Living in Israel: The dreaded gan party

Have you been hearing a strange sound every evening for the past week or so? Sort of like the sound of air intermittently escaping from a soon to be flat tire? In case you were wondering, what you've been hearing is the sound of thousands of Israeli parents trying desperately to stifle ther yawns as they once again suffered through another annual round of Hanuka gan parties. If you listened really carefully you might have noticed how after 90 minutes or so the yawns turned into sighs of relief as the sufganiyot were brought out and the yearly rite came to a merciful end.

I have four children, each of which attended three years of gan before moving on to first grade. Each year of gan brought with it three parties: Hanuka, birthday and siyum. Multiply 3 parties by 3 years by 4 children and you get 36 parties. Average that over 10 years (from my oldest's first year of gan to my youngest's last) and you get an average of 3.6 parties a year for a solid decade.

36 opportunities to sit for an hour and a half on a munchkin chair with my knees competing for space with my shoulders. 36 opportunites to take out my old PSD camera and try to get a decent picture of my beloved one reciting his/her lines without including the 4 adults standing up in front of the first row while they video the whole show. 36 opportunities to ooh and ah when the teacher turns off the lights and the ribbons tied to the kids hands glow with reflected UV light. 36 opportunities to watch the kids mill around the "stage" with cardboard candles affixed in some way to the general area of their foreheads.

At least the cardboard candles provide some variety: some years they're stapled together; sometimes they're glued; occasionally they're just slotted together; and I think I've also seen paper clips and rubber bands used as well.

3.6 parties a year. And then it stopped. But not really. It turns out that kids continue with gan parties all the way through school - they just call them something else. For example, when my daughters graduated 6th grade they each had a tekes siyum. But the only material difference that I noticed between the tekes siyum in 6th grade and the misibat siyum in kindergarten, was that that the 6th grade tekes lasted a lot longer. Well, maybe there was another difference - the gan parties seemed a bit more organized and better planned. I guess practice does help.

Sometimes there's no school milestone to celebrate, but that's not a problem because your child's youth group fills in nicely with at least one or two similarly mismanaged and boring events a year.

Of course there is one common denominator between all these events that I've ignored up until now. While we parents are typically invited, the event is usually for and about the kids. So if they can enjoy them, I guess I can grin and bear it for their sakes. That is, of course, until medical research proves that sugar, oil and small yearly doses of UV radiation cause cancer in labratory rats.

Living in Israel: The "Kick me!" sign

A little while ago my brother mentioned to me that he had recently noticed that driving in Israel - never the most relaxing sport - had gotten worse. It seemed that every few minutes behind the wheel another driver would cut him off, fail to yield the right of way, flash his brights, honk, etc. He couldn't figure out what the problem was. Was it possible that there really had been a fundamental shift in Israeli driving etiquette? Or maybe he was just getting old and driving a bit more timidly than in the past.

It took him a few weeks but he finally figured out what was going on: it was the "Kick me!" sign on his rear window. Other drivers saw the "Kick me!" sign and instictively began to kick him.

It wasn't his fault, of course. It wasn't his idea to hang the sign there, the law mandated that he do so. Or rather that his daughter do so. For as you have likely already figured out, the "Kick me!" sign is that orange sign that you hang in the back of your car to proudly proclaim that a new driver is at the wheel. My niece had recently received her license and instead of putting the sign up and taking it down every time she drove, they just left it up. Big mistake. Everyone who drove the car got kicked, not just the newbie.

That of course is not the stated purpose of the orange sign; it's supposed to let others around you know that it'd be a good idea to cut you some slack. Good luck with that.

If they'd asked me before passing the sign law I could have told them what would happen. I remember my first car pool driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and back every day close to 20 years ago. Every day as we descended the crowded LaGuardia on-ramp, one of the guys in the pool would always say the same thing: "look for a naheget chadasha to cut in front of." The logic was clear - no one else would let us in, whereas the new driver wouldn't be able to stop us.

And why davka naheget instead of nahag? For the answer to that question you have to think back 15-20 years. Before the law was inacted, when did you ever see a nahag chadash sign? A true gever would never point out that he needed a break.

Living in Israel: Customer Service

A friend of a friend recently told me this story:

A woman - we'll call her "N" (just like the press refers to security personages and state witnesses) - was in an Ace outlet when she happened to notice a super duper portable DVD player on sale (the kind with all sorts of connectivity options that are understood only by true teechno geeks). She decided to splurge and buy it, but then found out that there weren't any in stock. No problem, she was assured, she could order it now and pick it up in a couple of sdays when they got their next shipment. So she ordered one.

A week later she stopped in to pick up her order, but was told that they were still out of stock. But no problem and no worries: they'd call her when it call in.

Time flies when you're having fun, but I suspect that it goes slower when there's no DVD player to play music. Even so, close to 3 more weeks managed to crawl by before "N" next happened to walk into the store. Lo and behold, there were a stack of players on the display floor. She went up to the Head Cashier, produced her receipt for the player she had ordered - and paid for - close to a month earlier, and was rewarded with a new DVD player.

When she asked why no one called her she was told that they "must have tried, but no one answered." Did I mention that "N" and her husband work at home and even when they aren't there, there's an answering machine? Never mind, all's well that ends well. "N" took her purchase home.

The first thing that "N" did was check that her new player worked. She stuck in a music DVD and everything was fine. She then picked up her new toy, moved to another room, turned it back on, and ... nothing. Like one of those short-lived insects that are born, fly around a few hours, lay eggs and die, the player had lived its brief life and now was done.

Back to the store. When "N" asked for her money back, the store clerk didn't understand. They did, after all, have several more units in stock, wouldn't "N" prefer to replace her purchase instead of a refund? But "N" was adamant. Once burned, twice shy, she had no desire to tempt fate any longer.

It was at this point that they explained to her that she couldn't return the defective item. It wasn't that they didn't have a return policy, because they did (and do). It was because in order to take advantage of the policy you had to return the merchandise within two weeks of purchase - and "N" had bought the player almost 4 weeks earlier!

Never fear, "N" did eventually get her refund, but it was touch and go there for a while.

When I first heard this story, I grinned, and like a typical oleh vatik I shook my head and mumbled something like "Ah, only in Israel ..." Ignoring, by the way, the fact that the store in question was actually an American franchise because that would ruin my perception of the typical Israeli customer experience.

And then just yesterday I was reminded that perhaps Israel doesn't have a monopoly on odd and incongruous customer service.

20+ years ago I opened an IRA account with a well known American investment house. A few years ago I become vaguely aware of the fact that they had stopped sending me regular financial statements. I know that I should have looked into it at the time, but when you can't touch the cash until you're almost 60 anyway, it's not like you circle dates on the calendar to make sure that you get your statement on time.

Anyway, recently I tried looking at the account on the Internet, but I found out that my Internet access had been frozen because mail had been returned from my address of record. This, by the way, wasn't because I had moved without notifying the investment company - I've lived in the same home for over a decade and a half. But when we moved in, we used the address that the kablan gave us, and since then the Iriyah has informed us that the address (including even the apartment number) is something else. The investment company had the original "kablan address" - I hadn't updated them in respect to the Iriyah's revelations.

So I sent an email inquiry asking how to set things straight. They replied that I should call during office hours and ask to speak to rep who would help me out. So I called and the rep said no problem, he'd send me an address change form and all I had to do was fill it out and send it in. No problem at all. Why they couldn't send it in response to my email inquiry was an excellent question; he said he'd "look into it."

So last night I got an email with instructions how to get the address change form. All I had to do was log into my account on their website and download it. The only problem, of course, was that until I filed the form I couldn't access my account to get the form to file ...

So I wonder, has Israeli customer service progressed to the point that it's indistinguishable from American service, or perhaps in my extended absence American service has regressed to the Israeli level? Or maybe, just maybe, k'mo ba'America was never as good as I remembered it.