December 15, 2003
Dateline: Good Ol' Guatemala
Hello everyone. I'm having a great time here in Guatemala, wish you all were here and all that . . . regardless of your own personal desires concerning this sentiment. Anyway, lots of stuff happening, and not much at all at the same time. I did nothing on Saturday, went to church on Sunday, bummed around at my old high school today, etc.
I'm sure more interesting things will come to my attention as time goes on, but I discovered an absolutely fantastic retarded government policy that has been instituted since I was here last, and I thought it deserved a brief blogpost. It's about the license plates. Everything is a little fuzzy (yay!), but here's what I understand:
A few months ago, the government started talking about a nice new license plate design that would be "put into circulation" or whatever, and a lot of money got funneled into the project. Well, time went by and no one saw any license plates. Suddenly, everyone is talking at once and pointing fingers and the official story seems to be that the company that was producing the license plates committed some kind of fraud and the money disappeared. The next thing you know, the wonderful new license plates come out and start getting slapped onto cars everywhere.
A few of our cars have them, I've seen numerous other cars on the streets with them as well. Almost every single "lisence plate" is hanging off of the car in shreds. They appear to be made of some especially flimsy form of cheaply laminated paper. That's quality, right there. You can't even read the number on most of them because even if they aren't ripped in several places or drooping off the back of the cars, weather damage has caused the numbers to fade. I want to meet the bureaucrat whose idea this was and shake his hand . . . maybe even hear a few words from him, on the off-chance that he has the mental capacity for intelligent speech, of course.
You know, this is what makes the "good ol' USA" so blasted boring . . . You think you've got morons up there? Think again . . .
Random observation of the day: A lot can happen in a year, and a lot can change, especially when your on-site sources aren't keeping you properly informed (assuming that "someone must have told you"). I'm not doing this year-long absence thing again. I'm thinking six months, tops, from here on in . . .