I love Google!

How did we live without Google? Obviously, it's a rhetoric question and I'm not planning to discuss the advantages of internet research over locking yourself for days in the public library. What is interesting to me is that some people can find absolutely ANYthing, while others seem ready to give up after stumbling over the first irrelevant set of search results they find. Yes, some people are better researchers, whether on paper or over the internet. But can you actually improve your research skills?

Google thinks you can! That's why they came up with a new project this past April - aGoogleaDay. It's a simple Trivia game that is designed to test and, if need be, improve your research skills. Once a day they post one question that you need to answer. The good news is that nobody expects you to know the right answer, what is expected of you is to use google to find the right answer. It's fun and it's a chance to learn something new and random every day. I love Google! I wish I could work for them, too!

How it all happened OR What is Dive Cooperative

I don’t really know how it all happened. Last year, when Michael was visiting me in Cozumel, he was saying, “Listen, you practically live here now, why not open a dive shop? Of course, you don’t want to compete with Aldora or anybody else on the island, but why don’t you just focus on our compatriots and open Cozumel up for Russian divers from Russia. There is none on the island and that mistake has to be corrected pronto!” I was saying “yeah, yeah, sure”, but I wasn’t serious about it, not at all. Then he started bringing it up in conversations (and with Michael every conversation ends up to be about diving, you just cannot avoid it), engaging me more and more into believing that we can lure the rich Russians in with the right sort of marketing (for example, displaying total arrogance is a great sales technique with the Russian richies nowadays, believe it or not). I didn’t even notice when exactly the tables turned and all of a sudden it was me who was firing suggestions at him, “Aha, we could do exploratory expeditions and if they discover any new cool dive site, they will have the privilege of naming it” or “We should promote it as an authentic, rough experience. No luxury hotels, on the contrary, something very basic. I think it has more appeal for them”… Michael even came up with the name – Divers of FortuneJ.

Still, it was all just talk until… Sherief broke his legs in a motorbike accident. Sherief always has a myriad of business ideas. His brain is constantly busy with evaluating money-making opportunities. However, due to his severe ADD, so common in our day and age, he finds himself totally unable to focus on anything for a long time and as a consequence so far all his great ideas have been just that, great ideas. Well, I have long ago accepted the fact that I can produce 0 brilliant “start-up” ideas. What I do very well, however, is expand on the brilliant ideas of others and produce a zillion of little “operating” ideas (no less brilliant, I have to modestly report) to drive the original idea home. I am also very good at focusing on a task at hand for as long as it takes to implement it. So in that sense Sherief and I are a perfect match. We talked a lot with Sherief about his dream of opening a dive academy on the island and his quest to propel recreational diving to new levels. And suddenly it became clear that we should combine Michael’s original idea with all Sherief’s original ideas. When we first said it aloud, it resonated well in all of us, it just made sense. And we decided to go for it.

As a result of this amalgamation, Dive Cooperative is not your regular dive shop. Of course, we offer the usual diving options, but also we aim at becoming an accredited dive academy and strive to revolutionize recreational diving by fusing it with elements of tech diving philosophy and technique. We are also explorers, determined to find new interesting dive sites on Cozumel, and we invite our clients to join us for these exploration expeditions. And last but not least, we recognize and honor the necessity of giving back to the community. Hence our ambition - building a community outreach program to promote greater inclusion of low income and underprivileged local children into the sport of scuba diving, as well as to increase general participation and interest in scuba diving, cultural awareness, marine environment and conservation. We plan funding this program through grants and membership contributions.

Our goals are ambitious, but I think that in time we can reach them all. And all because of the coolest competitive edge we have – all of us. Our personalities, cultural experiences, professional career paths and set of skills are so different and almost all-encompassing that it’ll be easy for us to tackle anything that comes up in the process of creating and operating a business. Time will tell how good we are. I am excited to find out.

June 15, 2011 – I know it’s just an excuse… but it’s a damn good one, I promise!

Lately, some of you have been kindly pointing out to me that I haven’t really updated my blog for… well, forever. Frankly, that makes me feel great, because that means you are actually “hooked” on what I’m writing one way or another. Maybe you really like what I’m writing. Maybe you just want to be reminded of the good times you usually spend on Cozumel or vacationing in general. Maybe you need a break from work but you cannot look at the www.cnn.com newsfeed any longer. Maybe you are not happy with your job today and want to be reminded that there’s life (and a lot of it) after you quit. Or maybe you are simply ADD and need a million and one buckets of random information to be emptied on top of you with consistent frequency from all directions. Whichever group you fall into, I thank you. Thank you for reading my blog and thank you for asking me to continue it. And so I’m back then.

Believe it or not, I have a very good excuse. I know, I know, it’s still just an excuse and if I were a real writer I would have found the time and energy to continue anyway, but on the other hand, I’m not really claiming to be a real writer here, am I? In any case, this is what has been happening.

My camera broke

I cannot really believe it – my camera broke AGAIN! My friends in NYC got it for me only a year and a half ago and it’s already the second time it breaks. Granted, I’m using it A LOT, but still, I don’t understand why at his day and age our quality standards drop at the same speed as the technology gets higher and higher. Why is it acceptable that everything breaks so often and everybody almost expects it to happen (all these extended warranties serving as proof of our low expectations)?

The camera broke when I was still in NYC in April, and I sent it to the manufacturer without realizing that their guarantee had already expired and I had to use this “2-year extended” wonder that my sagacious friends purchased together with the camera for me. What a dumb mistake! Now I had to wait for about a month for the manufacturer to reject my claim and return the camera to me. At that point, I had already left back to Cozumel… Then, thank God, it took me a reasonably short while to convince the SquareTrade Warranties that my camera is worth their attention, notwithstanding this ridiculously retarded email exchange that almost made me lose any hope:

Maria: Dear SquareTrade, please repair my camera since the manufacturer’s guarantee has expired. Attached please find the camera purchase receipt and my SquareTrade warranty number for reference.

SquareTrade: Dear Maria, we urge you to consider using your SquareTrade extended warranty only after your manufacturer’s guarantee has expired. Thank you for contacting us.

Maria: Dear SquareTrade, as I mentioned in my previous email, the manufacturer’s guarantee has already expired. This is precisely why I am turning my camera over to you for replacement.

SquareTrade: Dear Maria, manufacturer’s guarantee is usually valid for one year. We contacted your camera manufacturer – Panasonic – to confirm that this is the case, and in fact, they do offer a one-year guarantee on cameras. Thank you for contacting us.

Maria: Dear SquareTrade, as seen from the camera purchase receipt attached to my original email as requested in your online instructions, the camera was bought on January 21, 2010. Today is May 15, 2011. [If you get your stupid head out of your butt you will realize that] it has been one year and four months since the date of the purchase, which means that the one-year manufacturer’s guarantee has already expired.

SquareTrade: Dear Maria, thank you for your thoughtful reply. [WOW, seriously?] You are absolutely correct, and as such I have approved your claim for repair. Please allow two full business days for the arrival of your pre-paid shipping kit for you to ship your camera off to our depot for full repair.

Of course, the kit never arrived in the promised two full business days. Then, Tanya and Michael left to Cozumel as well, and the camera saga continues.

I hadn’t realized how used I’d become (only in a year and a half!) to snapping photos of everything in my way. I felt like I had to reintroduce myself to all the sunsets and pretty blooming flowers and smiling people and delicious foods, so different they looked now with a naked eye…

(P.S. Tanya is leaving her camera for me here until my “situation” gets resolved. What a relief!J)

Well, fine, maybe this is not such a good excuse… I have more!

I lost my phone

Ana and I went to the Punta Sur beach one day when she was still here. We spent some hours there, snorkeling, chatting, eating, and lounging in the hammock. If you know me well, you’ll probably guess that all this time (besides during snorkeling, of course) I had my Nokia phone on me or at least in the close vicinity. At some point we decided that it was enough beaching, stood up and left. We didn’t even make 100 yards in the car, when I remembered with a start that I didn’t have the phone! I must have left it in the hammock when I stood up, completely forgetting about it. We came back right away. I had no doubt that I’d find it where it had been only 3 minutes ago. But no such luck… It was gone. The staff at the beach were a bit too eager to help us in our search and recovery mission, and I was immediately suspicious of their involvement in the disappearance of the phone. Oh well…

I LOVED my phone! I use my cellphone not only to call (this is actually the least used feature on it), but to organize myself – tasks, notes, calendar, books and movies lists, etc. And of course, I hadn’t backed anything up. How stupid! But it is what it is. I had never lost a cellphone in my entire life, I guess it was about time I had this experience.

As usual, the silver lining didn’t take long to show its beautiful face. I finally succumbed to the world’s pressure and got an iPhone (and for free! Because a friend has a newer version now and stopped using the 3G one). All these years I was very skeptical. The thing is that I type a lot. And I type fast. And I blind-type. A task impossible on an iPhone, with its stupid on-screen keyboard that my apparently fat fingers cannot press correctly if my life depended on it. But… EVERYTHING ELSE ON THIS PHONE IS DIVINE! I honestly don’t know how I could live without it! Although I still despise the keyboard, there are so many advantages in this device, that I’m willing to forgive this small flaw. After all, nobody is perfect.

This incident provoked some thoughts. First of all, how did we live without technology? I understand that it’s a very trivial question nowadays, but I’m still asking it once in a while, unable to fully comprehend how we could possibly lead our lives without call-waiting, voicemail, email, texts, digital photos, and the like? I remember rushing home after classes in high school because HE was supposed to call. And I remember yelling at everybody at home not to use the phone until HE did call, because obviously I didn’t want the line to be busy. And I remember having to always be on time everywhere and feeling bad if you were late, because there was no way of communicating, “Sorry, I’m stuck in traffic, will be ten minutes late, just go have a coffee in the meantime”. The technology available now is certainly a huge blessing. Although it could be a curse, too. For example, I have noticed for the past couple of years that I’m becoming more and more ADD. And that’s me, who used to be so good at focusing on any given thing for hours on end (well, I can still do it, but that “given thing” better be super fascinating for me to pay undivided attention to it)! And I’m also becoming progressively more and more dyslexic. I cannot even trust myself to write down phone numbers correctly anymore – I just switch all the digits around (although I believe this particular sort is called dyscalculia). Somehow I’m sure that it’s related to this overflow of information from all over the place that’s causing all of this. Or maybe I’m just getting olderJ.

I guess, the phone loss and gain is not a very good excuse for stopping the blog either… OK, let’s try another one.

Tanya and Michael’s visit

Why is it that if you are sad or bored or feeling otherwise negatively, time crawls, and when you are immersed in unadulterated happiness, the same length of time flies by like two seconds? How fair is that? Totally not fair! Tanya and Michael were here for 2 weeks, but it felt like 3 days. We did so much though: lots of diving, lots of eating, lots of chilling on the beach. It was simply great to be together with Tanya again, in our element, doing nothing in particular but so much at the same time, talking about nothing in particular but managing to tackle so many important subjects, looking at nothing in particular but seeing almost everything… The mechanics of real closeness have always been fascinating to me.

Well, if this is not enough, let me try the heavy artillery.

Today, on June 15^th, a new dive shop on Cozumel, Dive Cooperative, opened its doors to public

And this has been the main reason of my blogging hiatus. I just didn’t have any time left for anything else, but opening the shop. I knew that Mexico was a slow-moving country, but I didn’t realize just how bad it is – every single thing takes at least 5 times longer to accomplish then, say, in New York (no, probably, if we compare to New York, it’s 10:1).

But let me be a bit more descriptive here. Michael Proekt, Sherief Sanad and Maria Shibaeva Hykin are now in business together, manifesting their shared vision of diveRevolution through a new dive operation, www.divecooperative.com. We had joked about opening a “different kind” of dive shop with Michael exactly a year ago over dinner at my very posh Las Palmas Reales apartment, but we didn’t really expect this to materialize any time soon. But I guess every joke has only a grain of joke, so you should not only be careful what you wish for, but also what you joke about, because this just may happen.

It is strange to be a business owner – scary and exciting at the same time. Wish us luck please. And if you are curious to check us out, here is some contact info:

Our website: www.divecooperative.com
Our FB page: www.facebook.com/DiveCooperative
Our Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/DiveCooperative
Out address: 5 Avenida between Calle 4 and Calle 2 (right next-door to La Kinta)

And now that most of the bureaucratic madness is over, I pledge to post my blog updates on a regular basis again.

Canadian myth busted

I have been to Canada a couple of times during which I didn’t get a chance to interact with “real” Canadians a lot, but I’ve always heard the nicest things about them. Canadians always smile. Canadians are capable of seeing the bright side of any disastrous situation. Canadians are the most polite lot. According to the “How I Met Your Mother” show, you push a Canadian and he apologizes for being in your way… But is that really so? Well…

I didn’t want to leave my properly A/C’d house to have lunch out the other day and voted in favor of ordering in “Chicken Teriyaki” from La Parrilla Cozumel. This dish has little to do with the real Japanese chicken teriyaki, but it’s delicious nevertheless and you cannot beat the price – 35 MXN pesos ($3) for a very hearty portion. As I had ordered from them before, I didn’t really expect any foul, but after working in the financial industry I should have known better. Indeed, “prior performance does not guarantee future results”.

So I place an order on the phone and switch off my A/C because I know that with this noise on I won’t be able to hear the bell. I wait and wait and wait. Finally, the bell rings. I run from the second floor downstairs, grab the keys, shoot, the keys fall down on the floor and get entangled, I lose a couple of seconds fumbling through them, but finally manage to open the door, run to the gate and… see the guy get on his bike and shoot away from me. I try to shout after him, but (remember the muffler problem in Cozumel?) he obviously cannot hear me. OK, no problem, I think. I call the restaurant again and explain the situation. A very annoyed voice responds, “Well, I was there for more than 5 minutes. I was honking and yelling loudly, too, not only ringing the bell”. I find it hard to believe because actually I’m super sensitive to even any minor honking, so I say, “Ha, weird that I didn’t hear any honking or yelling.” All of a sudden the voice’s annoyance turns into rage, “ARE YOU LAUGHING AT ME??? THIS IS FUNNY TO YOU??? I WORK VERY HARD TO MAKE MY DELIVERIES EFFICIENT FOR HOURS AND HOURS AND YOU ARE LAUGHING AT ME???” Click… beep-beep-beep. He actually hangs up on me! Totally taken aback, I call back and offer, “My apologies, I certainly didn’t mean to offend you, in fact, I’m not laughing at you at all. Can we just please resolve this misunderstanding?” He yells, “DO NOT EVER CALL HERE AGAIN! THIS RESTAURANT IS NOT FOR YOU, UNDERSTOOD? FUCK YOU!” Click… beep-beep-beep. He hangs up again. In total disbelief, I decide to give it another try and call again, “I understand that you may be having a bad day and I’m sorry for that, but could I please have my food?” “WHAT??? – he bellows. – “HOW DARE YOU CALL HERE AGAIN? YOU WERE LAUGHING AT ME! LAUGHING! IT’S FUNNY TO YOU! WASN’T I CLEAR – DO NOT CALL HE-RE E-VER A-GAIN! NE-VER! FUCK YOU!” And the familiar click, this time totally expected.

Later on I learnt that the deliveries at this restaurant are done by its owner, a Canadian guy. As I mentioned above I ordered from this place before and I actually saw the guy a couple of times. He was most agreeable and polite. I respect everybody’s right to a bad day, but isn’t that a bit extreme? Firstly, it’s just a silly misunderstanding, things like this happen sometimes, it’s O-K. Secondly, I wasn’t disrespectful and even when he got offended in the first place by my “Ha”, I actually apologized right away. And if nothing else, what happened to the good old “The client is always right”?

P.S. I’m Facebook “friends” with his restaurant, so I’m currently debating if I should post this story on their FB page that has 354 followers… What do you think?