Ah, yes...
Cleef,
You have put your finger on one of my major complaints about my four yrs of living in SD: so much time and frustration spent by me & my family correcting needless mistakes made by others that had or could have a significant impact on my life. It started in my first days there, when I tried to get the process started in clearing our household goods & car through customs. Despite all the documentation I had provided that clearly stated that my car was a blue Honda Civic, someone in customs decided to mark it as a red Honda Prelude. I spent days getting that corrected, and the corrections stamped by five different officials attesting that it was a legitimate correction.
I can't count the number of times my name was misspelled on official documents (I had to change our car registration twice because the clerks could never be bothered to type names the way they were filled out on documents), or my age was put wrong. I was not alone in this. When my suegra went to get her "new cedula," JCE, with all its new technology and procedures, somehow managed to list her as half her age, a foot shorter and as a male, as well as misspell her name (how hard is it to spell "Jimenez"????), even though she had carefully and painstakingly filled out all documentation clearly (I saw it before she turned it in) and provided her old cedula, which had all the correct info on it! After wasting an entire day in the process, she had to return to waste another day to correct it.
As in my many cases, no one even apologized for the mistakes. Never (well, almost never -- Citibank apologized for a mistake they made -- but then promptly did it again the next month!). If they said anything at all, it was always only to blame someone else or the computers, never to apologize for the inconvenience.
And it was not just government offices that did it. Business Mail did it. CDE did it. Ay, don't get me started about utility screw-ups! For nearly two months Codetel information operators gave people our home number as the number for some plastics business in Herrera, giving us a mess of annoying phone calls. [Codetel never apologized.] After Hurricane Georges dropped the phone line to my house, Tricom continued to bill me for local phone service, even though I repeatedly went and stood in line and told them I had no connection, therefore no service, so I had nothing to pay for, and would they please send someone to reconnect the line? They insisted that all was fine because the computer said so, that I was just trying to avoid my bills, and they were going to cut off my internet access! We went at it for months. After going up many layers of management and still encountering the same stupidity ("the computer says you have service, so you do"), I finally asked for & paid a "final" bill, closed the account and turned reluctantly to Codetel. The next month Tricom sent me another bill, saying that they had not accounted for all charges on my closing bill!!!!!
I'm not claiming mistakes don't happen here in Virginia. They do. For example, the electric company misspelled my wife's name on the billing twice (once after being carefully corrected by me) before getting it right. But the difference is, the correction was done in five minutes by phone, and the service people dealt with apologized profusely.
I may love and miss my family and friends in the DR, and the country's beauty and wonders, but these hassles and "premium prices for running a business" I don't miss at all. Ni un minuto me hace falta estas "maravillas" de la Rep?blica.
Best Regards,
Keith
Cleef,
You have put your finger on one of my major complaints about my four yrs of living in SD: so much time and frustration spent by me & my family correcting needless mistakes made by others that had or could have a significant impact on my life. It started in my first days there, when I tried to get the process started in clearing our household goods & car through customs. Despite all the documentation I had provided that clearly stated that my car was a blue Honda Civic, someone in customs decided to mark it as a red Honda Prelude. I spent days getting that corrected, and the corrections stamped by five different officials attesting that it was a legitimate correction.
I can't count the number of times my name was misspelled on official documents (I had to change our car registration twice because the clerks could never be bothered to type names the way they were filled out on documents), or my age was put wrong. I was not alone in this. When my suegra went to get her "new cedula," JCE, with all its new technology and procedures, somehow managed to list her as half her age, a foot shorter and as a male, as well as misspell her name (how hard is it to spell "Jimenez"????), even though she had carefully and painstakingly filled out all documentation clearly (I saw it before she turned it in) and provided her old cedula, which had all the correct info on it! After wasting an entire day in the process, she had to return to waste another day to correct it.
As in my many cases, no one even apologized for the mistakes. Never (well, almost never -- Citibank apologized for a mistake they made -- but then promptly did it again the next month!). If they said anything at all, it was always only to blame someone else or the computers, never to apologize for the inconvenience.
And it was not just government offices that did it. Business Mail did it. CDE did it. Ay, don't get me started about utility screw-ups! For nearly two months Codetel information operators gave people our home number as the number for some plastics business in Herrera, giving us a mess of annoying phone calls. [Codetel never apologized.] After Hurricane Georges dropped the phone line to my house, Tricom continued to bill me for local phone service, even though I repeatedly went and stood in line and told them I had no connection, therefore no service, so I had nothing to pay for, and would they please send someone to reconnect the line? They insisted that all was fine because the computer said so, that I was just trying to avoid my bills, and they were going to cut off my internet access! We went at it for months. After going up many layers of management and still encountering the same stupidity ("the computer says you have service, so you do"), I finally asked for & paid a "final" bill, closed the account and turned reluctantly to Codetel. The next month Tricom sent me another bill, saying that they had not accounted for all charges on my closing bill!!!!!
I'm not claiming mistakes don't happen here in Virginia. They do. For example, the electric company misspelled my wife's name on the billing twice (once after being carefully corrected by me) before getting it right. But the difference is, the correction was done in five minutes by phone, and the service people dealt with apologized profusely.
I may love and miss my family and friends in the DR, and the country's beauty and wonders, but these hassles and "premium prices for running a business" I don't miss at all. Ni un minuto me hace falta estas "maravillas" de la Rep?blica.
Best Regards,
Keith
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