have gone was America. I submitted all of my paperwork but I did not get a study position, although my friend Tanya did get a one of the positions.

There were only 20 places open so the odds of getting a spot was not very likely. The reason for this was that the Uzbekistan government doesn’t want people to go and study abroad and then stay there. The goal is for the student to come back with their education. The common line of thought was that a girl will find a man, get married have children and stay there, which is why most of the people selected for that program were men.

It sounds like the current mindset limits women in Uzbekistan, and that is true but only partially. If the company that you apply to is a Usbek company then they will probably hire Usbek women, and the common stereotype is that when they get pregnant they won’t be coming back to work. I am considered to be Russian and that actually helps. The Russians will work, so even if they do get married and have children they would be coming back to work.

In the end I ended up in Japan as they were trying to build up their international program and this included grants to a lot of their foreign students. The grants didn’t cover everything, especially for the first six months but as I was living with my sister and her husband I didn’t have much in the way of bills. I worked in a foreign language school as an English speaker to earn a little extra cash.

My friend Tanya did actually beat the odds and got one of the few open spots in the program to the USA. She was both a woman and from Azerbaijan but in the end she did at least prove the stereo type. She met someone there, got married, had children and never came back.

Perhaps you have heard of the story about the college student who just kept studying. This semester it was mathematics, last semester it was modern art, and well I don’t even remember what last year. It is probably difficult to justify the perennial student given the current costs of education [in the United States].

Well, other countries do it a bit differently. In Germany the costs are actually much cheaper, well in fact almost free. Student fees usually cover some sort of public transportation ticket but they also convey the right to claim to be a student. Being a student may get you into the opera at reduced rates, allow you to get a student copy of Microsoft Office or even get into some nice student housing.

I was always surprised when I first showed up in Germany younger than most everyone else but with actual business experience. Perhaps I was just jealous. They are just starting in the work world and they are 29 years old. This might also be the downside to the Germany education system that I was not previously aware of.

During lunch we were talking about how my colleague had to prepare a new test for the eight students who failed the first final. I pointed out that where I went to school you either passed the test and the class or you failed. It was explained to me that if a student failed his or her test it could be taken over, a second and possibly even a third time. I was a bit shocked and made some sort of a joke about the fourth test.

Well, it turns out if you fail a mandatory class too many times you fail. But you don’t fail that class you actually fail that degree and you are finished. If you fail, you may have to make a big move. If you really loved that particular profession you may be able to start all over at another university. If you are planning on failing you should do it early on, otherwise, you will just be another student who took a decade to finish your studies.

When I was going to college I had a close friend who thought it would be nice to open a bar, and it should be called “The Library”. If anyone was asking you could always say you were going to the library.

Well, apparently someone else from a different continent had a very similar idea. Their drinking establishment was open on Sunday morning and it was called “the church”. I guess I was young and irreverent as I had been there a few times with some of the guys from work. You cannot call it a bar as it was a large room that reminded me of a gymnasium from school. At one end was a stage and at the other end was a series of long tables where you could buy three packs of beer.

On this particular day I can only hope my “friends” were testing that I indeed met a good women. My girlfriend was visiting us in London and my “friends” took me to the church early in the morning and we keep it up all day. I guess having a few beers in the morning on an empty stomach must have led to incapacitated thinking. We had something to eat and then went to the park, took a nap and then went out and started hitting the pubs with gusto.

By this time, I had not given all that much thought to my girlfriend. I must have had a lot of stamina as we kept going until about midnight. We ended up at Mike’s place and they wanted to keep going. I actually was starting to run out of steam and Mike suggested that I looked pretty bad and should crash on the couch.

It was about this time I remembered my girlfriend and said I needed to go home. So Mike and his girlfriend gave me a beer and a bag of potato chips. It was late and I was about a couple of miles from home, but I trudged on. I did make it but it was quite late.

Was my girlfriend impressed? No, just relieved. All she knew was that I was going out for a pint with the guys in the morning and no word from me and even she knew that the pubs closed at 11pm.