nono's bla-bla: Ma monkey trip to Panama (part III)

Tuesday, March 6th
So… despite ALL our drunkenness from the day before, we still managed to show up at the exhibition to continue the with the pavilion, and hopefully finish the set ups and the final decorations and make sure all the requested add-ons were installed, everything ready, as soon as possible, because the Expo started the following day.

Charm and I were able to get up around 8+, both very tired, moody from lack of decent amount of quality rest and what had happened. Lydia was very tired too since she had just arrived Panama a couple days before. Long flight + jetlag + tiredness + drinks don’t make a good combination. As for Paul, well, he was suffering from hangover, because apparently while all the girls were in the restroom puking our hearts out, we forgot that Paul was singled-out in the table, unsurprisingly becoming the center of red wine attacks.

But we are professionals, we have duty to fulfill and we will complete it no matter what. Mr. G was worried that we wouldn’t wake up early enough to finish our jobs, and he made it clear to me, when he was driving us back after I finally woke up from my drunkenness, that regardless of all the crazy alcohol, we still had to work. I mean, Geez, Thanks for your f*kin concern Mr. G! If you are so worried, then why the hell did you let your colleagues kanpai-ed us throughout the entire night?! Why didn’t you get your cold SOB’s ass up and stop them?

Anyway, back to the expo. We hired a local contracting company to assemble our booths. Their job was: we give them our blueprints and designs, they help us put the standard skeleton, equipment and facilities together, and we provide the more artsy decoration in stickers so they can paste it up the walls. Fairly simple. Our main contact person was Juan David, quite cute young guy (22 yrs old!!), who has been in the industry after high school. Very cool person to talk to. There were also other construction masters who were in our project, very nice and skilled at what they do.

Then, there were other normal workers that would only work after a task was assigned. These people weren’t that pleasant to work with unfortunately. Here’s an illustration: (for a light installation) one of them standing on a ladder to fix the cables, one man holding the ladder for the cable guy (the light was only 2.5-3m away from the ground), and one last guy standing next to the latter, passing the light bulb. Another illustration: the glue-ing guy was walking around the place trying to find glue sticks for the hot-gun, and that took him at least 3 hrs. Not being critical, but based on past experiences, S. American workers’ efficiency is not the best. They. Are. Very. Lazy. Only move or attempt to do some work after a set of commands. It’s amazing how slow they can work, as if they had 10 days worth of time when the Expo inauguration was only less than 10 hours away.

At first we thought our progress was on schedule, but by that stage we were freaking out. Most of them disappeared to finish other pavilions, and the few left there would vanish every now and then as well. It was not a fun day trying to catch and drag workers to their workstations, and doing their jobs. In the end, we stayed until 2+am. The expo’s opening was 8 hours away, and my feet hurt like mad from all the walking.