Take the good with the bad....


I have been very grateful for all the kindness and amazing people I have encountered here in India. From our family near and far, our neighbours, to my carpool, to my colleagues, to the security people, to the grocery store employees, to the kid's coaches, and the Airbnb host and hostesses and I know that our time here would not have exceeded our expectations without them. There is one sticking point that really gets on my last nerve...


Our property manager and all of his workers are not so kind and I feel at times, they are trying to take me for a ride. The other day there was a sewage problem that my neighbour brought to my attention and the property manager happened to be passing our place on his motorcycle. I politely stopped him and told him the problem and he shrugged and said that I need to talk to my landlord about it and then he will fix it. In my head I thought how does that make sense. A sewage problem is something that should be taken care of immediately and he wants to wait 2-3 days since my landlord is in California? Then my neighbour came out and talked to him in the local language and said to him what I was thinking. He still rode off on his motorcycle which made me even more frustrated. She was also annoyed and said she will bring it up with the association because this kind of behaviour is unacceptable. Wait that is not the end. This whole incident took place Tuesday night and did not end until Thursday evening with everything falling apart.


Wednesday morning, some guy is outside our place looking like they are fixing the sewage problem. Thursday evening, my door bell rings and they tell me how much I have to pay. I inquire again as to why I have to pay and shouldn't it be under general maintenance fees? A few grumblings in the local language and then he asks for the money again. I gave it to him knowing that my landlord will reimburse me for it. Still I am annoyed out of principal. What is the point of the maintenance fees?  Right after I paid him, our fan stopped working, the generator stopped working and this guy was outside our house working on our water pump (mind you , I had no idea why he was there nor did he inform me that he was working on it) and it was 95 degrees outside. Lucky me, I had to call the property manager to come back and look at the problems. He called the "electrician" and he came to look at the fan and the generator. Of course something was wrong and we had to pay for it to get fixed. And then the electrician blamed the generator guy for the problem with the generator but in reality it was an electrical problem. In the end, the electrician is hopefully fixing our fan today/Friday and the generator was fixed and we had to pay him. Again, I am not sure why I had to pay him when I am renting the generator. If their is a problem with the generator and I am renting it shouldn't he fix it? Isn't that logical?

It took me a looooong time to decompress from all of the commotion of the evening. Eventually, I was able to reflect and think about all the good things that we have experienced and encountered and that it should be expected that there will always be the good and the bad.




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