Productivity Live

Double Sided Photocopies:  Nope.  What requires three button presses in the US required 3 stores and a day and a half wait down here.

Plane Ticket:  I went to the travel agency and purchased a ticket.  Well, not exactly, I needed to pick it up the following day.  I learned this after sitting in the travel agents office for an hour while she called 5 people for various reasons and then we had to walk down to the main street to use a better photocopy machine than the one in the office.  Then, she had to call and make sure I live where I told her I was living and confirm that the eTicket (I don’t know if this is the best way to have a ticket down here as maybe you too have realized the travelocity-like fluency to this transaction) can be sent to her, but she couldn’t do that until the people at that office got back from lunch.  It was 3:00.

I returned the following day to pick up the ticket.  This lasted about a half-hour while she finished a phone call, gave me a print out of all the information I needed, and then insisted that I wait until another, very similar, paper be printed out.  She did not have this paper.  She tried again calling those people that were probably still out to lunch although, even though they said they would send it right over, nothing arrived for twenty minutes and then I was assured that what I have was good enough to get on the plane.

Yellow Fever Vaccination:  On reaching the vaccination center at 9:00 in the morning the whole staff had left to vaccinate some boat.  A nice man in the street was kind enough to ask me if I actually needed the vaccination or just the certificate.  I guess, depending on your situation, this could be a more productive or less productive an option.

I returned the following week for a more successful experience, you simply pay somewhere up on the third floor, they fill out two papers saying that you have paid, then you walk back down to the ground floor, go outside, and walk halfway around the building.  The room at the end of this trek is where you get vaccinated.  They fill out two more papers to say you have been vaccinated.