Recent Frustrations

Lately we have been presented with various situations here in Manaus that really test our patience. While we have actually gotten used to most of the smaller ones, we've encountered a couple especially trying times already this week.
Not much is as embarrassing or annoying as going grocery shopping, getting through the check-out line, and having your card rejected when you try to pay. We had just that happen to us today, but this time, it wasn't that we didn't have enough money in the bank. Right before leaving the house, I checked the balance on my food allowance card (like a debit card from my job), and I saw that it had just been refilled. What luck for us! Needless to say, we left the house with just that card, bought about $100R worth of food, had a rejected card, had to ask them not to put our food away while we walked home, got a real debit card, and walked back to get the groceries. Ughhhhh. It's most frustrating cause it's not our fault, and we wouldn't have bothered to use the card if I hadn't seen the balance on the internet.
Even more annoying, this weekend we planned a vacation with some friends for our week off during Carnaval in February. My friend found a great deal on airline tickets online, and there will be two other couples going with us. Since we were all together, we decided to buy our tickets from the airline's website. We each had to try, no exaggeration, like 40 times to get the tickets to go through without an error. And every single time retrying, I had to enter our names, credit card number, and other info all over again. After 2 HOURS of trying and getting extremely frustrated, my friend ended up getting the tickets for us. We even waited on hold for 30 minutes calling the airline, just to find out that they can't actually sell any tickets, and the problem was just that the system was busy. It was past midnight on a Sunday, which means it was 2 in the morning in the big cities of Brasil, and this is a major airline.
I'm getting the impression that this is really not that unusual here. It's like businesses don't mind if they don't make money or something.  Kinda like the time we went to the movies 15 minutes late, and the guy was too lazy and apathetic to sell us our 6 tickets. Too much work for this so-called worker. I mean, he'd have to take our cash, count it, and put in the drawer. Wow, I'm exhausted just thinking about it!
Oh, and don't get me started on how your debit card won't work at an ATM or at a store when it's particularly busy here... :)