I'm in the queue at the post office in Salta and it's 9:20am. This is my third attempt to post a parcel of cold-weather (and subsequently past their usefulness on this trip) clothes back to Australia. I tell the woman in the hostel what I'm doing and she tells me I'll need a box. 'I know' i tell her, does she maybe have one i can steal? 'They'll have plenty at the post office". Outside the post office there are upwards of 500 people queueing. This is not a good sign, although i realise relatively quickly that they are all queuing to collect their new digital set top TV boxes, presumably because the analog signal is about to be turned off, and also presumably because the easiest way the Argentine government thought to get set top boxes into every home was to make each and every Argentinian queue at the post office to get it. In 35 degree heat.
At the post office the helpful security guard at the door tells me that I'll need a box. Yes, but I'm informed that the place to get boxes for posting things, i tell him, is at the post office. 'Aha' he says, 'yes, go to the man at the Customs office and he will give you a box'. Having twice before been thwarted trying to post this self same parcel, i have some idea of the process involved. There is a Customs office, and an International Post desk. They are adjacent, but with autonomous queues. You take your box to the Customs office, where the (invariably) man inspects your goods, gets you to fill out a form, prints something out and then sends you, your form and your box to the International Post desk, where the (invariably) woman weighs your box, gets you to fill out two more forms, demands payment, stamps the form from Customs, takes your name and your box (for giving back to Customs behind the counter), and sends you out of the queue. Customs (man) will then - at some stage - call your name, inspect your box again, inspect the form to ensure you have paid the requisite fee, have one of his (female) assistants seal the box, and then send you on your merry way, happy in the knowledge that your box will likely never see light outside this particular post office ever again.
I go to the empty Customs office and after ten minutes of increasingly elaborate gesticulating the man can no longer ignore me, and he comes out. I tell him i need to post this parcel to Australia. 'You need a box', he says. I know, i tell him, but all intelligence in Salta has told me that he is the man to see about a box. He looks at me like i have belittled the entire footballing history of Argentina. Why would he have a box? Does he look like a box seller? I need to go and get a box somewhere and then come back. I come up somewhere between not speaking Spanish and outright refusal to go anywhere. He sighs and shouts over at the woman at the International Post desk. She has boxes apparently. I should queue there and get one from her and then come back to see him to start the process. So i queue, and check my watch, and it's 9:20.
This is a problem. There are 20 people ahead of me in the queue for International Post, and the two women just in front are grumbling that the people at the very front have been there for fifteen minutes already. As it happens, they end up staying at the front until 9:55am, whereupon the woman (who i am quite sure is someones lovely granny), finally gets them organised. This is another problem, as the signs everywhere are telling me that as opposed to the normal onerous working hours of 8:30 to 12:00 worked by the Customs office, today, because it is during the holiday week between Christmas and New Year, they will close at 11. Granny, it seems, needs - for every customer - to stroll to the other side of the office to get any one of a set of forms which might be better situated within arms reach, given her reliance on them. She then, likely on account of her age, needs to wait for one of her colleagues to "do the computery bit". This means that every single person has to wait for someone else - who doesn't work at the International Post desk - to have a spare 2 minutes from shovelling set top boxes over the counter to anyone with a form and a smile.
At 10:45 there are still seven people in front of me in the queue. One of the people who had been at the head of the queue when i arrived has just now been called into Customs, fully one hour and thirty minutes after i first laid eyes on him, and fifteen minutes before the Customs office is due to close. As though this had just now dawned on the Customs people, they hastily call out a number of names and in a flurry of activity they dispense with a handful of people who are waiting. Then a Customs assistant announces (to nobody in particular, lest she get lynched) that the Customs office will close shortly, and that even those people that have already been processed by the International post desk will not be seen today, and will have to come back tomorrow. Between 8:30am and 11am, she finishes, failing to appreciate the irony that the current time (10:51 by my watch) appears to meet these criteria. 'Fuck' i decide, 'this', and I leave.
As i write this - 4 days later - I remember that my brother told me once that in Argentina everything looks modern and new and shiny, but that nothing really works. I have just come from the Chilean Correos/Post Office in San Pedro de Atacama where two lovely women sorted the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. That included one of them having to duck out to the shops for packing tape, and the other doing everything one-handed while holding a 12-month old with an eye infection.
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