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My business partner Jerry has returned to Belgium this morning. As always, he drives the car to our warehouse and showroom in Almancil (a 40 minutes drive from where we live), he leaves the car over there, and takes a taxi to the airport, which is only 10 minutes away. It would be ridiculous to pay € 25.00 per day to leave the car on the public airport parking, instead of leaving it in our own place. The challenge each and every time is in finding a taxi.

Yesterday, he had to call five different taxi companies, until he found one that was willing to come and get him in our office, this morning at around 07.00am. The trouble is that we don’t have a number on our location. For one or the other reason, nobody in our neighbourhood has a house number. When we rented the place a couple of years ago, even our landlord (who’s living just next door), didn’t know the number. We have a huge Gifoa-publicity panel on the wall. And we are located exactly at kilometer 96 on the “Estrada Nacional nr. 125″, the biggest national road which runs all through the Algarve, from the Spanish border until Sagres, in the West. Aproximately 15000 cars are passing our front door each and every day. Lots of them are taxis. A couple of our neighbours are large companies that have been here a very long time, and these companies all have huge publicity panels in front of their doors! But explaining the taxi-companies where we are situated, isn’t just enough. They need the house number!

By coincidence, yesterday afternoon a taxi had a puncture at our doorstep. Jerry asked the driver if he could come to get him this morning. This guy answered that he had the day off today, that he wasn’t going to be working. When Jerry asked him if his company could send a taxi, the driver just shook his head, didn’t even bother to answer the request, and continued changing the wheel of his car. He just couldn’t care less.

It was only after Jerry had spoken to a taxi company, and he had promised to take a small map with our location explained on it to them, that he could make the reservation. What a huge productivity!

In our five years of existence in this country, our company has hired a couple of collaborators. This has always been a huge challenge. When Portuguese people come in applying for a job, they all want to earn a salary which exeeds the norm, they want a company car, a company cell phone and a laptop provided by the company. And then they want to send e-mails to prospects. As if doing business was that easy.

They have certain rights. The employer has to pay them fourteen times a month’s salary, each and every year. While there are only twelve months in one year. But ok, they have that right, so they are protected by law, so we pay fourteen months!

But what they sometimes seem to forget, is that they have certain duties as well. Coming on time for example. Showing up in the morning is one of them. Doing the job they were hired and trained for is another duty they have.

Unfortunately, some Portuguese people seem to forget these duties. One of our ex-employees stopped showing up on the job. She just didn’t come anymore. Just like that. Without any warning at all. When we sent a registered letter to the address we had in her file, the letter came back. Returned to sender! Person unknown. She now demands a couple of thousands of euros, because we did not send her a letter of dismissal in time.

We did, but it came back! I wish her a lot of success in her future jobs. And no, I will not give her a letter of recommendation!

Portuguese productivity. The lowest productivity in Europe. According to the Portuguese television news. Based on personal experience, I can only agree to that!

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