Currently sitting by the water in San Diego just before the Burton Group’s Catalyst conference kicks off but I got to thinking how it’s been awhile since I posted, and I’ve been meaning to post about a couple of things that struck me while I was in Italy a few weeks back. (Great weather, great food, great wine, and ah the gelato…the gelato…)

The first happened immediately after we’d arrived. We had a friend picking us up at the airport and as luck would have it, his daughters were also returning from visiting their grandmother in France at pretty much the same time, so he was collecting them as well. After they’d arrived and had a nice reunion with their father, our friend realized he had left his id in the car. So he could not pick up his daughters (travelling as unaccompanied minors) until he was able to prove who he was. Now, I know why they do this, but it makes me kind of sad that things have got to a point where a couple of girls (11 & 13) cannot say “This is our father and we want to go home with him now.”

Later the same week the same friend was faced with buying a new washing machine, so off he goes to the store, picks out his model, then wants to pay for it by cheque. A cheque from an Italian bank in Rome. BUT, did he have Italian ID? No, he’s a French national working for the UN in Rome, so his ID was French. Well, they didn’t know if they could do that. The salesman had to check with his manager, who had to check with the floor manager, who had to check with the store manager… Finally, and a little reluctantly, they agreed to accept his cheque. So did he huff the machine in the back of his van and drive off? No, the model he wanted would have to be ordered and would take a few days to a week to arrive. It seems to me that would be plenty of time for the cheque to clear the bank, so the whole rigmarole of deciding whether to accept the cheque strikes me as really odd. It seemed to have more to do with whether he had the right Italian id as opposed to whether his money was any good.

Then again, maybe there’s just something about my friend…