Naive, but attentive… The change starts to be visible…

The wish to my friend…
- 15th of January today, a good friend of mine celebrates his 45th birthday. Taking advantage of the world economic crisis, it was a good opportunity for me to wish to him, except the typical wishes, to get in closer contact with the reality and the majority of the society. He started laughing, asking me why I think this. But it was simple, as I explained to him: He spent the last years of his life (or maybe all, who knows?) spoiling himself to the limits, spending money like crazy for all his habits. Now the crisis helps him, like many of us, to reconsider all we did in the last years, cut off unnecessary costs, remember how it is to earn money by working hard, feel how simple people around us survive. (He was not offended by the wish, he even thanked me!)

“My car will bring you girls…”
- “Look, guy, I want to buy the house you sell…”, “apartment, sir”, “ok, call it like this too. I want to buy it but I don have all the money cash”, “I can help you with a bank, if you wish”, “no, my income is not justified… I prefer to give you my car instead”, “what is your car?”, “a unique Porsche, full extra, I bought it for 120.000 euro, I can give it to you just with 105.000”, “but I don’t need a car now…”, “why you don’t need??? You don’t know how many women you will have with this, it is called “woman trap” (he used other word than woman, but this blog is polite…), you will not have the time to choose a woman and you will also enjoy driving a super car”, “thank you, mister, but I prefer the cash, especially in this period…”, “Stupid …#@#… you don’t like my car?”, “I am sorry, I have nothing against your car, but I want the money instead. If you wish, we make a precontract, you pay what you have now and I wait you many months to sell the car and give me the rest”, “Nooooo, if you don’t want my car, I go”…
(I told to the developer of this true 2009 story that he is lucky because with the way this guy thinks, he could also have the proposal to receive some girls from the guy and deduct money to.…)

Out of cash, out of patience, out of hope too?
- We are still running out of cash… Companies complain, individuals too, everyone does… rumours say that there are banks which did not pay the rents for their branches, people are fired with the same speed they were hired, some people say that there is already a serious problem with people who took a loan to buy an apartment and now they are unemployed…
Most of my Romanian friends, especially the ones who don’t have a property to sell (some owners still believe we have 2007…), keep asking me when is this problem going to end. Yes, this means that they don’t read this blog (joking), but I will repeat: Not before 2010 and most probably not in the first part of the year. I see people without any patience at all, searching someone to blame for their problems and I am afraid that most of them will not wait that much… So soon the patience will be converted to disappointment and this would be the worst of all, if hope will be gone… (I hope not).

Change started to be visible in some domains…
- The planes come and go half empty, instead of full, the fare prices are 20-30% down as you can find cheaper ones nowadays, the advertising banners in the airport from “fully booked” are now “50% available”, the restaurants in Bucharest can not be described as “crowded”, the number of polite waiters increases dangerously (what happened? We will lose the pleasure of being treated like dogs?), many foreigners have left the country, the prices of properties are going down, the prices of rentals are demolished, as well as Lei did, people are stressed by losing their jobs and hearing bad news, many are also because they kept Lei and lost from the depreciation, Banks struggle to give to super serious people few euro as loans, while the legal interest for Lei is usually given only by “sharks”…
The change has started to be visible… and it is just the beginning…

… while some things remain the same…
- “I am sorry, but this price is not for you, it is for subscribers out of Bucharest”. “But you don’t write this anywhere”. “I am sorry, it is not my fault, if you want, you can complain to the company’s department about it”. Some things never change… some companies did not wake up… too bad, I thought that internet providers would be more attentive in 2009, with all these problems coming… (wrong once more…)