Anger Management

Or at least anger organization, into a neat little list of the things that make me want to explode:

1. The ICICI bank in Ghazipur won't give me my money. I have an ICICI account, and it is my personal account (only my name is on it). But the bank manager says that they are suspicious of me because I am the only foreigner in Ghazipur and that I have been taking out a lot of my own money (for staff payments). He wants me to show him a letter that says that I'm "official." It's not clear what this means, but government and business people are obsessed with the concept of official-ism here, even if in practice the only thing that stands between be and officialdom is a printed letter with a few sentences that I made up and my signature at the bottom (see also the Kindle blogpost).
2. Our landlord in Patna told VA that if we have any more guests stay at our apartment then he would evict us. I think this is because the guests that we've been hosting (DFS monitors) are maybe lower caste and definitely lower class than our landlord, and he doesn't like them mucking up the image of his apartment complex. But I'm not sure why else he thought we got a place with two guest bedrooms if we did not intend on having guests stay there…
3. For some reason, people here think that the real value of currency is in the physical condition of the bill, and not in its guaranteed backing by the central bank. During staff payments, one of our surveyors noticed that the Rs 1000 bill that I gave him had a tiny, hardly discernable tear on the edge of it, and he wanted me to exchange it. I told him tough luck - it's not a problem and if it is then it's definitely not my problem, because this is the bill that the bank gave to me, and anyways what does he expect me to do with it if he thinks that  it is value-less. I'm not sure why, but Deepak intervened and took the bill and promised to exchange it somewhere for a more pristine piece of paper with colored ink. He went to two gas stations and two restaurants, but it was rejected everywhere. It is just a simple coordination fail - if everyone agreed that these microscopic imperfections didn't matter in determining the value of a bill, then there would be no problem. But if just one person or a few people reject the bill, then the whole system falls apart. Sometimes I hate this country.
4. Over the course of the survey, and in particular near the end of it, some surveyors have worked and waited until Saturday night, took their week's pay, then left Sunday morning without giving us any warning. This has happened 5-6 times and has been a real problem since we are pushing so hard to complete everything on schedule. Pure selfishness, without any concern for the team or for the project.
5. Some of our staff are unable to accept feedback. On Saturday, I told one of the monitors that he was doing a good job, but that there were just two small things that he could change for the better. He proceeded to force all six surveyors in his team, as well as all six  surveyors in the team in a neighboring village, to return to the block headquarters and refuse to work. He told them that if they tried to work then he would hurt them. This of course made me very upset, especially given the tight timeline of our project, and on the motorcycle ride over to see him I kept checking the side of the road for various weapons I could use to beat him into submission. But then I realized, and this made me doubly-angry, that I really needed him and his team to work, since I had no time to find and train replacements. So I sucked it up and apologized to him (it hurt my soul so badly that I was the one apologizing to him), and told him that he was doing a great job. He then started to cry, which reminded me that he is human and not just an object to direct my hate and frustration toward.

Gah!