Mi jefe no me creyere
~me

I can now say that I have officially seen it all. Today is the tenth anniversary of the day Hugo Chavez took the oath of office and became the president of Venezuela. It is also groundhog day. In celebration of himself, el presidente decided this weekend to give everybody off on Monday. That means everybody. Now... This guy has his own TV show in Venezuela which broadcasts on Saturdays. He also spends large portions of the weekend going around trying to find ways to make himself more popular. That means he is all over the news. I rarely pay any attention to his speeches for two very good reasons.

I came to work this morning to see everyone standing around, chatting among themselves. When I asked what was going on, I was shown the newspaper above and told that nobody had to work today. I'm suppossed to be receiving some parts from our factory to fix these machines, but of course, they won't be delivered until tomorrow. DHL took the day off too. Obviously, this begs the question of why anyone would bother to show up in the first place. The answer is simple. Nobody knew until they got on the bus this morning and opened up their daily papers. When they arrived at work, they staged a mini-wildcat strike.

This went on for about an hour and a half until the boss realized what was going on. He came out to have a chat with the employees. He began by telling them that what they were doing was illegal. They had contracted with the labor union to provide labor today and they were in violation of their contract. Furthermore, the company knew nothing of the "holiday" and it couldn't actually be a "holiday" just because the president decided the day before that it was so. He left when the employees stuck their newspaper under his nose and told him to "stuff it".

We stood around for another hour until the buses showed up to take everyone home. I voted against my better judgement and decided to stay, since my parts might show up by some miracle or another. It was a good thing I did. About thirty minutes later, half the buses came back and dropped off a sour bunch of employees. They were apparently told that they didn't have to work, but they couldn't go home either. The buses that management was able to get in contact with brought their people back. The other half went home.

Half of the employees who returned decided that there was no point in being here if they weren't going to accomplish anything, so they started production back up. The other half sat down and played dominoes. This continued until after lunch/siesta when they held an impromptu union meeting and decided that everybody who stayed could go home early with pay, since they were the diligent ones. All of this had some unintended consequences. For one thing, there was no line in the cafeteria at lunch time. Half the employees had left. Unfortunately, half the cafeteria employees also left which meant that used trays were stacking up at the dishwasher with noone to wash them. On the bright side, they still made the same amount of food even though there weren't as many people around to eat it. On the funny side, after spending the majority of the morning doing absolutely nothing, many of the employees still decided to take a siesta at lunch. Why not...

I feel a little bit like a character in an Ayn Rand novel asking who John Gault is. I honestly have to say that I think all of this is totally appropriate. In my mind, I can't think of a better way of celebrating 10 years of socialism than sitting around on your ass and doing absolutely nothing. The inherent logic goes far beyond mere irony.