The Frustration of Getting Things Done in Quito

I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated – that’s mostly because I’ve been struggling with the internet here. You heard about the initial troubles already with replacing the USB cable, but there was more.

I had to rip apart the box to replace the cable, and I broke my mom’s scissors in the process because I cleverly forgot that I was carrying a knife in my belt. I had a great time ripping apart all the geeky shit in the box and figuring out exactly how it worked, and when I was done, it actually did work. So I had a great internet connection in my room for about four days, two of which I was in Otavalo (more on that later).

Craig had told me before he left that when it was sunny out again, I should take apart all the outdoor cable connections, dry them out, and tape them up with electrical tape. It was a while before I had decent weather to do so, but I finally managed to find a little time when it wasn’t pouring rain, and I dutifully took them all apart, cleaned them, and taped them up. When I had it all back together again, it no longer worked.

I spent the afternoon at Marie’s house working on a school project, not worried about my internet because Craig told me that it probably just needed to be rebooted. When I got home, though, and followed his advice, it still didn’t work. After taking the lid off the box again and doing some basic diagnostics, it turned out that I had, in a moment of complete stupidity, failed to unplug the amplifier before unplugging the coax and blown the damn thing apart.

I was seriously pissed off at myself, and probably an absolute bear to talk to that night (sorry Craig!). But he told me that if I got a certain connector part, I could probably juryrig the system back into some form of working.

I printed pictures of the parts that I needed, because I didn’t know how to say the words properly in Spanish. I started by going to Radio Trunking, a place Craig had noticed on Orellana that he figured would sell parts. They were more of an office, as it turned out, and they refused to sell me parts, but told me to go to Electrónica Nacional. It was another two days before I got there, because I had a school project to complete with Marie. When I did finally go, it was actually the two of us that went, because she agreed to come do my errands with me if I would cut her hair that afternoon.

We found Electrónica Nacional without problems, and I showed them my piece of paper. The guy behind the counter looked at the paper, dug around in the back of the shop, called someone, and finally came back. He wrote an address on the paper and told me to go there for my parts. This is life in Quito – nothing is ever where someone tells you it will be. We grabbed a taxi and showed the driver the address, and after consulting his map, he told us it was about twenty-five minutes north and asked if we really wanted to go that far. I said sure, why not, as I needed to get there at some point.

He leaned out the window as we were stopped at a light and asked another taxi driver if he knew the location of the street we were looking for. He didn’t, so at the next corner, our driver flagged a third driver and asked the same question. This guy told us that it was not north at all, but in fact west around Parque La Carolina. That was a whole lot closer, and I was glad the driver hadn’t taken us all the way to wherever he thought it was.

We found Cablecom, but it was closed for lunch from 1:00 to 2:30, so we went in search of lunch ourselves. Across the street was a little place serving almuerzos ejecutivos, and the two of us managed to get a full lunch for $2 apiece. Then we sat outside Cablecom and waited for them to open. When they did eventually do so, I managed to get one of the parts but not the other; but Craig had told me that I technically only needed one, so I left it at that and didn’t bother to chase down the other.

After that expedition, it was time to track down the package that Craig sent me before my birthday. The day before, I had gone to the post office with the tracking number to ask about it, and they told me I had to go to customs to get it, and I had to have two photocopies of my passport.

I had a post-it note with the package tracking number and the address of the customs office, and two copies of my passport. We took a taxi to the office and stood in a long line for the door labeled Aduanas. After a few minutes Marie pointed out that everyone there was holding what looked like a reciept, and it seemed you needed one to get in. When the line at the main window cleared out, I went and asked how to find my lost box. The guy behind the counter put the tracking number into the computer, and then told me, “This package was shipped express, so it’s not here. You have to go here,” and wrote down another address on my post-it note.

We took taxi number three to yet another post office in another part of town, where I went in and hopefully presented my note to the first employee I found. He glanced at it, then told me to follow him and walked down the block to another section of the post office, where apparently they handle parcels. I once again presented my now-rather-abused yellow note.

Marie’s eventual question was the most succint thing I heard all day: “Why is this not computerized?” Apparently every express package that comes to Quito is hand-written in a large notebook, or has a hand-written slip of paper as a reference to it. The guy looked through several stacks of paper and most of a notebook, and couldn’t find my tracking number anywhere. Eventually he asked the woman next to him for help, and the two of them went in the back and were gone for ten minutes or so. I was starting to get worried that my package wasn’t anywhere when he suddenly reappeared with a large and abused-looking box in his hands.

I thought for a moment he was going to try to charge me to pick it up, but he just took one of the copies of my passport, had me sign my name and passport number in a couple of different places, and then handed it over.

By that time it was four o’clock; finding one connector and one package had taken us four hours and three taxis so far. We took a fourth taxi back to Marie’s house, where I managed to set aside the box long enough to cut her hair.

Goofing around during the haircut:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1603.jpg

The result:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1607.jpg

I also took an updated picture of the dead rat, which is STILL where it was when I first saw it:
http://i258.photobucket.com/albums/hh276/keskipper/100_1597.jpg