How to Handle Company Playing Hooky

The worker's quarters, you know, if they were here

So I know exactly what I would do if I lived in the US. But here? It’s not quite so straightforward.

Digging a 450’ well, it’s tough to do on your own. So you contract a company, and after a few weeks of ignoring you, they work for a couple weeks, then they stop, and there’s not really anything you can do about it.

There are two main reasons this doesn’t happen (with the same regularity) in the States. First because if a company does this, other people won’t want to use them and they’ll eventually go out of business. The other is that a contract is enforceable; theoretically at least they have to pay you for damages.

Here, between a lack of reliable communication and a lack of qualified companies, good business practices don’t always mean success and bad ones don’t always mean failure. And the judicial system moves so slowly and with such irregularity that to go to court is submitting yourself to an agonizing process that will guarantee you even higher costs (although this certainly can be true in the States as well).

This leads to the generally accepted way of getting things done; pleading, wheedling and prostrating yourself are all effective. Although I haven’t gotten to the point where I could do it myself, I’ve seen it done with great results (ok, not the prostrating part). The idea that this is necessary when you are already being paid to do the work doesn’t seem counterintuitive to companies or workers.

So the steps to a successful project, that would be research, plan, decide and plead. Repeat as needed to achieve desired results.