Director Micromanagement, Asia Region

Some of you have asked me what on earth I do with my day .... a valid question given I have 12 staff for the "farmhouse" .. more than Dean's direct reports actually tee hee!


Ok so, yes ..... my grocery shopping is done for me.  But trust me, with no supermarkets here in Delhi you need help.  The weekly grocery shopping could take you 3 days and includes visits to no less than 10 different markets, a few calls to wine/beef suppliers, and some serious finger crossing in the hope that the stuff you want is actually available this week, or hasn't been spoiled in transit (or frozen/defrosted 10times in the process), it helps avoid paying the "white tax" and when it's 46degrees, trust me I ain't going nowhere some of those markets .. the smells are bad enough now and our days are only 26ish degree and very beautiful days!


Oh what I would do for a trip into Coles (Leo's to be precise) or Waitrose and have the luxury of being able to buy everything I need in one shop and know to trust the quality and that I'm not paying exorbitant prices for a few "luxuries" from home, like 250g "Bega" cheese for AUD$12 or 250g "Cathedral City" cheese GBP5!


It was explained to me that one thing India does well is pamper, and middle to upperclass Indian women are indeed pampered and they take for granted those "tools" that we in the west deem decadent; cooks/ayahs/maids etc.  So it's not surprising that whilst I'm here, I get to be pampered too ... trust me, in this place, with what you have to face sometimes, you need it, otherwise you'd be sent straight to a mental asylum and no collecting rs200 on the way Madam!!!!!!!

Ummmm lost my train of thought, where was I? Oh yeah what do I do with ALL that free time?

WELL!!!!!!!!!!!

Let me tell you.


I micromanage!


On a daily basis.  


EVERY FREAKN DAY there’s not one, but countless situations where I’m micromanaging the most tedious of things.  Scrutinising the shopping bills to make sure Ganesh isn't loading up on stuff he needs at his own home, spot checking the fridge to make sure he hasn't bought off cheese (mould usually gives it away Ganesh, look for mould when you're in the shop huh!) to check the vegetables aren't in bags ... a sure sign they haven't been sterilised!  Checking on Shanti in the laundry to make sure she's set my washing machine correctly, walking the garden to see the mali's are actually weeding, not throwing their paan wrappers in the garden and not sleeping the day away.  Telling Lal there's obviously no point the mali's watering today cause there was a massive downpour last night huh Lal?!  Making lists of maintenance items Lal needs to attend to or what Raj Kumar the sweeper needs to do, cause he can't see that the tops of the a/c's are dusty or that the window sills are littered with 10billion mozzie cadavers.  The list is endless.

I'm fortunate that my key staff are well educated, speak great English and generally do a good job, although sometimes ... sometimes ....they do really silly stuff stuff that drives me absolutely mental, keeps me stupid busy and makes me wonder about their IQ but only sometimes!


I know I'm not Robinson Crusoe here, any get together of expats generally leads to some group whinge about the frustrations of living in a country where we do not speak the language, where the conditions are very challenging (heat, dirt, dust, filth, corruption, off food and lack of western food etc etc) and we are expected by our spouses to somehow hit the ground running and find (miraculously I might add) a way to live as close to normal as possible .. which is really important for our family as we support Dean while he builds a business which will ultimately benefit hundreds and thousands and eventually millions and (we hope) millions of Indians across the nation!


So let's start with Bubba G Ticky, our cook, who (and let me say here, he's worked overseas for 20ish years, in hotels in Dubai, Rome and Singapore and on a US cruiseship for 8 years as well so it's not like he hasn't been trained!!!)

• Doesn’t melt the chocolate while making a cake, stands there watching the creamed butter and sugar whirl around my precious Kitchen Aid while chunks of cooking chocolate thunk round and round endlessly, making a god awful noise, completely mangling the whisk.  My only thought was how effing long was he gonna stand there before he stopped to wonder if the chocolate was never gonna melt that way!

• When asked to buy 40 coat hangers (like the wire ones you bought last time Ganesh), comes home with monster wooden ones, the type you’re given when you buy a suit.  When I asked him what possessed him to spend AUD$70 of our hard earned dosh on this type .. he replied, well you asked for coat hangers and .... Madam, these are the type you hang coats on.  Oh really Ganesh, how many coats do you think I'm gonna need in India?  Does 40 sound like a reasonable number to you when, for 8 months of the year it's well over 35degrees?  No Madam, sooooooGanesh cause ... ya know what, there isn't another word in the English language for a coat hanger!  I’ll tell you my theory ... he’s been snooping in our wardrobes and noticed I have a lot of wooden (and very cheap) Ikea ones oh! and the odd few wooden ones we've nicked from hotels over the years!  Just in case you were worried, the coat hangers went back and were exchanged for wire shirt hangers!

• The same cook who when asked if he knew anyone who could sharpen Dean’s global knives, of course obliged.  Silly me, should have only sent one on a test run, but instead, without thinking, I sent the whole knife block’s contents and was disgustificated to find that they had been sharpened on a grinding wheel and they were returned with edges that resembled a chain saw! “all for only Rs100 Madam” yeah Ganesh ya know what?  I can tell!

Since then he's lost one knife, broke another opening a coconut and wasn't game enough to tell me cause I'd already yelled at him once that week! AND broke Dean's ceramic knife, the very first day he used it, cutting chicken bones ..... straight after Dean told him the only thing he couldn't do was cut bones with it!

Or the driver, the one who when asked to make a u-turn cause I just noticed we’d passed the shop I was looking for, stopped the car, put it into reverse and slammed into the car behind him!  AND THEN argued incessantly that it wasn’t his fault!  This is the same driver who only hours earlier, crashed the car into another when turning a corner.  The same driver who precisely a week later ... had an altercation with a rickshaw and came off second best.  That’s 3 accidents (albeit minor ones, no-one was hurt) in a week.  Only one more week and every corner of my brand new car will be ready for the Bumper Repair man.

The same driver who, unbeknownst to him, is about to start working for Dean for a few weeks ....  that'll really rattle him!

Or Dean’s driver James, who lied about his sick mother, took Dean’s car for 3 days to care for her, then lied that she’d died, only to be found hours after her alleged demise, drunk out of his skull having locked the keys in the car.  The same driver who, not even 2 weeks later, was ratted on by another driver for drinking while waiting for us to finish our Margaret River wine tasting evening at the Aussie High Commission!   No James, just cause we’re drinking doesn’t mean you can while away the hours drinking the local (and godawful) whisky!  The same driver who was entrusted to have a rabbit hutch built, only to up the price by 10,000rupees two days before Christmas and claim Dean miss heard the price!

Or the caretaker who told me the malis planted all the precious seeds I’d had sent from Australia (despite me telling him no less than 10 times that I wanted to stagger the planting to ensure I’d get constant fresh produce over the next months, not 20kgs of everything all at once), because ..... get this, once you open the airtight packet, the seeds would be damaged!  HUH?  The same caretaker who had the water damaged walls repainted yesterday, only he didn’t have the mould treated or the bubbling paint scraped back before painting.  The same rocket scientist who told me that we couldn’t flush toilet paper down the toilet because the pipes were made of iron (not pvc) and therefore would stick to the iron pipes causing blockages!

I don’t know how many times, I’ve said ... “oh Lal, that’s complete and utter bullshit!" and then had to argue the point with him!

Or the malis (gardeners) who refused to pick up Bongo’s poo ... until the Maharajah and his doting wife ... made a big show in front of them how they’ve been doing it for the last 10 years and you know what, if it’s good enough for us to do it, then they’re damnfreaknwell gonna do it too!  Whooooooooohooooooooo no more Bongo Bomb collecting for meeeeeeee!

And yes Dean, I know the bottle’s usually well on it’s way to being half full by the time you get home.. but ya know how many people I had to call, or how I managed to juggle a visit to the nearest friendly bootlegger to get said wine (that's most likely stolen) I toss down with gay abandon just to get through all this palaver?  


Countless calls/texts/emails to friends, friends of friends, complete strangers even, "harassing" Mum's at school & embassy staff, and monitoring of expat forums/groups to help me source/do the stuff I used to be able to do without batting an eyelid .... in the civilised world I mean!  I've been here only 7 months and it still amazes me at the networks I've developed in such a short time,or ones I've barged in on, those networks I rely so heavily upon to help us live as normal a life as possible here!

Oh and of course in amongst all the micromanagement duties I fit into my day, I also manage to complete all my responsible mummy duties too...  with pleasure, mostly!


Oh and I do a bit of blogging too!

So now ya know, that's the kinda stuff I do with all the “free time” I have ... now that I have staff to do everything I did ALL BY MYSELF for the last 20 odd years!

Givin’myself a big pat on the shoulders for keeping relatively sane in this extremely hard to live in and oh so micromanaged city .......


Signing off for now, gotta get my nails done (well i would if I ACTUally had time!)