Unexpected Conveniences

There are so many inconveniences of daily life here in Lebanon that when something gets done with ease and speed you find yourself blinking in astonishment.

Actually, there exist quite a few such blissful exceptions to the inconvenience rule, you just don’t realise it right away. Everywhere you look you see chaotic traffic, absolute disregard for queues and no order to anything, at least on the workaday level. What naturally passes through your mind, then, is, “Oh man. How does anything ever get done in this country?”

But by and by you become aware that the deplorable lack of law enforcement also means a lack of red tape. For example, if you wake up one day and decide you’d like to have an extra living room (Lebanese people can’t seem to get enough living rooms) and that the best way to achieve this would be to add another floor onto the top of your villa, you can simply call up a man on the telephone and he will come with some men and build it for you, very possibly the next day. There are no permits or inspections, no code to follow (well, there are, but absolutely everybody seems able to get around them). Oh, certainly your home will leak, crumble, and crack under the poor workmanship and no doubt collapse like a house of cards if Lebanon ever gets the big earthquake it’s due. But you’ll get it built without any pesky inspectors telling you that your stair risers are 0.4 cm too high and must be ripped out.

A few days ago one member of our family -- who shall, in light of the delicacy of the topic remain nameless (though Noonie wishes it to be known that it was not her) – was required to submit a faecal sample to the lab. We learned that the deposit, as it were, could be made in the comfort of our own home as long as it was sent to the lab forthwith.

The sample having been collected, sealed in the plastic container expressly made for such things, and securely wrapped in half-a-dozen or so layers of tied bags, was given to Kassem to be taken to the lab. It wasn’t my idea to make him take it, by the way. I planned to take it myself. I was of the opinion that transporting poo fell far outside the boundaries of his duties but he most heartily assured me that nothing would give him greater pleasure. Well, maybe he didn’t say it would give him pleasure but certainly he insisted on doing it. I handed him the bag, bid him godspeed, and hastily closed the door.

He was back within about fifteen minutes. The lab turned out to be only a few blocks away. See, this is another aspect to what I was saying about finding convenience in unexpected places here. Who would expect to find a lab in the same neighbourhood as their house? It doesn’t work that way in Canadian cities. But there seems to be a little of everything in our neighbourhood here in Beirut.

Within a two block radius of our apartment there is — and this is just the merest sample, by no means a comprehensive list : a gas station with car wash, four drugstores, three vegetable stands (permanent ones — I'm not counting the vendors who sell from their wheeled carts), a tire store, a floor-polisher rental place, a shop selling military-style clothes and boots, a book store, an underwear and bra store, a mattress shop, a shoe store, a bank, half a dozen toy stores, a dozen or more cafes ranging from seedy to decent, a large establishment selling all forms of chicken – raw, cooked, eggs, and ready to eat sandwiches; a doctor’s office, a dentist, a travel agency, a television studio, a florist, a wedding planner, half a dozen tiny cell phone shops, and even tinier convenience stores too numerous to count (some are so small that only one person can stand inside them at a time and how the proprietor makes a living by peddling a few bags of chips and packs of batteries I’ll never know).

I was relieved that Kassem had not been sequestered long inside the car with the poo and when he told me that the test results would be ready at 1:00 p.m. the next day I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. That was just 24 hours away.

“What, ready tomorrow?” I said. When, in the history of lab tests, had anyone ever been required to submit to a test, done the test and had the results back all within a day and a-half?

“Yes. Oh and the cost is 8,000,” he added.

“What?” I said again. Sometimes I wonder what Kassem thinks of me.

“The test. It will cost 8,000,” he repeated.

Well, 8,000 lira is like 5 bucks. I was expecting it to be around 50 dollars, maybe a hundred. I don’t know what they do with the poo once they get it. I thought they put it through sophisticated tests and maybe a chemical analysis, see what temperature it boils at etc.

At first I was thrilled with the cheap price. Of course, we have medical insurance and don’t have to pay for lab tests but a good deal is a good deal. But after a while I got to wondering, what kind of poo test only costs 5 bucks? Is it a proper lab technician doing the test or have they got some of the unemployed men I always see clustered under the Beir Hassan bridge sitting in a little room rating the samples for smell and colour?

Kassem brought me the test results promptly at 1:00 the next day. It was a single sheet of paper with a disappointing scarcity of information: just a brief description of the findings, which were all negative, and none of which was as scientific-sounding as I’d hoped (no molecular weight or gas chromatography findings) though on the other hand, none as unscientific-sounding as I'd feared.

Well, I thought to myself with an odd, anticlimactic feeling, that’s that, then.

It had all been so easy.

And although we hadn’t needed to fill a prescription this time, that could have accomplished with tremendous ease, as well. Because drugstores in Lebanon deliver to your door, free of charge, from early in the morning until late evening. There may even be all-night deliveries, I don’t know. We don’t often need things from the drugstore. I’ve only had things delivered on two occasions. Both times M had to remind me the service existed. He found me fretting and fussing about having to go out at a late hour to get nasal decongestant for Dude or some such thing and said, “Why don’t you call the pharmacy and get them to deliver it?”

You can even order antibiotics this way. No prescription needed. You don’t even have to give a reason for wanting the stuff. You just ring the drugstore up and say, “I fancy a bit of Amoxicillin, could you send some round, please,” or whatever. A young man on a moped will be dispatched and in a few minutes will buzz on the interphone and present you with the tiniest plastic bag in the world, containing your Amoxicillin.

The payment methods can be convenient, if unorthodox, too. Last month both the kids had braces put in. When I asked the orthodontist how the payments worked, since we would be seeing him over the course of two years, he said that it was up to me. I already knew what the total cost was, since we had discussed that on the previous visit, but I didn’t know how much I needed to put down for the initial payment and when and how much the subsequent payments should be. I explained this, feeling that the orthodontist hadn’t understood what I was asking.

“It’s entirely up to you,” he assured me graciously. “However much you want to pay.”

“But, but –“ I sputtered. Surely this couldn’t be. How could an orthodontist run his business this way?

“Well. how much do people usually pay on the first visit?” I tried.

“Oh, it varies. They pay whatever they want to pay.”

This was not helping me. I really had no idea. Should I pay half of the total? A tenth? “Well, what would be an average amount?” I said.

At this point the assistant stepped in with a softly offered suggestion. Clearly she knew her boss and his reluctance to get down to the nuts and bolts of it with his patients. With relief I paid her, the orthodontist having retreated into his office, and waited for my receipt. They had no credit card machine so I’d had to pay in cash and as it was rather a large amount I felt the importance of hanging on to my receipt.

She handed me a small square of cardboard on to which a simple appointment schedule had been printed. Into the appropriate spaces she had handwritten today’s date and the amount I’d paid.

“Ah, could I have the receipt please?” I asked.

“I’ve recorded the amount you’ve paid right here,” the girl said politely, pointing to the card.

I couldn’t believe it. “But — a receipt. Is there no receipt?”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “It’s there on the card, plus I write down the amount you’ve paid in your children’s file.”

The orthodontist appeared in his office doorway. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, fine,” I said, “I was just asking for a receipt.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have receipts as such,” he said regretfully. “We could make you one on a sheet of paper if you like.”

It was so strange. A good friend had recommended this fellow and therefore I assumed I could trust him but it was the first time I’d ever had to insist on paying a dentist and then been told they only accept cash and then been given nothing for a receipt but an appointment card with a tiny, handwritten number in one of its little columns.

But this is Lebanon. When we had to replace our water heater (which died after six months of use, but that is another story) there was a lot of arguing about the guarantee with the fellow who sold us the new heater. I didn’t get involved in that one, but curious to know what had eventually been agreed on I asked M about it a while ago. He told me that nothing had been settled yet but not to worry because we still hadn’t paid for the heater (it had been installed and in use for a couple of weeks by that time). This would all have taken place without the aid of credit card numbers taken as security or anything like that, you must understand.

This untidy way of transacting business does make me feel like pulling my hair out sometimes but as you can see, there are times when it makes things easier to get done. And I mean, you can’t knock that 5-dollar poo test. Now that’s a deal.