A Little Frustrated...

So today I feel a little frustrated.  Argentina is not a first world country.  Their technology, safety standards and sanitation is not the most…up to date.  So my frustrations today are stemming from the subject of cell phone usage.  Okay, cell phones, things here and in the states are somewhat similar.  You can obtain a cheap pay as you go cell phone, or you can sign up for a contract with a company and chose a plan and minutes and all that jazz.  Because of the fact that we are poor as dirt right now, my husband and I got a cheap pay as you go special.  Before I elaborate on the Olympian process it took to obtain this I will first say that Argentina has the tendency to do things a little…”half assed”.  Example, we went to the cell phone store called Movie Star and asked for a pay as you go cell phone.  We discovered that even though it is pay as you go and does not require a contract, you still need to show some type of documentation showing that you are an Argentine citizen in order to buy a phone.  Bummer.  Except I am lucky and I have several Argentine friends and one of them was nice enough to accompany my husband to the store and we used his document to obtain a phone.  It should have been smooth sailing form there right?  Ha!  Okay so now we need to activate the thing and get our number.  Most pay as you go cheap phones in the states require that you dial a number and follow some easy instructions in order to activate your phone.  Here?  No way, that would be too easy.  No, instead an employee at the store told my husband that we would receive a text message with our phone number, and we would have to wait a few hours for it.  Hours turned into days which turned into weeks and no message. Our cell phone might has well have been a paper weight.  We tried a couple of times to go to the cell phone store, but it was either ridiculously busy or closed. Then we were told we needed to go back to the exact store where we purchased out cell phone in order to get the pin.  This was going to require a 40 minute bus trip since we had since then moved.   When I told my friend Argentine friend Cesar about this, he was pissed.  He went back to the store and basically had to demand that we receive our cell phone number.  Eventually we did.  Then we discovered in order to be able listen to our voicemail messages we have to obtain a special pin.  How do you obtain the pin?  By receiving the magical text message of course.  We have been here six months and have still never received the pin number, I would go to Movie Star and demand it, but I just haven’t seemed to be able to muster up the energy, besides text messages work fine.  Part Two.  Pay as you go means exactly that, you pay for the minutes you use, but how does one recharge their minutes?  Well you have to go to the Kiosko (the corner store) and you give them your phone number and they punch it in a special little machine and then you pay and then your phone gets recharged.  This sounds easy right?  Well usually it is.  Except the machines that transfer the minutes to your phone are often down.  Yesterday was Dia de Amigo (Friends Day) and every one and their brother was calling their pal on the phone and this resulted in some sort of cell phone outage.  No cell phone calls to be made or received and no recharging your phone.  Today I woke up and went to work.  My phone is out of minutes so I spied a kiosko with a sign that says: MOVIE STAR RECHARGE YOUR MINUTES HERE.  So when the lady at the window asked me how she could help me I told her I wanted to recharge my phone.  She gave me a funny look.  “Recharge your phone?” she asked.  Me trying to stay calm: “Yes, I want to RECHARGE my phone.”  The woman shook her head, “No, we don’t recharge phones here.”  I pointed to the sign.  She stared at it and then shrugged.  I resisted the urge to hurl my phone at her and instead bought a Pepsi.  So what can I say, this is not a paradise, far from it.  There are things I love, things I hate and things that make me want to impale my own face, but that’s life.  You take the good when you can and you learn to deal with the rest.