Shopping for clothing at the Matahari department store in Denpasar is quite simply and easily accomplished--right up the moment (or rather the hour) when you actually make the payment, at which point you find yourself wishing you had never started.
Matahari employs a virtual army of young men and women to stand at a distance of perhaps five feet from one another, like a military picket line before the tables and racks of clothing, each one ready to rush forth and assist the shopper. As it happened, I was wanting a pair of jeans, and this, in appropriate size and preferred price range, was found with the utmost speed and alacrity--and off I was sent to the dressing room.
You do not take this to the cashier for payment, however. You take it to the girl or the boy who found it for you, surrender the item to him or her, and are given a note. This you take to the cashier.
Notice here the use of the singular: cashier. For whereas you face an army at the beginning of your campaign, you now face a single employee behind a single cash register. Or rather, you don't face her, because you are able to see her only dimly in the distance at the head of an unmoving line of customers, each of whom holds his note in hand--or uses the note to fan himself.
.
The cashier, you discover, is apparently using some ancient form of calculation for each purchase--an abacus, perhaps--a time consuming art of calculation that is now lost in the West. There is much manipulation of keys and tagging and untagging and stapling and reams of paper involved in this process. It's quite quaint.
Upon reaching the front of the line, along about late afternoon or so, I found that no part of the army, formerly so quick and eager, had yet delivered my jeans to the counter. A complicated series of communications proceeded, wherein the cashier summoned a manager via intercom, who then sent another employee to find the employee with the jeans, whom herself could be seen from where we stood at the counter. But everything must be done just so, and I felt it improper, therefore, to muddy up the process by simply waving at the girl.
My jeans arrived in due time, and after a painfully slow flurry of calculating and cataloging and shuffling and stapling, a receipt about the length of the Constitution and its amendments raveled out of the register and my purchase, praise God, was made!
I'm hoping that these jeans will last for years.
Matahari employs a virtual army of young men and women to stand at a distance of perhaps five feet from one another, like a military picket line before the tables and racks of clothing, each one ready to rush forth and assist the shopper. As it happened, I was wanting a pair of jeans, and this, in appropriate size and preferred price range, was found with the utmost speed and alacrity--and off I was sent to the dressing room.
You do not take this to the cashier for payment, however. You take it to the girl or the boy who found it for you, surrender the item to him or her, and are given a note. This you take to the cashier.
Notice here the use of the singular: cashier. For whereas you face an army at the beginning of your campaign, you now face a single employee behind a single cash register. Or rather, you don't face her, because you are able to see her only dimly in the distance at the head of an unmoving line of customers, each of whom holds his note in hand--or uses the note to fan himself.
.
The cashier, you discover, is apparently using some ancient form of calculation for each purchase--an abacus, perhaps--a time consuming art of calculation that is now lost in the West. There is much manipulation of keys and tagging and untagging and stapling and reams of paper involved in this process. It's quite quaint.
Upon reaching the front of the line, along about late afternoon or so, I found that no part of the army, formerly so quick and eager, had yet delivered my jeans to the counter. A complicated series of communications proceeded, wherein the cashier summoned a manager via intercom, who then sent another employee to find the employee with the jeans, whom herself could be seen from where we stood at the counter. But everything must be done just so, and I felt it improper, therefore, to muddy up the process by simply waving at the girl.
My jeans arrived in due time, and after a painfully slow flurry of calculating and cataloging and shuffling and stapling, a receipt about the length of the Constitution and its amendments raveled out of the register and my purchase, praise God, was made!
I'm hoping that these jeans will last for years.
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