Yesterday, we had a review/training day for the filter entrepreneurs and community health promoters. Claire and Isaac conducting the meeting while I recorded information on the filters that have already been built as well as some other small tasks such as organizing transportation reimbursement.
The meetings went really well, but when we went to pay, the hotel wanted to charge us an additional $40 or so since we used a larger conference room than was expected. We would have been fine with the smaller one originally assigned to us, but one of the staff members said we could move to the larger one since no one was using it. They didn’t inform us of the difference in price when we moved. It’s difficult to negotiate in a situation like that due to various reasons.
1) The adage “The customer is always right” is not a well-known concept here.
2) We’re white which makes us blatant targets for extortion. (Isaac had done the original price negotiations by himself.)
3) Managers don’t really manage, they delegate. (The manager refused to see us, leaving his assistant manager out to dry in trying to get the extra money from us.)
4) Employees are held individually responsible for money that goes missing on their watch in order to combat corruption (As a result, they often give guilt trips and are hard-nosed since their neck is on the line, and they don’t have any authority to cut customers any slack – even at say, a grocery store with mislabeled merchandise.)
Overall, it was unfortunate since the rest of the day went well, and we could have given them repeat business. We ended up paying a little bit extra for the confusion, but not the full amount…and we kind of just left.
Today, we’ve been organizing and inventorying the office. It’s been a little frantic with Scott and Claire trying to finish everything before they leave tomorrow. The students start taking their sampling tomorrow so I worked on that for a little while. I will be in the lab, but not the field tomorrow so we’ll see how it goes!
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