The Dark Side

January 17, 2008 |

Nan is slowly getting familiar with her computer. And it did not take me long to to turn her to the dark side. Her Acer lap top came complete with a karaoke program, and some fifty games. Everything a Thai girl needs really. She has also discovered the gossip at Sanook.com, and is now concentrating on mastering the MP3 playing functions.

She has not really used the internet much, apart from reading gossip that is. But I suspect that side of things will improve, once we get the wi-fi set up, so we both can be online at the same time. We did buy a wireless router for it. But At that stage of the buying process, I was exhausted, by the Thai way of conducting the simple business of purchasing stuff. So I forgot to check if it has TP cable outlets. And my desktop does not have a wi-fi card installed.

Buying anything more advanced than groceries here is a drag. My idea of purchasing stuff is this. I enter the store, locate whatever I want to buy, haul it over to the cashier, hand over money or plastic, and leave. If the store does not have the item I want…simple…locate a place that have it, and buy it there.

Right here in Putthaisong there actually is such a place. The furniture store where we got all our stuff is great! I admit it’s not top quality stuff. But they can’t be beaten by any place in the Kingdom for one simple reason. Long term stayers in Thailand won’t believe this. But these people actually understand the concept of service, and easy shopping.

You can enter the place, they will leave you alone to browse around for what you want, but do recognize your presence. At the slightest hint, they will immediately be at your side to answer questions. And all you have to do is point at the item, agree on a price, tell them where to deliver it. And it will be at your house a couple of hours later, and readily assembled with nothing missing, and the delivery dude will only accept payment after thoroughly checking that everything is in order. Fantastic!

But for some reason this does not happen if you buy anything that requires some form of electricity to work. Take when we where looking to buy a desktop computer. The sales assistants best argument to convince me the computer she wanted to sell to me was that it had a screen saver!

Not to forget purchasing our TV and Hi-fi system. It took us 5 minutes to find the one we wanted….and 2 more hours of waiting around for them to locate it at the storeroom and complete all the paperwork.

Let’s say you do find something you want to buy. This is it, you are actually ready to part with money and haul the stuff home. In any part of the world, you would be out of there 2 minutes later. Not so here in Thailand. This is the stage of the buying process where the real, life draining experience starts, where, if you where not so happy with your life in general, away from the greyness of existence in your own country, you would no doubt be looking for a rope or a 10th floor balcony to end it all.

You see, instead of simply entering the agreed price into some computer gizmo, print out a receipt, and receive the money, they insist on sitting you down, offer you some water, and then chit chat with your wife about you in Thai. Meanwhile forms have to be filled out, signed, counter signed, stamped and approved. And should you want to use your Visa card, they want your pass port, copies of your credit card and preferably some extra ID too. So you are stuck there waiting and waiting.

Well, after all of that, I hope you can understand that when we got Nan’s computer, and I did not remember to add the Wi-Fi router until after all that paper work…I forgot to check the existence of TP-5 ports on it, so I could hard wire it to my desktop. Of course Wi-fi cards can not be had here in Putthaisong, nor in nearby Satuek. So we’ll just have to wait for that until after the Bangkok trip.

That’s it!

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