By Ian Mulder / illustration by Sarah York/phlo design
People work very hard in Alberta. So hard, in fact, we don’t even have time to vote. We’re so busy making money – I use a printing press – that we leave all that democracy to the idle rich, the incorporated, the pensioned and the unemployed (both of them).
There’s nothing wrong with our breakneck pace (other than, of course, all the neck breaking), but there’s no sense working all the time, either. That’s why we have NAFTA. And factories/call centres in penitentiaries.
With the economy humming along like a humvee with decorative testicles hanging off the bumper, I like to dip my toes into the tropical waters of recreation. It’s what I do when I’m not procrastinating and procreating. (Fortunately, I rarely find time to work, so these three activities take up most of my time. Also on my things-to-do list: profiteering, litigating, disinfecting.)
I’m writing these words on a balcony overlooking the rolling, aquamarine Pacific Ocean and the Golden Mile in Mazatlan, Mexico. The palm trees sway in the warm breeze, the extradition process is on hold, and the mariachis compete with this week’s Mexican Pop Hit (“¿Dónde Està Me Pantalones?”) blaring from the speakers of the Blockbuster-Senor Frog’s-McDonald’s complex next door. Just as God made Adam in his image, so the Mexican tourist mob has made Mazatlan in the image of a more modern God: the American marketplace. You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a bit scattered – since I’m on vacation, I’ve decided to write my own column this time. Besides, my entire Mexican communications team has up and quit. Something about temporary foreign worker jobs at a Taco Bell in Fort Mac.
Preparing to go on vacation can be tiring: tying up loose ends, loosening up tight ends, and making sure that when I’m gone, the whole Mulder Industries family of companies keeps running. I have to think about logistics (emptying the paper shredder), security (does the cat really have enough food to last him a whole month?), and cash flow (call my accountant, or lawyer, or cat). It helps that most of my businesses are cash-money enterprises. Translation? You pay me cash and I take your money.
At any rate, going on holiday can be a time of personal growth and often forces you to confront the challenging questions in your life. Like, “Should I really convert all of my money into pesos?” I ask this particular question because of something that happened to my former associate “Cool Breeze” Sal. After inventing slacks and striking it rich in 1971 (“Relax! They’re not pants! They’re slacks!”), Sal lost it all in the Mexican peso crisis of the early 1990s while vacationing in Tijuana. Right now he’s schlepping his self-published, self-help biography (The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Nuns) on a street corner near you.
As Sal’s story illustrates, many of my friends are rich and infamous entrepreneurs who have done jail time and/or had body-altering operations, and you gotta be careful when it comes to travel or business (or surgery) in Mexico. But sometimes things happen in far-flung locales that we foreigners cannot understand. Local problems require local solutions. Case in point: Mexico has dealt with traffic safety in its own unique way. Not with frivolous, impractical measures such as better brakes or lower speed limits, but with louder horns. In fact, they’ve got a horn here that makes a sound like a guy whistling at a girl. It really impresses the white-as-run tourists from Moose Jaw strolling the waterfront Malecón (which is kinda like Edmonton’s Whyte Ave or Calgary’s 17th Ave if the home team was in the Stanley Cup finals game every night of the year. Ay, caramba!)
I’m a big fan of mixing business with pleasure – or, as I like to call it, pleather. To be truthful for a moment (won’t happen again), I’m here to visit family. My parents, along with what appears to be the entire over-60 population of Western Canada, have purchased a condo in Mazatlan. They’re all in the same building, with the same franchises that litter the strip malls back home down below. But at least my folks bought at the right time, and they’ve got a great view of both the local pigeon coop and the nightclub styled after a mosque across the street.
I’m not complaining; the price is right and the police can’t find me. The rest of the gringo residents are angry, however. They’ve organized to cut the wires of the nightclub’s sound system. It’s amazing how far $300 bucks will go here. I guess it’s a sort of geriatric neo-colonial direct action campaign.
As one of my parents’ neighbours told me yesterday, “I don’t speak Spanish, I speak pesos.”
If doing business abroad is your pleather, don’t forget to bring cash. And be prepared for obstacles. Like the callous that’s building up between my big and second toes thanks to my flip-flops. U
Ian Mulder no habla mucho inglés. No mucho espagñol también. Pero bebe mucho cerveza. ¿Dónde està his pantalones?
Category: Work
