THANK YOU, GOODBYE, CLICK

Every time I have a phone conversation here, I feel like it ends so abruptly. Let me give an example. I called AVIS to extend my rental from Sunday to Tuesday. It was simple enough, and only took a couple of minutes for me to explain what I wanted and for the woman on the other end of the phone to look up my records and make the change. When she was done, she simply said, "Thank you, goodbye", and then I heard a click and a dial tone. I didn't even have a chance to respond, "goodbye". If this was a one-time thing, I wouldn't think anything of it, but since it happens every time I use the phone, I guess that's the norm here. I'm used to some conversation wind-down phrase, like "Is there anything else I can help you with?". One of the guys at work tried to explain to me that customer service is a very new thing here, since under Communism there was no such thing as putting the customer first. I'm not sure if I completely buy into this explanation or not, but it's an interesting point.

Speaking of communism, to me it's a surprisingly frequent topic of conversation. Everyone likes to explain how things used to be, and what's changed. The amount of change is drastic and quite amazing. At the end of just this month, many people are being returned ownership rights to apartments and property that belonged to their families prior to the Communist era in Poland. Apparently, many of these people now have the money to perform much of the maintenance on these old buildings that was ignored during Communism. I find the amount of renovation, new construction, and clean-up going on here quite surprising. At the same time, some of it is a bit troublesome. For example, my real estate agent pointed to a newly remodeled building and expressed how good it was that Adidas had come in, bought and remodeled the building, and opened a franchise shoe store. I imagine that this new Adidas franchise will quickly run the nearby small family-owned shoe stores out of business. To me, the disappointing side of democracy is that we can't figure out a way to preserve these small family businesses.