And we wait.
Something that takes some getting used to in Chile is having to wait in various lines just for one thing.
You want to purchase a water from a little store. First, you must give the water to a person who gives you a little paper saying how much you owe. Then you must go to a cashier and pay. After they stamp your paper and give you a receipt, you must then go to yet another person who has your water for you and give them the little stamped paper.
And this is fairly normal. It´s not always three different lines, two is standard, but three happens. It´s an extremely inefficient system, but that´s just the way it is. For example, at the recent fondas, if you wanted to buy food, you first had to stand in an at times very long line to order and pay. Then you had to get in an even longer line to wait to give someone your tickets and get your food. So in the end, you lost every bit of a half an hour in lines. Probably the worst is in night clubs that practice this.
Maybe it´s a bit of a rant, but I can´t help it. I feel so much of the time, we´re all just waiting in lines here, sometimes only to get to the next line. No, not all places function like this, some have caught on to the fact that if one person takes your money and serves you, the wait time is generally cut in half; generally bigger chains work more efficiently, but the family owned, or places that have been around forever continue to work in lines.
I´ve been told the reason for this system is to keep all the money in one pair of responsible, trustworthy hands. There´s not a whole lot of faith that a regular old worker would do the right thing if they had to take money and give change.
And I don´t see the system changing anytime soon. So for now, we must wait in lines and have hundreds of little receipts floating around.
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