View from a higher run on the road to socialist oblivion

[The Village Idiot]

http://antipatrioticvenezuelan.blogspot.com/2010/04/work-and-productivity-are-anti.html

english is not her first language but you'll get the point...

Yesterday, I had a work meeting at another company at 10 am. My mom was kind enough to give me a ride till there. Trouble was that she left me about an hour earlier. Luckily- I thought - this company I had to visit is strategically located: just a few blocks away from a very popular shopping mall so I thought I could go there and try to find that book I’ve been looking for a while. But then I remembered, it came back to my mind like those things you know but they are dragged inside your routine and escape briefly from your knowledge: Shopping malls can’t open its doors till 11 am, due to a government decree.

Not so long ago I wrote a long whining postabout this decree that forces shopping malls to only open its doors from 11 am till 9 Pm. I explained there how important shopping malls are for us Venezuelans in all possible senses. I merely complained about the decree because it made shopping malls close early; but not because of its late opening time. Soon after I wrote that, the government “fixed” the decree, allowing some business like movie theaters and restaurants to remain open after 9 but the opening hour was not changed. The shopping mall was closed, and every single business in the street: bookstores, boutiques and so on, were also closed. I walked about four blocks not in a ghost city, because people kept passing by, probably going to their offices and stuff; but in a closed one. Government claims this decree is for saving energy, but to citizens like us who needed to make the long waiting time somehow productive seems like a big lost.

On the week before Easter, Chavez proclaimed out of nowhere, another measure to save electricity; the three work days before Easter time became Holidays. He probably thought that people would preach him with rejoice, after all he gave us all three more days of vacation. Perhaps a few secretaries smiled but I don’t think the most of us really praised the decree, specially the ones who owns any business – big or small – ; and the ones who have non changeable due dates for a project, the ones who are working partnerships with organizations abroad that did not stopped working during those three days and the list goes on and on and on. A friend of my dad, who works on the construction field, was worried about the due dates for his projects so he opened his office despite the decree even through it meant to pay his workers twice its day salary. I don’t know the details of this story, how exactly it happened. All I know is that he was fined and forced to close his office on Tuesday (the Holy Week and the new Holidays started on Monday, 29th, March).