The weirdness that is hiring help

Okay, we're going to dive headfirst into some weird privilege here, so be ready.

Hiring help is bizarre if you're not used to it. Maybe it's better if you have professional managerial experience, but I'm not sure. It's a very weird mix of a personal and professional relationship.

We've mostly been interviewing people off recommendations from others in the diplomatic/ex-pat community. Apparently household employees actually prefer us as employers because we treat them better than local employers might (this is 100% hearsay, so apply salt liberally). Also hiring someone who as worked for other ex-pats removes a lot of the guesswork, as they will already know our strange foreign preferences.

The major hang-up ends up being salary. This is the least comfortable part, obviously. It's also the most bizarre. The monthly salary ranges from around USD 130 to 250, probably clustering around the middle. This is for full time work. So, obviously, we're not talking about a lot of money to most people from the US. So when a potential employee asks for what is (relative to the local economy) an outlandish salary, it's tempting to just agree to it rather than have an uncomfortable negotiation.

Apparently, this is actually a pretty bad idea, though, for two reasons. First, they may just assume you're a sucker (and you are, a bit, but willingly). That's fine, as long as it was left there. But oftentimes it results in more questions about bonuses, paying for school fees, etc. So it's (again, apparently) better to be firm at the start. Second, employees accustomed to a relatively high salary may not be willing to work for less after you leave, making it harder to find work. So you (as an employer) may actually be doing them a disservice by paying them more. So pay them less, it's better for them in the long run? How's that for noblesse oblige?

Anyway, the whole thing is a headache. Then again, it's a headache that will end with us never having to drive ourselves or clean up after ourselves for two years. So it's hard to complain. Just kidding, it's really easy to complain, it just makes one feel pretty hypocritical. Still, I have found myself wishing multiple times that we just had a good butler (Mr Carson?) to whom we could delegate this whole process. But then how do you hire the butler? What a conundrum.

Our new home

Our new apartment is a mixture of really awesome and really not awesome, as one might expect from a relatively high-end residence in a developing country. Basically, it looks really gorgeous and is very spacious but many aspects are designed or constructed very poorly. We have about triple the space we had in Virginia. We've also had about triple the maintenance issues in three weeks here than we had in our whole year in Arlington.

I won't dwell on things too much, but so far we've had two leaks (one fairly major that resulted in large portion of the floor or our apartment being covered in water), a broken cabinet, a broken dryer, and a water faucet handle that detached, among other things. We're slowly getting these issues taken care of (the Embassy maintenance guys are very responsive) and are making our house into a home (blech). We just had our living room, dining room, and master bedroom repainted (sterile white walls combined with exclusively fluorescent lighting does not make for a cozy feeling). We also repainted our kitchen cabinets - alternating bright pink and teal was not as appealing to us as it seems to have been to the previous tenant. Of course, all those cabinets might need to be replaced because of water damage, but that's a question for another day (tomorrow in fact).

Unfortunately, posting pictures of an Embassy-maintained and -secured residence on a publicly accessible website is something even I'm not stupid enough to do, so most of you will have to use your imagination.

I'll gather a few more musings on the apartment and amenities here.

The internet (after finally getting it set up) is better than I'd feared and worse than I'd hoped. Bandwidth is tolerable for most general internet browsing. Streaming and downloading large files is not so great. Gaming varies from completely fine to completely unplayable, depending on the importance of ping.

Our washer and dryer and both kind of bizarre. Instead of having a couple dials that independently control temperature, agitation, etc. you have a single dial with like 40 different settings. A bit overwhelming, and I'll have to consult the manuals every time I do laundry for months to come.

Hot water is plentiful. Water cooler than lukewarm is pretty much nonexistent. Unsurprisingly, tap water is not safe to drink. We have a distiller in the kitchen, though, so it's not too much of an inconvenience.

Air quality here (in terms of pollution and dust or humidity, depending on the time of year) is relatively poor. To combat this, our apartment is fitted with four dehumidifiers and four air purifiers. Each dehumidifier pulls about two gallons of water out of the air each day (the Embassy recommendation is to run them 24/7 to avoid mold and, since they're footing the bill, I am happy to oblige).

Our furniture is almost universally a roughly pea soup shade of yellow-green. Apparently there's a tailor that can whip up new upholstery pretty cheaply and quickly, so we'll definitely be availing ourselves of his services soon.

I'll probably post other musings on the quirks (or massive disasters) that affect our place, but for now things are more or less in order.