Life Style Refugee – The Ajijic Blog

My adventures with the furniture salesman last week are only the latest chapter in an ongoing saga with our refrigerator. Some months ago, it started behaving badly. The ice in the freezer melted, and the refrigeration compartment, while perhaps a degree or two cooler than the outside temperature in the hottest month of the year, was obviously struggling.

I was raised by intellectual parents in the gleaming atomic age. By the time I was old enough to own my own appliances, the world had divided into them and us, them being qualified to keep things running, us… not.
I know that at the first sign of trouble with anything significant, I’m going to have to initiate diplomatic relations with an alien, but necessary, group of redneck fix-it types who know about repairs. Members of this intimidating nation are free to tell me–and charge me–whatever they like, because I’m completely at their mercy. It has always been a more comforting option to just go buy a new car than to live with the anxiety of trying to keep one running after it starts having problems,and staying awake at night wondering if the guy in the jumpsuit is laughing at me behind my back.

People who move here and then complain about the “manana” attitude and whine about a shiftless work ethic strike me as highly suspicious. In the States, as a realtor, I was held hostage by workmen too numerous to count, plumbers, electricians, heating-and-air-conditioning guys, repair people of all stripes. As for the Manana attitude, well, the only way I ever knew where any of my handy -man type guys were is because I happen to attend AA meetings myself. It took precision timing, but I developed a strategy that involved catching a painter on his way back from a binge. If they’d been attending meetings and managing to accumulate some sobriety for a few months, I’d give them a wide berth, so great was the likelihood that they were about to pick up a bottle and go on a bender. None of this would have been so harrowing, if it weren’t for the fact that it cost hundreds of dollars every time one of these characters got involved, and you were never sure what they were doing, or if it would work, or if by the time you needed some warranty work you’d be able to find them again without calling Dog the Bounty Hunter. And the idea that they were more likely to show up when they said they would than the guys I’ve dealt with in Mexico is just ludicrous.

My observation here in Mexico is that there are three possible phases involved in a repair. If you’re lucky, the problem will be resolved in Phase 1, which is the guy that you called shows up on time and fixes the problem, charging a miniscule amount, thirty pesos or something.  I’m here to tell you, that happens far, far more often than not, and a whole helluva lot more than it ever did in the States. If it doesn’t, you move on to the second phase. This only happens if the original repair was unsuccessful. The repairman returns. After this, things can go in a couple of directions. People here are awfully, awfully good at what they do, and they will do it right the first time if they know how. There’s some wiggle room here for human error, of course. If that’s the case, it will be immediately spotted and corrected. If it’s not, you enter Phase 2b. This is where the gifted repair guy has taken his best shot and is about to start making stuff up,and down the rabbit hole you go. We had been stuck  in 2b for a while with the extended family of father, brothers, sons, and wives– They are the Flying Wallendas of major appliance repair –that are responsible for keeping local refrigerators running.

The problem with this phase is that most Mexicans would rather commit ritual suicide than give you bad news, so they’ll try anything, but at some point, they move into Phase 3. That’s when the repair person has exhausted what he knows and what he can make up, and the object still doesn’t work. At this point he’s smart enough to quit showing up, even though we’re not smart enough to quit calling and bitching. It is probably the uninformed gringotard who has been graduated to this phase without receiving the memo that is responsible for all the kvetching about “manana.”

There came a moment when the refrigerator had been muscled out onto our front terrace so that it could be worked on by repairmen who, having entered Phase 3, abandoned it there. The freezer was stocked, not with ice cream and frozen vegetables, but with milk and fruit. In other words, it was now being used as an auxiliary refrigerator. Which made a total of three, because there was also a blue igloo chest sitting in the kitchen where the fridge was supposed to be. It was a low moment. Generally, I am perfectly convinced of the rightness of our move to Mexico, but cut me some slack. I’m a 52 year old woman, and subject to, er, fluctuations in mood. The multiple unsuccessful attempts to fix the refrigerator were making me feel anxious,  helpless.  I would have liked to go buy a new one. However,we had just gotten back from ten days at the beach. It’s not a great time to be replacing big ticket items. While I was mulling this over, a prehistoric looking spider, probably imported from the Puerto Vallarta jungle in the trunk of Bruno’s 1991 Taurus, ran across the porch.  Worse! Now I was a person with a cooler in the kitchen, a refrigerator on the porch, a car from the last century, and giant hairy spiders running around loose. I felt that moving to Mexico was a colossal mistake, that I had sacrificed any chance of every achieving anything, taken a left turn when I should have gone right. I felt broke, a failure, and that, more than a loser, I was a loser living in freaking Mexico. Uber Loser!

In a scenario that didn’t need any help to depress me, there was a pair of jeans sticking out of the fridge and revealing a healthy slice of ass crack, but neither belonged to Javier Castellenos, the local appliance repair man who had gone missing. No, the jeans, and the crack, belonged to my husband, who–coup de grace!–was trying to fix the ice box himself. For some reason, that was the last straw. Something about my husband trying to fix a broken refrigerator made me feel as though we were teetering on the brink of disaster.

Ah, don’t worry, there’s a happy ending! Like I said, mood swings.

Bruno has more experience than I with this whole pattern, because he drives a 20 year old car that has been driven into a horse. At this very moment he’s chasing down Chui, who is responsible for the day to day upkeep of our valiant 1991 Ford Taurus, in spite of his complete lack of qualification for such a job. Or any job! He lives outside the network of competent repair people that are the subject of this post, believe me. He tends to leapfrog into Phase 3, but he’s been with us for a long time.  Chui obviously neglected some vital step when he painted the car, as that paint is now peeling off in long strips.

For some reason that has never bothered me, but the whole refrigerator thing caused me to  panic. Here’s the happy ending; Bruno fixed the refrigerator. Returning to some joyous boyhood passion for tinkering, forgetting that we don’t have the necessary clearance from the brotherhood of redneck repair guys to do this kind of work, using some common sense, he fixed it. It’s sitting back where it’s supposed to be, making ice cubes like crazy–we both grin at each other every time we hear another batch thunk into the receptacle. It makes me feel like he, like we, can do anything. That we are self sufficient, that we are not intimidated by guys showing their butts. We  show them ours!

That, no I didn’t miss my chance by moving to Mexico. Far from being my undoing, is the making of me.