Wrong Number!

By Adriaan van Ginkel

Imagine that US president Barack Obama were just a normal Venezuelan living in Venezuela. His ID would look very much like that on your left. He would be living in some nice middle-class suburb in Caracas, working at some university as a professor of law, and maybe moonshining at some law firm to fatten up his skinny university salary. His wife would maybe be a consultant for school meals, moonshining by selling low-carb home baked cakes and earning her wage attending a score of wealthy schools in the better parts of the capital. Their daughters would attend a decent high school nearby their home. And as every mortal under the hot tropical sun, Barack and his lovely wife Michelle would have to do their weekly shopping.

Now in Venezuela these days, doing your shopping means skipping and hopping from one supermarket to the other to get the things you need. And since the scarcity of everything from milk, meat and cheese to toilet paper and disinfectant has grown humongous, despite all efforts by would-be presidential colleague Nicolás Maduro to win that wretched “economic war” waged by an evil US government led by some white-skinned right-wing Republican president to destabilize socialist Venezuela, the scarcity and the screaming inflationary prices call for that proverbial extra mile to be run by the Obama’s (and everybody else who hasn’t connections). And off they rush in their blue 2009 Aveo in dire need of unavailable spare parts from one shop to the other, every Saturday, to look what they can get at the lowest price possible.

This week, a new plan was initiated at the order of Maduro’s government to regulate the shopping frenzy in the country. Now, it all depends on the last number of your ID to know on which days you are allowed to buy “regulated” goods, i.e. items that have effectively disappeared from the shelves – like milk, toilet paper and the like - but are now sold in a controlled way at subsidized prices. For professor Obama, the “1” at the end of his ID number (see picture) means that his shopping days are Mondays and Saturdays. Michelle, whose ID ends in “7”, gets Thursdays and Sundays. If the Obama’s want to keep Saturday as their shopping day, they will have to share that day with all other people showing 0’s through 5’s on their ID’s. That means that all the Saturday shopping would be done on Barack’s ID. Or, they can switch places during the week, meaning that Barack might take a Monday off from university, and go from shop to shop to see if there is any toilet paper. Michelle would then rearrange her schedule to go on Thursdays to look for milk, for example. Knowing that one half of all shoppers will storm the shops on Saturday and the other half on Sunday, the possibility is larger than life that everything will be sold out – no hay – by the time the Obama’s coughing Aveo finally finds a parking space at the shopping mall. It might give the Obama’s a better chance to get their shopping list done, if they do it during the week. Right?

Wrong. If only there were a regular flow of regulated items, this ID number system would be livable. But it isn’t. There is no way of knowing, except if you have insider information, WHEN or WHERE there will be rolls of toilet paper at the shops, for example. It could mean that professor Obama does take a Thursday off from his work, only to drive his poor Aveo into semi-retirement without having found a shop in the whole city in which he can get toilet paper. Same goes for poor Michelle, who has some disgruntled client having to rearrange their meeting because she might go on a Thursday in the hope of finding milk, frying oil, rice, maize meal – or toilet paper. And since Barack always takes the family car to his work, Michelle has to travel in a sweaty stuffed subway train with the airco broken down to reach some shops. I call it the food version of Russian roulette. Will he or she really get the things they looked for? Tune in next week to find out!

Or maybe the Obama’s could choose to become naughty citizens, like my wife and me, and many others I know who are sick of playing good citizens cheated by a rogue system of incompetent government members, corrupt insiders, bachaqueros or resellers, and bootleggers. For example, last Tuesday we went into a shop and saw – oh miracle! -  rolls and rolls of toilet paper and milk!  It felt like Christmas to us, really. Only problem, on Thursdays neither I nor my wife is allowed to buy those items. Wrong ID number! But since we were there, we tried anyhow. In Holland you say that you can always get “no” for an answer, but sometimes a “yes” might come your way. 

We loaded our shopping cart with overprized, non-regulated things and on top the regulated toilet rolls, two six-packs a person, and four packs of regulated powder milk. In front of us and behind us, shoppers were whispering. They all had the same problem – wrong number. None of them really could get those items in their carts on that particular day. But they tried. We tried. We picked a male cashier and let my wife’s charm loose on that young guy. Please, please, we haven’t had milk in weeks, and are totally out of toilet paper at home, she pleaded. The cashier wavered for some seconds, and then looked at our two ID’s. We got a No. It was either buckling under my wife’s irresistible charm or getting fired. Next to the cash registers, heaps and heaps of toilet rolls and bags of milk powder were waiting to be carted back to the shelves. Many tried, many didn’t make it. We neither. We felt like heroes, though. At least, we gave it a shot; we climbed that hill under heavy enemy fire, we slithered down, and as unsung heroes we will bear witness to the horrors of the Bolivarian Food War. 

Then, our eyes fell on some man doing his shopping too, at the other end of the supermarket, his cart groaning under an exaggerated load of Forbidden Goods. He was just one person, but by the quantity of paper rolls and powder milk bags, he appeared to do shopping for his whole family, grandparents and second cousins included. How could he? He could. By showing a collection of ID’s like some deck of cards to the cashier with a poker face, he effectively managed to buy everything and get his own private warehouse outside. We were astonished, as you can imagine. Enraged. My wife rushed back to our young cashier and told him what we had just seen. The young guy, ever so afraid of losing his job in times of low employment, played the game of the three monkeys – no hear, no see, no speak. We looked at each other. We had been naughty, but not naughty enough. Next time, so we told each other, we will borrow the ID’s of everyone we know, including my in-laws, and just go shopping on the day there is anything on the shelves we need. If we have to beat the system, we will!

But as born suckers, just like our poor professor Obama and his wife, we might not pull the trick as that certified stoned-faced bachaquero with his deck of ID cards. For to make it in today’s Venezuela, you have to be a bad-ass person, corrupt, reckless, without any consideration for your fellowman’s sorrows.  That way, you will always have the right number. Despite being completely wrong. It’s the world upside down, I agree completely with you. But what can you do?

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© Adriaan van Ginkel 2015