Diet Pepsi Update

With our diet Pepsi supply now getting critically low and another food shipment not due to arrive for probably another month, we decided to ask our driver to try to find us some diet Pepsi bottles.

This was a big step for me. Let me explain.

In Beijing, our driver did one thing for us...drive. When we weren't in the car, he was free to do whatever he wanted...sleep, eat...or the very popular activity of playing cards with the other drivers. We didn't really care what he did as long as he was there to pick us up when we were ready to go someplace.

I was surprised to learn that the drivers here in Chennai do much more than just drive. They fix things, clean things, run errands, and pretty much anything else you can think of for them to do. Now, if I wouldn't have lived in China prior to moving to India, this probably wouldn't have seemed so strange or weird to me. But it is. As far as I'm concerned, our driver is hired to drive for us. Period.

It is very easy to spoil oneself when living overseas...especially in Asia. Labor is very cheap. You can hire a housekeeper, maid, nanny, cook, pool person, etc for about $100 to $200 per month. When S and I originally moved to Chennai, we had thought we would hire a housekeeper. However, after the 6 week apartment experience, we have since decided that our privacy is a lot more valuable to us then having someone do everything for us. Plus, someday we will have to move back to the U.S., and I'll have to go back to doing everything for myself anyways...you can't even get your house cleaned once for $100 in the U.S. Now, please realize that we are in the minority here as far as not hiring a housekeeper. However, just being the two of us, not having kids or pets (just ask my mom how much my cats shed), it's really not all that hard to keep the house clean.

It has been a very slow process for me to accept that our driver will do more for us here than just drive. He has done a couple of big projects at our house with the help of one of our security guards...they were both compensated extra by us for doing what they did. Besides this, the only thing I have had our driver do is go to the post office for me.

However, with the frustrations of not being able to get any diet Pepsi bottles on my own, I decided it was finally time to turn this task over to our driver. So as we left for Malaysia, we gave him enough money to buy two cases of bottles. When we got back Sunday night, he told us that bottles were not available, but that we could get cans. Nope, not yet ready to pay $15 per case for cans.

Well on Monday, our driver took S to work and never came back to the house all day long. I wasn't too concerned as I had told S that I wasn't going anywhere. Well S came home Monday night to tell me that our driver had spent all day Monday looking for diet Pepsi bottles and finally had found them at the 15th store he went to. It makes me think that he didn't try to hard while we were gone to find the bottles. And, 15 stores...at what point do you just give up? Oh well, at least now, we have 2 cases of bottles. I'll probably make a point to try to get a couple more cases while it can still be found. This store told our driver that there should be no problem getting the bottles in the future. Yeah right, heard that story before.

Slowly but surely I will probably accept the fact that our driver can be trusted with money to do things for us. In India, sometimes it's just a whole lot easier to have someone else do things for you. Actually, most of the time it's easier.