Way back in January, we decided to let our property manager go and take responsibility for our casa on our own. It’s gone pretty well, as we’ve made arrangements for all the usual things (handyman, water softener and filter maintenance, plumber, gardener, house cleaning, etc.) without too much effort. Yes, we had to learn which bills could be paid online, which had to be paid in person, and where to pay them. Some can be paid with a US credit card online, others only with a Mexican credit card. As I mentioned before here, some have discounts if paid early, others have a penalty for late payment. Most allow you some grace period, and as far as I can tell, few are exacting about the amount. If you pay a little more or less than the bill, it just gets rolled over to the next payment (government bills and the phone service being exceptions).
We were pretty much set for the year by March, when the quarantine and shut down hit. The only exception was our car registration. I was going to go the last week in March, but I had a stomach ache and decided to wait, and then: boom goes the coronavirus. And I totally forgot about the car.
Until last week, when I saw a notice in the local English language paper that the Jalisco government was extending (through July) the grace period before fines went into effect for auto registration renewal. So I got after it.
I had been warned about the long lines at this office. My first trip to it was in the early afternoon, and sure enough, I drove past to see lines out in the street and just kept going. That was last week, the beginning of the month, so perhaps more people were going to get it out of the way. I decided to get up early (when I say early, I mean expat retiree/Mexico time early) and hit the office when it opens at 8:30 am, when the lines should be more manageable.
That is, if there were lines. I arrived at 8:35 with not a soul in sight. Made my way in to the counters, where two clerks were handling two customers. Just as I sat down in the waiting chairs (thoughtfully socially distanced), the clerk beckoned. I walked up, performed in flawless (and rehearsed) subjunctive Spanish my desire to pay my auto registration renewal and handled over the expired registration card. The clerk said gracias and started typing my info into his machine, hit “enter” and the printer spat out my documentation. I paid my 702 MXP bill (a little less than $35 USD, including a small mandatory-voluntary donation to the Mexican Red Cross) and was on my way in under one minute.
Boring, yes? But a little piece of normalcy, too. It was nice to avoid the lines, better still to do something routine in a routine manner . . . perhaps with the exception I was masked. It made me think: when people sometime in the future see pictures of people wearing masks, they’ll (probably) immediately associate it with 2020, a tell of from what era the picture was taken. Just an odd thought at the end of oddly routine day!