Selling Petrol To Argentines

More petrol. Better asses.

Whilst the world focuses on Copenhagen, and what to do about Climate Change, this fair country is as ever both ahead of and right behind the game when it comes to using its natural resources.

I arrived at work on last Saturday morning for our end of year celebration, expecting to be met by a sea of miserable faces. Instead I was met by a chirpy colleague, positively skipping out of his (fully full of petrol) car.

- What's put you in such a good mood? I asked.
- Just stopped for petrol, he replied, as if communicating a secret.

Wondering briefly if this chap needed to get out more, I looked at him quizzically.

- You don't have a car, do you? he said, as if to clarify my suspicion that to him, stopping a car, lifting a lid, and filling a tank with petrol was absolute tops.

- Go on, I said.
- The new Shell estaciones de servicio? I'm still looking at him blankly. Right, he says, in a 'I'll start at the beginning' tone. Shell realised that more than a quarter of all petrol is sold on a Saturday morning, right? People filling a full tank before heading out of town for the weekend. So, who's filling the cars? Men. How do you get men to your petrol station?

In these times when using natural resources is tantamount, Shell lead the way by running the following advert in last month.

Shell argentina incorpora chicas sexy y hot con buen trato con los clientes para sus estaciones de servicio en capital y gran buenos aires mayores de 18 años el trabajo es de playera las interesadas enviar CV con fotos.

A playera is best translated as a hospitality girl, although literally translates to a shirt. Directly below the advert where the hopefuls. My favourite comment was from Silvina:

Hola que tal? Mi nombre es Silvina, tengo 20 años Hi. My name is Silvina. I am 20. Trabaje 2 años en una estacion de servicio shell I worked for 2 years at a Shel service station. Soy simpatica I'm friendly Me encanta tratar con la gente I love working with people Y estoy acostumbrada a llevar uniformes extrovertidos And I am used to working in extrovert uniforms. Tengo una buena cola. I have a great ass.









Well, it might not stop Bangladesh from having another draught/flood year, but it's a very Argentine response. And good luck to you, Silvina.

Long Live the NHS

Been feeling ill recently. Without boring you with the details, I needed a doctor's certificate. The rule here is that you need a doctor's certificate for each and every day you are off sick. And this meant that I had to throw myself into the national lottery that is the call out paramedic/doctor.

In the UK I believe you do this only once you've been off for 5 days. That way you do not burden an already overburdened NHS by calling out a doctor to confirm that you do indeed have the sniffles, and it is nothing to do with the fact that you've just really got into The Wire: Series 3 and you're shamming it for a working week.

Anyway, no certificate, no pay that day. This is so strictly enforced that a colleague of mine had to take a day off (unpaid) to get a sick note from his doctor (9 -5 appointments only) to get paid for his sick day. But had he not done that he'd have been marked down AWOL for a day, which is sackable, and consequently missed two days instead of one.

You never quite know what you're going to get with the medical system here, I find. Often it's excellent, efficient, highly professional. Often it is barkingly mad, with a level of informality that you literally would not believe. From my immediate circle I know one person whose gynecologist gives her a friendly pat on the bum at the end of each appointment, and someone who called a doctor out and, after he asked her a series of questions such as: "So, you alone in here?" he asked her out. Before he'd examined her. And an honorable mention for our midwife, who turned up, a good hour after she'd arranged to meet us, a good 4 hours after Katie's waters had broken, with an armful of liquidación shopping bags. Can't miss a bargain on a Saturday, baby or no baby.

This is not entirely surprising. This must be one of the only countries in the world where you do not need very high grades to study medicine. You do at UBA - the eminently respectable public University of Buenos Aires. But you don't at any number of private universities around the province. And I have taught some deeply average students who, a couple of years later appear back at school, comfortably completing their 2nd year in Med School. Terrifying. If some of them appeared at my bedside table, I'd operate on myself. 

So I shouldn't have been surprised when Lady Doc arrived on Saturday evening. Maybe I was in a crap mood because Scotland had just been beaten by the Pumas. Again. Maybe it was because I had a temperature of 40 degrees. But after a mumbled Spanish conversation - bit tired... yes, I've been drinking water... no, I'm not on any medication.... yes, The Wire, it's excellent... - There was a slight misunderstanding regarding how long I'd "been here" (I thought she meant the country, she meant in bed... so I said 2 and a bit years), and I asked her for her diagnosis.

Lowering her stethoscope, she looked me in the eye and said:

- Very bad, your Spanish. 

As you might imagine, it took me a little while to process this, partly because she spoke so slowly I had time to worry about the very bad... bit, assuming this related to my physical condition, and not my incorrect use of the subjunctive.

Furious, I took my ordens that work would need, and asked her a simple question.

- What's your job?

- I am doctor, she said.

- A doctor. Not a Spanish teacher then?

- No no, she joked.

- Then your job's done, isn't it? Out.

Which she did, without so much as asking for my number or even trying to pat me on the arse. What's coming to the profession?

Goldalot and the 3 Bears

Couldn't post this on youtube, no idea why, so trying again here.

You Could Knock That Down...

Why are there so many average men walking around with such beautiful women on their arms? From celebs to your mates to yourself, this pattern recurs. How often have you sat in a cafe/bar/tree with night vision googles and stood/sat/leaned, simply baffled at how in a millions years he got her.

This is not a new thought, nor a new observation, but I am yet to hear a convincing explanation for it. It's always women are less superficial, men are intrinsically less attractive, women drink more these days... None of these ring true to me.

But, daydreaming one afternoon, I realised that the key difference is as follows:

- A man looks at a woman for what she is now.

- A woman looks at a man for what he might become.

- To translate to ManSpeak, that is to say that a woman looks at a man the way a man looks at a house.

Let's put this to the test.

When a man goes to look at a house, and this is a fact, whilst his prettier half is discussing logistics with the sleazy bad suited rep who's still thinking about whether the new Mini Cooper is safely parked, the man is mentally knocking down walls, installing cupboards, visualising where the projector could be hooked up for movie night, picturing the things he needs that doesn't know the name for yet to buy in B&Q, and thinking that if the downstairs bathroom truly is the 'unique selling point' that MiniSuit is telling you wife it is, how much more unique is a cocktail bar/man cave?

Thus, when a woman is looking at a man she is not thinking what she has now, she's thinking: ok, fair enough, decent area, room for improvement there, some of these friends need to go, I can cut that down, we can paper over that, that can go away when we have guests over, mother important but is neither a neighbor nor a supporting wall. Interesting.

And, may I add, long may this continue. Right, I'm off to B&Q to get me some things-me-gigs.

You Are What You eat

I thought I had to share this. The first, a truly remarkable story from the Middle East, and the second, my take on the theory based on Argentina.

Email from Pricey:

Every now and again I catch a glimpse of something so brilliant on Arabic TV that I just have to share it.......

On Saturday I was channel flicking on TV when I paused on a picture of a packed auditorium of smartly dish-dashed gents being spoken to by a local Iman (of undisclosed nationality!). He was speaking in English on an Arabic channel and mid-way through his clearly thought provoking diatribe, this is what I caught:

"Many great writers and poets throughout history have philosophised that WE ARE WHAT WE EAT. This explains so many aspects of our cultures and societies. The reason that we as Muslims are so peaceful is that we eat peaceful animals, like cows, sheep and goats. However, our enemies eat vicious and violent animals like..............PIGS (!!), WOLVES and .....................(wait for it)..............TIGERS"!!!!!!!!!!!!

Absolutely brilliant! I would stay and chat but Sarah's got a full shoulder of Tiger roasting in the oven............

Case Study. Argentina.
You are what you eat? Case Study 2: The Argentine.

Argentines are made almost entirely of cow. As such, they should make an excellent Case Study, unpolluted as they are to extraneous factors that would colour the study, such as fruit, vegetables or others meats such as chicken, wolf or tiger.

At first, I thought that is was actually hard to think of an animal that reflects the average Argentine worse than the cow.

Cows are, after all, slow and dim witted, whilst your Argentine is a sharp witted and intellectually aggressive character: I have never heard a cow getting angry over politics, for example.

Cows are not talkative, even monosyllabic, and spend far less than 2 hours a day in front of the mirror.

Cows are systematically abandoned at birth without any obvious signs of trauma, whereas an Argentine will spend half their life in therapy based on no more than an implied sense of parental abandonment as they were only breastfed for 22 months, rather than the 9 years they so craved.

Cows are rubbish at football, and not that good looking.

But then I thought some more.

Cows are, I reflected, notoriously work shy. Bulls are a different matter, but they don't eat bulls! Cow are happy to stand around all days eating grass and talking crap. Moo? Like that means anything. Maté, the national drink, is after all, not much more than dried grass. And when did you last see a Cow, or for that matter an Argentine, returning home from the office past 8pm, I asked myself?

Argentines, like cows, do spend a lot of their time blocking roads. Furthermore, Argentines, like Cows, show wilful disregard for the rules of the road, wandering acorss the lanes without ever indicating or showing respect for rights of ways, as is particularly evident in India.

Then there is the President who is, after all, almost entirely skinned in leather and has a singularly bovine intelligence. And she, like Cows, shows nothing but comtept and dislike for the farmers who, she believes, are trying to steal her milk then bleed her to death.

And to answer a previously unsolvable question of these people: how does one process the staggering amounts of meat the average Argentine eats in a year? You're there before me. 4 stomachs.

You know what? Your sciency bloke may be on to something...

Resources

It's exam leave time, which is a truly wonderful thing in the life of a teacher. It's like waking up in the morning, about to go to work, and you realise it's Saturday. You're so used to your timetable by this time of year that you completely forget you're not teaching. A thing of beauty...

And at this time of year your forgotten little ones - the little year 7s - finally get the attention they have been craving. Naturally, when preparing 18 year olds for important International Exams, a teacher can focus a little too heavily on the 'exam classes', leaving the enthusiastic ones slightly out of the limelight.

It's not like you don't teach them, you think, quietening your conscience, you just teach them quite well, rather than brilliantly.

Now, I didn't realise the true state of affairs until this morning. Having spend a good hour preparing resources for the lesson - something interesting and engaging, even writing an example answer myself - I bounced into the room, excited to deliver a brilliant lesson, rather than the only quite good ones they are used to.

My first clue was when I opened the folder to smugly and safely save as a joy foever this thing of beauty, and there was, worryingly, but one file in my entire Year 7 folder. Very worryingly, it was labelled almost exactly a year ago to the day. Truly, deeply worryingly, it was simply saved as: "A resource!"

Not to be deterred I bounded down the corridors to the eagerly awaiting recipients of my planning and erudition.

"Morning guys, how's it going?" I asked, with typical enthusiasm.

They looked up, in retrospect, kinda surprised. They had that look of bemused but pleasant surprise, now I think of it, like the look you give your Dad when he asks you a question that indicates he's actually been listening. That look. Multiplied by 24 (faces), or 48 (eyes).

"Morning... Sir?" they replied.

"OK," I said, with continued enthusiasm, and, trying to disguise my pride, announced, "here are your resources for the lesson. Take one each!"

Silence.

Eventually a hand born of the courage of the ignorant raised itself, and ventured, quizzically, shatteringly:

"Sir. What's a resource?"

The Diving Bell and The Brick

Have you read The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It is the story of Jean Dominique Buaby who suffers a stroke. Tragically, he is left with a perfectly functioning mind, but his only form of communication is by blinking his left eye. Using this method, he narrates the entire, beautiful, novel.

The patience and dedication required to complete this book I previously would have found utterly unimaginable. The hell he must have gone through to write even the simplest sentence.

The agony to correct a mistake, I could barely bare to read on, as you feel every letter eeked out with such a force of spirit.

Then I bought a phone that pre dates predictive texting.

It's the same.