Last week, the goal of my day off was to pay my cable bill. It took forever, but I accomplished it. Not without the help of my landlord, because he almost literally held my hand through it.
Backing up, the cable guy had told me to pay at an ATM, which seemed weird, but that’s the way bills are done here, it seems.
But I tried using my Florida ATM card and it didn’t work. The card works, but I don’t have the “payment” option, only the “cash withdrawal" one. I tried on several machines prior to the day off, so I figured I could pay it in cash.
Somehow. I have no idea where First Media is, or at least their payment center. On the bill, there’s no address but on the Web site (sorry, new AP style – website) there are multiple addresses, each in different places of this sprawling city.
However, although I know my address, I’m still not sure exactly where I am. My world revolves around about a two-kilometer square area and although I am pretty good at that, I’m not sure where it falls in the entire mass that’s Jakarta.
So addresses on a page mean nothing to me. Absolutely nothing.
But also listed were several banks indicating I could pay in cash. One address I recognized by the initials (acronyms are BIG here. That’s Big-Immense-Giant) as being in the World Trade Center, the banking complex across the street from me.
So last Friday, I headed out there so I could pay in cash, since until I get my work visa, I can’t even think of opening a bank account.
Unfortunately, after two tries at HSBC (which I still think of as either the “Hot Sauce Blue Cheese” or “Holy Shit Buffalo’s Cold” bank) it didn’t work. That bank requires you to have an account there to transfer funds to another.
So I gave up and figured I’d just give the money to someone I worked with and ask them to pay it the next day.
But I ran into my landlord in the lobby on the way back up to my apartment and asked if I’d paid the bill. I got the impression the cable company had called him and asked when they were getting their money so he was eager to help.
And help he did. Quite like my host mom in Morocco would do, he took me over to another bank, filled out a transfer form and waited with me until I got the thing paid.
In the end, it was fairly simple, but the act of trying to figure it out was quite complex.
Today, another day off, I got to use applied knowledge to pay another bill. As I was already planning to go to Dunkin Donuts today in the WTC center, I conveniently found my utility-maintenance bill shoved under my door. It’s steeper than I would have thought for about three weeks, but what can you do?
I went to yet another bank – luckily I remembered which one they’d told me – and had absolutely no problems and no surcharges. Just a long wait, which was OK because I brought a book.
This past week, I also got my paycheck, which was deposited seamlessly in my Florida account. Honestly, if the cable and utility bills are the only ones I have to pay, I’d just as soon stick with my Florida account.
So my little apartment life, which isn’t very social, is somewhat falling into place. It’s boring, but I did take a walk today around the neighborhood and it was a nice change of pace from the joggy thing. (I’m putting that off til this afternoon today – too hot to go at midday.)
Hopefully, at some point, the paper will all click soon, too. So far, it’s still a struggle.
I’m getting a little better with the banking stories, but somehow I always manage to not understand some crucial thing. I stare at it and try to decipher the stuff, but it doesn’t always work.
A lot of it is simply confusing. Everything is an acronym, and for some reason we have to list all the acronyms in the story. They’re not so simple as BIG, though, because lots of times the letters used in the acronym are from the words in Bahasa Indonesian, not the English words, so they don’t just make sense. It’s not like we’re saying “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” where you know it’s “FBI.” (we don’t list those, we only list the weird ones.) It'd be something like "BJI."
Everyone’s titles are long and we have to put those in. There’s such a thing as “president director” and the same person can officially be called “chairman” or “representative” or even bulkier. Part of my job is to fact-check, and it gets complicated when you can’t tell what the title is because they’re called different titles in the past.
Fact-checking is HUGE, and it’s a PITA. You have to check every little detail, including stuff like if the president’s name is spelled correctly, and mark that you did it so the next person doesn’t have to.
But it’s necessary because screw-ups happen. I understand that. It just seems at some point I have to give credit to the writer, whose name appears on the story.
It’s been rough this week, especially. One guy is on vacation and maybe that’s a part of it, but we haven’t finished close to on time for awhile now. My shift allegedly ends at 11, but I haven’t left before 11:45 for a bit. Oh, and now we get to start editing blogs in our free time – like working an hour extra every day – but not getting OT – in any way translates to having free time.
Last night was brutal. I was almost done at 11:30, and just lacked a quote box on the front page. But for some reason, I couldn’t access the box. I could see it, but not click on it.
It took about 20 minutes for someone else to fix it, because it was one of those things that is supposed to work. You know, like when you call the help desk in frustration and they basically say “that’s not supposed to happen” and you’re like “well, it is, so now what?”
Finally, the guy – who was more baffled about it than me – and I went to pull the quote.
Now, these are tricky, because there’s not a lot of room. You have to have something concise or it won’t fit.
And, in the entire story, only one quote fit. It was a decent one, too. But the attribution was “he said.” And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out who “he” was.
I’d thought about it previously, when I’d edited it, but convinced myself it was this “Prince of Jihad” fella whose website (I remembered!) we’d quoted earlier. But it didn’t look right.
I went to the other guy again, and he looked it and assured me it was the “Jihad” guy, and I said OK. But I looked at it again, and it just didn’t look right. The “Jihad” site had things like “We will avenge” and crap like that. The quote I was looking at said something like “It’s a good thing, but it’s not over.” It just didn’t make sense that the same guy said it.
So I had to Google for the story, which was an Agence France Presse story, and sure enough, someone who’d looked at it before me had chopped out the first reference to Guy No. 2, who was a moderate Muslim and relieved Bin Laden was gone.
By the time I finished, it was midnight.
It’s constantly stuff like that, or just trying to figure out why the heck things appear in the paper in the first place. This week, I had to do a caption on a photo of a guy driving a tornado-slammed car from the week before. In the pre-written caption, it said something about it being Thursday and President Obama was visiting Friday.
Of course, this was running on Tuesday the following week. Which makes no sense. Tell me there’s not a newer photo. One that’s maybe, you know, relevant?
Same thing with the stories. I got one yesterday that said the Thai president was going to have surgery on May 2. Minor procedure, not a big deal. But I’m editing this on May 3 for a May 4 edition. (I did a search for the story, and it was on the wire April 28.)
As I’m not Mitch Albom, I don’t know if the surgery took place, so I can’t say it’s a done deal. It looks pretty dumb, IMO, to run something on May 4 that said something “would be” done on May 2 without saying if it did or didn’t go. When I brought this up, I got a “well, there’s been no further statement.” True, and I put that in there, but it still looks silly.
So the whole point of running it is ….is….Bueller … Bueller?
Had another one the other day, too. Right now, we have a big embezzlement case going on, so some attorney took the opportunity to hawk some other case.
His client’s ex-wife, he said, embezzled millions from their bank. Now, beyond the fact that the bank says this absolutely didn’t happen, they knowing made a loan, this entire thing took place in July.
I get this story, and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. No charges were filed, the bank denies there’s embezzlement, and it certainly would seem they’d know.
Nothing has happened since July, which is when the then-wife took out the loan. Not even a personal loan – in the name of her company.
I go to the news editor and ask what, exactly, is the point? He said, basically, that there is no point. Since there’s another embezzlement case (a real one) in the news, they thought they’d mention it.
Now, not that I’d want to start running Lindsay Lohan crap (although we do that, too), but newspapers are supposed to be full of news.
A guy who has a grudge against his ex-wife for something that happened last July just isn’t news. I’m trying to understand it so I can get with the system, but there’s definitely a learning curve.
So that’s about it from here. In more fun news, Zippy took Nic and Zac fishing over the delayed-launch weekend and Nic fulfilled one of his life’s goals by catching a little bass. 
With a three-foot "Go Diego Go" fishing rod. Go figure.
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