Com licenca, another rant

Funny hearing people say "Com licenca" when I suppose they mean the equivalent of "excuse me", getting past you in eg a supermarket. There's that ornately formal language again. Also amuses me how people not only say "de nada" (your welcome) without fail in reply to obrigado (thanks) but so often it is more of a "Naaaaaaaada".

But onto the rant. Today I enjoyed some bihemispherical stress. It began with the lovely surprise that my now rented out flat in London is late in paying it's half-yearly service charge (my responsibility). Everything else in the flat's running has been managed very well by email, between myself and the tenant, but the managing agent which "runs" my block of flats has never quite discovered email notifications. Since I am away from the UK and unable to check my snail mail, and being somewhat distracted by life in Brazil and a baby, I forgot to pay my March instalment. An oversight that has only ever happened once before in 14 years.

Obviously, this sin necessitated the immediate instruction of lawyers and a check with the Land Registry to see if I was still the owner ! The fact that I have been in pretty regular contact with the managing agent by email obviously was irrelevant. Upshot: a nice big penalty fee of £250. Just one email to let me know about the late payment would have been enough to remind me.

But in increasingly moronic Britain, that's just too much to ask. There are "procedures" and "processes" don't you know. And the banker always wins. Common sense ? Common courtesy ? Died long ago.

Meanwhile in the consumer paradise that is Brazil, I finally managed to find an electric heater for the flat, or rather two of them, since one was on sale for R$150 while two were just R$200. That is still about 80 quid, or 40 each, but having got used to prices here, believe me it seemed like a steal.

Next problem was what voltage did my flat use, 110 or 220? Only in Brazil do you have this extra headache. The nice man said he would come round to my flat to have a look the next morning, ie today, but he didn't come. People saying they will come round and then not doing so is perfectly normal here.

Only the other day we interviewed a potential nanny who seemed quite nice. We asked here to come for a trial run the next day and she was all smiles. But the next day came and went and clearly she had thought twice about leaving her current employer for us. Much easier in Brazil to smile and laugh and be best friends while you are talking to someone and then simply not to do what you had said you would do. Avoids any and all confrontation. Simples !

But back to today. I returned to the heater shop with my offspring and his new nanny (another one). Spoke to the same chap. Maria, the nanny, said we needed the 110 voltage plug. Great, so let's pay and leave ! Oh, silly, deluded me. No transaction here is ever that simple. First off, they needed ID, thankfully I had my passport, but no, that wouldn't do. They needed my "CPF", which I think is like a National Insurance number. But I'm a foreigner I told them, all I have is my passport, my credit card and my simple desire to buy your overpriced but much needed merchandise !

But the CPF was needed because, wait for it, there was a guarantee ! How exciting, a guarantee for these Chinese-made heaters. How long a guarantee ? A year, two years, five years ? What, are you crazy ?! Make that three months. So reassuring, a whole 90 days of guarantee, no wonder they need my CPF !

As I began to lose the plot for the umpteenth time, perhaps exacerbated by the morons back in Blighty, Maria stepped into the breach by offering her CPF number. Problem solved ?

Of course not. Next, I was told they couldn't take any kind of plastic as payment because is was a discounted product. Yeah, sure they couldn't. What the poker-faced Korean owners meant was that we were deep in the grey market, like so much else here, a tax-free zone in this tax-and-steal dystopia.

Fortunately, I am now in the habit of carrying silly amounts of cash on me so even that hurdle was jumped. But still no finish line. Next we had the farce of products that came without proper packaging, and one was in fact taken "shop-soiled" as we quaintly say in the UK. Shop-soiled means nothing here and certainly no hope of a discount.

Then the final farce: the Korean woman spent something in the region of a thousand years tapping out a receipt. What was my favourite phrase, used to death here: "It's not rocket science." But once again it was rocket science, it really was - perhaps even more complicated than rocket science. When you are keeping multiple sets of books, Korean-Brazilian style accounting, then no doubt it is all a most fiendish sort of rocket science.

I lugged the heaters home and now hope not to freeze our rocks off quite so much in this shack of an apartment. Soon enough we can look forward to some big fat extortionate fees from the electricity pirates.