Friday, November 19, 2010

A quick note

Today was my last day of class.  Murray thinks she hasn’t taught me anything since we met, but I did learn the importance of note writing from her.  The difference today was I could give my thank you note to my profesora as my free writing homework assignment.  I gave her a thousand quetzals ($125) which is only $40 a week tip for working with me 30 hours a week.  When you consider what you give the bellman for taking 5 minutes to schlep your bag it still wasn’t much.  But here a tip goes a long way for the locals. 
She said she used to get tips commonly when she was younger but not so much now that she is in her 40s with teenagers.  I suppose the same invisibility of middle aged women that Murray complains about exists in Guatemala.  At that age perhaps a person isn’t interested in using their special power to sneak into the locker room of the opposite gender.  In which case it isn’t much of a superpower.   
Notes are nice because you can pretty easily make someone’s day with a note, but a decent tip here can make someone’s month.  Of course Murray and her sister just finished a hundred or so notes after her mom’s funeral.  I am not in that league.  I think I wrote about having to track who brought what while the two of them were out with funeral errands.  I now understand the method to the madness was for better note writing ability.  I like to be kind, but I don’t want to get carried away.   Although it does seem that notes are becoming a thing of the past.  For me paper notes and emails are fairly equivalent.  Generally I use notes for people over 50. 

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