Shopping for a duck hair pillow and other frustrations

Home > Life in Bangkok > Shopping for a duck hair pillow and other frustrations - Jan. 27, 2006

Shopping for a duck hair pillow and other frustrations - Jan. 27, 2006

Date Created: Jan 27, 2006, 11:34 AM

It's been an exhausting couple of days in which I've been trying to make more sense of the scatter-brained nature of my job. Yesterday I had only three meetings, two of which I'd arranged myself, so at least I could run them and end them myself. I met first with the core of my staff -- Bernie, Natnipha, Apichart and Deng. The latter three have worked for AIT combined for longer than the university has existed. I had to explain to them why it is a good thing that my boss has said I'm going to take the large corner office and move everyone else around from where they have sat for years. And I had to tell them that no, there is no budget for any new equipment. It was a fun meeting. Later I met with the faculty of the School of Environment, Resources and Development and explained to them who I was and what I think I plan to do here. It was an education for me too.

During the day, I found it was possible to purchase and have installed a water heater in the shower. It has been an unusually cool winter here, with morning lows in the 60s, and this business of no hot water in the shower has left me with soap suds on my ears when I reach the office late again because of spending too much time steeling myself to brace the cold water. Turns out that sure I'm allowed to have a hot water heater; I just have to buy it, pay to have it installed and then pay 50 baht (about $1.25) for each hole that remains when I leave. Additionally, it turns out that the installation fee from a campus electrician working on his own time is 500 baht (about $12.50). And it turns out that a wall unit on-demand water heater can be had for less than $100.

So last night after work, I made the exhausting trek into Future Park, which is the nearby shopping mall. From my room, I can call the taxi stand outside the main gate, and a taxi picks me up at my building about five minutes later. The trip to Future Park is about 20 minutes down the main highway back to Bangkok. To go in that direction however, one first travels north, away from Bangkok, to a U-turn bridge a couple kilometers away. Then the trip takes 15 minutes or so, depending on traffic.

The taxi ride costs about 100 baht (about $2.50). When I arrived at Future Park last night, I realized I had only a 500 baht note and kicked myself, as taxi drivers are more notorious than anyone for claiming they have no change. It is as if they visit the bank to make a deposit after each fare. So, of course he had no change, and I'm really not sure why he thought this story would have done him any good -- I wasn't going to give him a 400 baht tip. This is Thailand, however, and a woman who wanted my taxi and opened the door for me when I first pulled up said to me in English that she had five 100-baht notes, and she gave me the proper change. It's amazing how quickly my faith in this place recovered.

Future Park is somewhat sprawling, and it is built in such a way to be incredibly difficult to get around. Unlike in the U.S., no thought is given whatsoever to pedestrians -- or seemingly cars, for that matter. I realized I'd had the taxi let me out all the way across the main parking lot from HomePro, which is a place surprisingly like Home Depot Expo. I wended my way through the parking lot, dodging cars and construction -- they love their jack hammers here -- and noting that there were several crosswalks freshly painted on the roads, yet none of these line up with anything resembling a sidewalk.

HomePro is a real experience. I'd been to the one in Phuket quite often after the tsunami, and this one at Future Park happens to be much larger. I first began looking at bedding, veering around a woman who used a floor polisher in the same area for what turned out to be the entire time I was there. Sheets are surprisingly expensive -- roughly the same price as in the U.S. -- and down pillows were not available. Outside the main door, permanently covered in weatherproof plastic, they sold mattress sets, and the most expensive was roughly $750, so I'd hoped sheets were also going to be reasonable.

Anyway, my point was to buy a water heater, and I made my way across to the hardware section of the store and came to an aisle that had nothing but wall unit on-demand water heaters. It was like visiting the olive oil aisle in an supermarket in Italy -- or the rice aisle here. There were literally more than a hundred on display in every imaginable make, model and finish. One I particularly admired was blue and had chrome with racing stripes. I was a bit dumbfounded by this dazzling array, and paused for a moment to consider how great my first shower with one of these was going to be. I was also wracking my brain, trying to figure out how to shop for one of these things.

But I should have remembered: This is HomePro, after all; this is the place where if you buy a light bulb, there are three people to help you choose it -- all of them in crisp uniforms -- and then once you have chosen it, they take the bulb out of the box and screw it into a socket and turn it on to make sure it works.

Sure enough, as I was standing there agape in front of a wall full of water heaters, a beautiful Thai employee asked me in pretty good English if she could help me. I told her I was looking for a shower unit, which fortunately reduced my selections by half. Then she asked if I needed 3.5 or 4.5 kilowatts. I had no idea, and she said for Bangkok I'd need only 3.5. She directed me to an even narrower selection, so I was down to having to choose between 25 or so. I asked for her suggestions, and she pointed out a sleek model, complete with a "Safety Circuit" -- presumably a GFCI breaker. It was more expensive than I had anticipated -- about $110, and so I pointed to one that looked more like a Chrysler than the Lexus she'd pointed out. It cost maybe $25 less, and she shook her head and began taking it apart. Inside, she showed me the heater and said "Made in China. No good!" Then she opened up the hood on the model she was pushing on me. It had a heater made in Italy.

Anyway, I shrugged and chose the Italian model, hoping it was a Ferrari and not a Fiat. My salesgirl proceeded to unpack the entire box to make sure everything was there, and she had me fill out the warranty card right then and there. She also translated the other portion of the card and said if I get shocked by the water heater in the next year while it is under warranty, then I can call a number on the card to complain.

Next, I had to pantomime the installation of the device, and she indicated I would need a hose from the current shower head to the heater itself. She pushed my cart for me to the aisle I needed, where there was a salesman she spoke with, and he directed me to the hose section. This contained a display almost as mind-boggling as the water heater aisle, but here again, he helped me choose, and next I was pantomiming wire, so that the heater could be connected to the circuit breaker. Both the guy and the salesgirl pushed my cart this time to the electrical aisle, where two salesmen were standing next to the spools of wire, anxiously awaiting a customer that needed wire measured and cut. So now my purchases occupied four staff members of HomePro. You just don't get this kind of service at Home Depot. Imagine going into the one on Pine Island Road and finding a salesman who speaks Thai.

When next I told my sales team that I'd just like to browse a bit, they seemed a bit crestfallen, but they wished me well, and I was off to the padlock aisle.

I finally made it to the front of the store to check out, and, lo and behold, what did I find? More displays of water heaters that I hadn't even considered! There must have been 20 more in special displays so that the lighting made them look particularly sexy.

At this point, I had quite a lot of stuff, and I still hadn't made it inside the mall, so I took all my bags to the security guard at the door and left them with her. She was tiny and not very intimidating for a scurity guard. She and her associate thought it was the funniest thing in the world when I spoke the six or seven words of Thai that I know, and they tried their English on me: "See you tomollow!" I kept saying, "No! I'm coming back before you close!" until I realized they were just running the gamut of their English vocabulary.

So I made my way again across the parking lot and into the labyrinthine halls of a Thai shopping mall. These places are like one of those drawings by Escher, where all the escalators lead seemingly into each other. That they are covered in mirrors does not help. It is horribly confusing and disorienting, made worse by the fact that shopping malls are invariably crowded beyond belief. Oh, and they are loud, with everything from American pop music playing to Christmas carols, and there are usually announcements made in Thai on loudspeakers every few minutes.

This trip was meant to familiarize myself with the stores in the mall. Most malls have different themes on each floor. In the basement and on the top floor are usually food stalls and restaurants. Also on the top floor are usually the movie theaters and karaoke booths that Prae enjoys so much. Nearly the top floor is usually the cell phone floor, in which hundreds of small stores sell the same 100 or so models of mobile phones available today. I have never determined how one chooses a cell phone store, as the advertised prices and product selection do not seem to vary from place to place.

I was also looking for down pillows, and so I went to the largest department stores. Here again, the malls are set up for confusion. You can go up and down the escalators within the department stores with reasonable ease, but the weird thing is, if you go up or down a floor too far, you wind up in an entirely different store within the store. At Central Department store, for instance, the basement contains a HomeWorks, which is a competitor to HomePro. And the top floor contains a sporting goods chain. At Robinson's, you go too far downstairs, and you wind up right in Tops Supermarket.

At Robinson's I went to the bedding department and squeezed every pillow I could find with no success. A salesman saw me looking, and I asked if he had any down pillows. I knew this would be a tough question for someone with limited English, and an even tougher discussion for someone with limited Thai.

He looked a bit puzzled and called over the English expert in his department. She said to me, "Hellooo," and I asked her the same about the availability of down pillows. "Hellooo," she repeated, evidently exhausting her knowledge of English. She had me wishing for the comparatively fluent security guard at HomePro. I'd already looked at all their pillows, and wondered whether it was worth pursuing a pantomime here. How do you act out a down pillow, after all?

Somehow after a while I was able to get both of them to understand that I was talking about the filling inside the pillow, and then all that was left was getting across the concept of goose down. I kept saying "Feathers!" and sort of flapping my arms and then "Duck!" When relating the story later to Prae, she tells me that if I had only flapped my arms, said "Quack!" and then pointed at my hair, signifying "duck hair," of course, then they would have readily known what I had wanted, and I would not have had to put on such a show as I did.

Ah yes. Duck hair.

Well, later than sooner, it all clicked, and we were having a fine time, me with my little street show of charades, and not only did they eventually get what I was looking for but they had it as well, and I was able to sleep on down pillows last night, dreaming of a hot-water shower as early as Friday evening. Unfortunately, that did not happen, as the fellow who was supposed to install the water heater did not show up at the appointed time, and I left a meeting with my two bosses for nothing. While my bosses did not know of the outcome of my early departure, they were aware of why I was leaving, and they both thought my reasons very funny, particularly when I told them I kept coming to work later and later, not being able to bring myself to get under that stream of cold water in the mornings.

My immediate boss is a jovial Indian named Sanjeev, who seems to get a real kick out of all the bureaucratic antics. This morning he called me up first thing and told me that his boss wanted me to rework an e-mail I'd sent yesterday in which I'd detailed what I saw the responsibilities of the people who will be appointed to help me rebuild the Web site. I'd sent a fairly detailed but concise e-mail to Sanjeev and his boss. But his boss decided my e-mail should really be in the form of a "TOR," Sanjeev told me. Because Sanjeev speaks fairly quickly and with an Indian accent -- although he did his undergraduate studies at Indiana University -- and because we were on the phone, I couldn't tell what acronym he was saying. So I got off the phone and wrote down DOR, POR, TOR, VOR -- every combination I could think of. I asked everybody I knew if they knew what any of these acronyms meant, and apparently all of them meant something. They love their acronyms at AIT; I'm trying to wean the people here off them. Finally I broke down and went to my boss's office to admit I had no idea what he was talking about.

Turns out in bureaucratese TOR means Terms of Reference. I told Sanjeev that still didn't help much explain what I was supposed to do. In the end, basically his boss was holding up the whole process simply because he wanted what I'd written in bulleted form. It's the little things like that that have a chokehold on this whole place. Really amazing, but at least Sanjeev gets a kick out of it when he sees my expression after finding out about another bit of such idiocy. The other day, this same boss of his and mine came into a meeting where we were discussing an upcoming open house for prospective students. He wondered if we might change the date from Feb. 17 to another date, and for a good 45 minutes, the people in the meeting tittered about, actually considering a date change. Because I know just enough about Asian business culture not to outright say it was idiotic, and because I'm new, I shut up until their polite debate turned to gridlock. When it came to my turn to offer my opinion, I told my boss's boss, "Yes, it is certainly possible to change the date this close to the open house, but we should decide quickly so that I can assign someone to take down the 500 flyers we have posted at area universities (flyers in English and in Thai, incidentally). And I'll also have to call the newspapers and radio stations to let them know the press release I sent contained an error."

That ended the debate rather quickly, but we still lost those 45 minutes.

On Monday I get to meet my boss's other boss, who is based in Paris and is in charge of fund raising. This two-day trip here she wants to make a video of AIT students to send to Oprah Winfrey for her birthday. The idea is to somehow raise money for the university by doing this. I have been appointed to tell her what some of the pitfalls may be with this idea. In typical Asian fashion, though, I will skirt the issue of its inherent flaws and rather stress the time factor involved in the production of such a video -- in two days' time we could never produce something worthy of Oprah, I'll tell her. We wouldn't want to insult the queen of daytime talk with a video less than perfect and thereby tarnish the reputation of AIT.

My eyes are beginning to tire of rolling. But it is rather fun. I look at it as a game to see if I can actually accomplish something worthwhile in the face of all this constant interference.