Here is a story that is kind of funny, but also shows a little bit about what the culture is like here.
A few weeks ago we decided to go to the video rental store. While we were there Steve became a member and paid the membership fee to be allowed to rent movies there.
Well, last week, we returned to the same store. When we tried check out, the clerk asked us for our membership number. Steve told him we forgot our number but we did have a membership. He searched in his computer under our phone number, but couldn’t find it. Then he searched under our name, still no luck. So he pulls out a stack of membership applications, and starts to look through them…one by one. When Steve went the first time he never filled out a form. He just wrote his address and phone number on a scrap sheet of paper that they gave him.
So our as our clerk was flipping through all these forms, he flipped past an application of a friend of ours, Rebecca Hopkins (also with MAF). Steve told the clerk that he knew her. So the clerk picked up the form and started to check out the video’s to Rebecca. Then, Steve had to come up with the Indonesian to say, “No, I’m not her, I just know who she is.” The clerk then went back to flipping through applications. At the end of the stack he never found ours (probably because we never filled one out.) He simply found Rebecca’s again and said, “Let’s just use hers.” Steve said, “No, I think it would be much better if we filled out an application form.” The clerk said, “No, it will be much easier to check it out to Rebecca’s name, let’s just do that.”
So in frustration, we acquiesced. We ended up checking the movies out in Rebecca’s name. In America, that situation would have been so much different. It’s amazing how much we are learning to be flexible.
The good thing that has come out of the situation is the clerk now knows our name, and we have been able to start a little bit of a relationship with him. Hopefully, we can rent movies under our own name in the future.
