Some thoughts on living temporarily in San Carlos: This has so far been an El Niño winter, with several cold fronts moving through Southern California and Arizona managing to drag the tail end of the front through Sonora. This means that we actually had a few days with sprinkles and a couple of days with rain and cooler temperatures. Not cool enough to not wear shorts and not long enough periods that we didn’t wait a few hours and manage to golf at least nine holes. But it has been a bit of a surprise compared to last January when temperatures were pushing close to 90°.
Having internet capability in the rented casa has been a vast improvement and I am certain that our four months here would be very different if we still had to go somewhere to get access like we did last winter. Having most of our bills and all of our mail managed for us back in Florence is fine, but it has been personally difficult for me to give up that control for such a long period of time. I am now concerned about business tax filings, even though we were able to have Alisha take some checks back to the States and have FedEx delivery from our accountant to Alisha in Washington D.C. so that the government could receive our payroll taxes on time. February 15th is the next upcoming date for business income taxes and it has me checking my memory and relying on Eric back in Florence to sift the mail for things that need to be mailed to our Eugene tax guy. The other things that I have tracked all year in QuickBooks® will be emailed. This brings me to the lack of a timely, reliable mail system in Mexico.
People here rely on many different methods to send a receive mail. The most common is a loose knit group that has picked a business location, like a Realtor®, to accumulate mail that is gathered at a similar point in a place like Tucson or Nogales. This seems to work reasonably well except when nobody is going or coming from that direction for long periods of time. Things pile up to the point where all of it will not fit in a passenger car. Really. Then there is the issue of some people shipping boxes. What is in the box? Is it legal? Will it get me thrown in the jail? These are serious questions. Another comment I have heard on this mail delivery problem is that the group may have worked 15 years ago, but with aging of the participants fewer of them make the trips north, thus bigger loads when someone does finally get there.
The mail system in Mexico was used as the model to construct UPS with its central collection point, or at least it seems so, but UPS works and Mexico’s system does not work so well. Apparently, everything coming into or out of Mexico goes through one central point in Mexico City, and then it is distributed out from there. So it is not uncommon for a letter from the States to take a few weeks or a month to reach San Carlos. That is far too long for any business purpose and one would never consider sending anything of value through the system because it could become “misplaced”, permanently. It seems to me that this lack of reliable cross-border transactional commerce would have a significant negative impact on the country’s economic development. I do not think that I would willingly opt for a more permanent residence here when such a simple thing as mail is such an obstacle. The fact is we still have a few things that need real signatures and are time critical. I have talked to several people that just accept the fact that they drive to Tucson monthly just to get mail and justify it by also using the trip to buy a few products that are difficult or impossible to buy in Mexico.
No comments:
Post a Comment