Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Let's Meet Up... Somewhere

Hello there, gorgeous beings. Today I'm going to expose the shame (pride?) that most of us Indonesian people have in common. I'm going to talk about how we arrange appointments.

How appoinments are supposed to be made?
Let's see the ideal conditions in an appointment, I'm going to use an "unofficial group meet up" situation as an example. First thing first, the time and location of the meeting must be arranged and decided beforehand, surely no one wants to go blindly with no idea when or where they should be for the appointment.

Not all of us can fast travel, you know

Next is the list of people that will come, participants should let everyone else know whether they are available on the said time, and of course whether they are familiar or at least know the location of where the meeting will take place.

Finally, before the appointed day comes, or at least several hours before the meet up time, make sure you tell anyone attending should it turns out that you can't come after all. Your prescence might not be important for the whole thing, but at least it shows that you are a responsible person.

How (most) appointments in Indonesia are made?
The methods are not completely different than the usual actually, but there are some 'arrangements' that need to made. The first one is that the time of the appointment will be modified in around 1-2 hours earlier than the actual meet up time, because people WILL be late to show up.

And even after that, there will be some that will be late beyond the actual time anyway. With whatever reason they can find, mostly made up bullshits. It's not that I don't believe the excuses right away, there are times that they are actually true. But more often than not, they fake the excuse so that they won't look like an irresponsible douche.

The top excuses are "I'm sick", "Something important came up", "Bad traffic", "I overslept", and "I'm already on the way, be there soon" even though they just got out of the bathroom. Again, I'm not saying that these excuses are invalid and should be considered as a fake right away, but if there's any Indonesian who claim that they never did any of this, they're a bigger liar than someone who claim they actually read and accept the EULA before they click the agreement check.

"Oh man, I might plan to make a nuclear weapon one day. Guess I can't install this program after all"

And then when the time finally comes around, those people may or may not inform of them not coming. If you try to contact the ones that didn't say anything it's usually met by an unanswered dial tone, and even if they pick it up THEN they will say the excuse of why they couldn't come (refer to the above). Or in worst case scenario, they totally forgot about it.

How can it be worse?
You might notice I haven't compared the second 'ideal' situation yet, because it's actually the worst thing that can happen should it go wrong. And it really did happen to me last Sunday.

The meet up time was at 12pm, so I departed from home at 11am. Because, again, this is Indonesia, and that means the actual time is probably around 1-2pm. The time it took for me to go to the location is supposedly less than 2 hours, but again, this is Indonesia and the traffic is pretty much fucked up in weekends, not to mention the amount of people using the public transportation, so it took me more than 2 hours to get to the mall that was our meeting location.

The effort of getting inside a bus in weekends is basically a similar bloodbath

I tried looking around for the exact location inside the mall. My clue was it was a restaurant, surely it wouldn't be so hard... If I am actually familiar with the place. So I asked around, practically travelled all over the place, yet no one can be seen, even though I've reached the said location. Right then I decided to ask the group again, maybe they have moved to another location, but surely they would inform the people that haven't arrived yet, right....?

Turns out the meeting was actually at another goddamn mall, but at the restaurant with the same name. I read the chat messages again, probably it was me who got it wrong from the beginning... nope, it actually said I was supposed to be at the right place. And then I asked a simple question, "Why nobody said anything about moving to another location?". Which, impressively replied along the line with, "We've been here all along, I didn't say anything about the meeting taking place over there".

Which can also be translated into a one big picture

I snapped, that was completely irresponsible. Keep in mind that I have been walking and standing all that time, tired and hungry. I decided to head back outside to go home when another friend of mine - who was in the same boat - met me, so he invited me to tag along and go to the meet up anyway. Which I did, and long-story short, it was a complete waste of 6 hours... and another 2 hours going home.

Yes, this is actually a rant post, and I'm sorry for making you read all these. But I still try addressing a general problem (and one in particular), especially since I posted a lot of related stuffs on the last one. Speaking of which, none of them apologized for the miscommunication up 'till now. Sure, I got treated a Starbucks chocolate drink by one of them, but what I really wanted was an actual, sincere apology. Which I don't think I'll be getting anytime soon.

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