Reverse Culture Shock

I went to a play group yesterday, with my two kids in tow. It was our debut at this particular play group — a mom I know from my daughter’s preschool had just moved away, and said she could get me in.

All the other play groups in the neighborhood are fully booked.  

As we don’t know many people here, I was pleased to have a social event.  We were the first to arrive. My daughter ate two cookies —  which looked like a lot, as there were only about ten laid out — played with puzzles, kicked a ball. Only one other mom arrived, which the host said was strange, as six had RSVPed, but then, of course, it was just a casual play group that met once a week.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I came home to an email from the host complaining that only one mom showed up (ahem. Actually, TWO showed up.  I suppose because I’m new, I don’t count) even though six had said they would come.  She had gone to the trouble of cleaning her house and preparing snacks (there were only TEN cookies!) so she deserved notice that others didn’t plan to show up.

I’ve had business meetings with less stringent RSVP policies than this play group.  Others seemed to be outraged by the email, as well.  Four women replied that they were dropping out of the play group. Seems a bit drastic — back when I was working, if someone sent an angry email, colleagues would shrug their shoulders and hit delete. There wasn’t much time for this level of drama.

I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  Then one lovely women replied to the thread of angry emails to say: “Has anyone welcomed our newest member?”

That was met with e-silence.

A great American attribute is optimism.  The families in our neighborhood love to raise money for the local schools and playgrounds.  They host fundraisers, donate money and volunteer their time and energy to pull weeds from the nursery school garden.

But the cynicism I picked up in Britain makes me ask where the $20,000 plus taxes Atlanta residents pay go, if not to improve schools and playgrounds?

In London, I didn’t know anyone who performed regular community service.  Once a year, colleagues would participate in a company organized volunteer day.  That usually involved heavy weeding, painting, and other unglamorous tasks at playgrounds or schools. My cynical colleagues come back muttering that they were doing the local government’s job, for free.

Here, people seem to throw themselves into volunteer projects with gusto, without asking whose job it should be to do it.  So maybe the Americans are getting taken advantage of a little bit, but at least they’re happy about it.

Is it just me, or does it take a lot of time to pay bills?  In setting up gas, electricity, cable, and phone bills, I discovered that representatives from these companies are more committed to following protocol than to actually getting money.

When I tried to save a few dollars by combining my wireless and landline bills, AT&T told me I couldn’t pay my cell phone bill yet — I had to wait until the landline bill was ready.

Yes, they admitted there was a risk that my cell phone service would be shut off because the bill was overdue.  But it simply wasn’t possible to accept payment from me until a big combined bill was ready to be mailed out.  

With the state of the economy, I assumed that companies would want payment immediately, to avoid the risk of  a customer defaulting. But following a strict order of payment seems to be more important than actually receiving payment.  

Maybe this is less an American quirk, and more a big company thing.  But in the UK, companies took the money we owed them magically from our checking accounts. They mailed or emailed us a statement each month which we looked at with varying degrees of interest.

It was actually too easy to pay by this method. We discovered that we had been paying insurance for a gas heater in a flat that we had sold a year before.  Had we actually received the bill in the mail and written a check, we would have asked the question why we needed a gas heater in a flat we no longer owned.

So maybe the bureaucracy will serve us well — unless my cell phone gets turned off.