Gainful employment.

At long last, Brent's Argentine chiropractic office is up and running. And he already had to replace his receptionist.

A few weeks ago, I manned the door while Brent and his chiropractor friend and partner conducted inverviews to find the perfect assistant. The woman they chose was the obvious choice amongst the applicants: she was friendly (a rare quality in service employees here), retired (no danger of her running off to find a better job; also, no danger or her having child or boyfriend or husband drama), and she had been under chiropractic care already (so she already had a basic understanding of the philosophy and what is involved).

She started training, and the guys had a couple of hiccups with her in the first few days, but they thought she was just nervous and overwhelmed, and after speaking with her determined that she would be fine.

Unfortunately, after about three days of official work, she called Brent and the others aside to say, in short, that she couldn't do it.

Thankfully, the chiro team had another woman in mind for the job, and she was able to step in after just a couple of training days. So far so good with this one.

We've heard consistently that finding good help is hard work around here. The laws protect the employee, making it very hard to get fired, so there is no real incentive to do good work. (In fact, another one of the chiropractors here fired one of his receptionists because she was stealing -- but she sued him and won, anyway.)  This is why it's possible to go into a department store for something specific, stand around for 10 minutes, finally catch sight of an employee, ask the employee for assistance, be told to wait a second, then see that same employee chatting it up with his employee buddy, and leave the store empty handed. Of course, this is a generalization, and we have had some very good service on some occasions, but we've seen this enough times (and had it confirmed by enough Argentines) to realize that bad service is the norm.

So, we're counting our lucky stars and loving the receptionist. She's going to be great.