Do you have electric slippers?

The Pink House

Alamtec: La Casa del Transformador sits at Calle Parana 220, about a dozen blocks west of where Evita’s launched her Broadway-tweaked populism from a surprisingly low veranda on the Casa Rosada (or in english’s prosaic density, “The Pink House”). In a nod to wobbly local economy, however, the bother to paint it pink has only been taken on its front face. As if the building—like an architectural Evita—were an fading diva who only allows paparazzi to photograph her surgically remodeled face, the less-viewed sides have been allowed to fade to what can be charitably thought of as “putty” (or, less charitably, “psoriatic pooch belly”).

The House of the Transformer

La Casa del Transformador—yes, the House of the Transformer—is where I’ve taken a 40 minute bus-and-walk to buy, if I must explain, a transformer. In a classic expat foul-up—you’d think there would be a manual on this, and that I might have actually read it—I plugged our printer into a US power strip already planted with a phone and wireless router that in turn was plugged into a 220v-110v voltage reducer designed to handle 100 watts, which in turn was plugged into a three-to-one outlet expander on which I’m plugged in another, Argentine-local, power strip that was seeded with the rest of our electronics. Say what you will, at the time it seemed like perfectly a reasonable move.

When I plugged in the printer, the first hint that someone had gone askew came in the form of rising and falls status lights on the various electronics. Next came the smell of melting rubber. Then, smoke. At this point I admitted that something might have gone, well, wrong, but I chalked it up to the electronics adapting to this new home. Jet lag, or perhaps a food allergy. Things are different here, I reasoned. Just like Montezuma takes his vig during a tourist’s first days in Mexico, so might American electronics feel a little dyspeptic upon arriving in Bs.As.

This theory quickly died when a sparkling flame shot from the top of the voltage reducer and the electronics plugged into it—one and all—went dark.

The next afternoon, after a good four hours and 37 minutes searching with increasingly sweaty irritation for wireless internet paraphernalia in a country where the pinnacle of readily-available technology appears to be the AA Battery Charger, I returned home $230 poorer to realize that in order to revive our appliances I’d really only needed to replace two blown transformers, those little $6 boxes that sit between appliances and outlets and change alternating to direct current. Putting aside the fact that I was now saddled with $230 worth of electronics I could not return (while commonly thought to mean “Good Winds” in reference to its constant pleasant breezes, “Buenos Aires” can be loosely translated as “All Sales Final”), I was happy to know that I could return my comfortably worn-in electronics to life.

Except, of course, for one thing: one of my fallen transformers provided 2 Amps of output. This meant little to me, but in the owners of two local electronics stores (tiendas de computacion or, well, “computation stores”), it induced shock, and then awe. Such a specialized transformer could never be found in a local specialist shop—my god, what a thought! The first store owner, a soft-spoken 50-year-old with a tracheotomy scar, wrote down the address on the back of his card and smiled me out of the shop after selling me one, more common, transformer. To triangulate this advice, I visited a second store run by a clerk who made the Mumbles villain from Dick Tracy seem like a master of elocution. One of his exhortations did get through: “Go you directly to the House of the Transformer, at Calle Parana 220!” he mumbled. “No one in this city but they will have what you need!” Not as poetic as Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” exhortation to Ophelia, but clear nonetheless.

If nothing else, The House of the Transformer is adamant about its name. Its walls and drawers are pregnant with anything you might need to change one version of electricity to another, alternating, direct, up down—and, like some Khruschev-era Moscow store that proudly only sells baking soda, nothing else. In a kind of paean to this expertise, imitators have turned Calle Parana into electronic transformation’s version of Broadway.

The House of the Transformer serves as the archetypal distillation of Argentine retail. In a store I share with only one other customer, my purchase requires four clerks, three counters, two bills, and a visit to Citibank. After being assured that they can tweak a transformer to match my fried American version, a clerk standing at the center of the store uses an aged PC to prints out an invoice, an 8½” x 11” page that contains a number—the price—and nothing else. (Adding to the furtive weirdness of this, prices are rarely marked on products, suspicious given the “dual pricing” strategy often employed with foreigners).

It is now time to carry the invoice to the bowels of the store, where the cashier (a woman—as the division of labor often goes—painted in the style of the Drew Carey Show’s Mimi Bobeck) informs me that they’ve recently “suspended credit cards because of card company arguments.” She will take debit cards, of course. Well, sort of. Not my debit card, actually. It has a MasterCard, not Visa, logo. They’re not fighting with Visa debit cards. With them they have the love of enamored teenagers. With the rest of the credit world, however, they’re in a bronca (a favored Argentine word literally meaning quarrel, but often more specifically conveying, “A quarrel for which I go to Freudian therapy four times a week.”)

To garnish my Argentine retail version of Kafka’s Before the Law, my request in Castellano (the local Spanish) for the closest “Citibank” somehow leads the cashier to assume that my Spanish is quite passable but, sadly, short the words city and bank; she helpfully points me to Banco Ciudad (“City Bank” in Spanish) instead of to the Citibank two blocks further away. At last, I pay my bill to another cashier (it’s break time), receive a printed receipt in triplicate, and return to the front of the store. I am to collect my transformer at this third location, but only of course after a fourth clerk stamps and initials my receipt to show that the last piece of Four Stations of the Retail Cross—order, invoice, pay, receive—has been touched. I am close to tears of joy at achieving bureaucratic exoneration, but I worry about unstamped receipts. I can only imagine the purgatory to which they are damned.

What you realize after a few weeks is Buenos Aires is that when it finds itself in need of inspiration Argentine retail looks north and east—behind the Iron Curtain, to the chit-and-wait system of the Soviet Union. The aim is not something so prosaic as efficiency, or low prices, or ease of use. Before anything, you must rid yourself of these notions. Instead, it is as if each employee were a sensitive child in the need of a little bucking up and the twin goals of business are to offer them the feeling of inclusiveness and expertise. Just like in grade school, everybody here is a winner.

Take the supermarket: There are no scales in the checkout aisles. Instead, dedicated weighers are stationed in each produce section and shoppers cue. At first I thought this was a wonderful ploy to employ the blind in a useful role. They might, I figured, learn to lift a bad of mandarin oranges and weigh by touch. But no, the pricing of each seven cent head of lettuce provides nothing so much as a human touch point and another job with micro-sliced expertise. You can't dislike the humane sentiment of South America's version of Iron Curton Retail—there are aisles just for pregnant women, announced by portraits of stylized ladies with huge red hearts on their crotches (see below), and who doesn't like a little personal attention?—but you have to budget your time ahead.

The pure and unadulterated division of labor runs everywhere, from to lingerie stores to computer hardware. Five and dimes sell envelopes, but not paper; newsstands sell papers but no candy or beverages; kiosks are the opposite; and the near-empty drycleaner next door to our apartment seems to given up on work in advance of the inevitable apocalypse to come. During my Quest to Buy a Powerstrip (in Argentine Spanish, this is a “zapatilla” or “zapata,” which technically means slipper, so I was searching for an electric slipper), I failed in visits to a dozen computer, music and appliance stores. You see, appliance stores only sell appliances. Music stores? Music. Perfect clarity, once you think about it. While the tie between stereos, appliances and power strips might seem clear, assuming such a tie overlooks the expertise obviously required to sell the correct power strip. Thus, one must go to a hardware store to get a power strip, hardware store owners being specially educated in Multiple Plug Issues. This created a slight problem for me, however, as most hardware stores are closed on Saturdays (Who would want to go to a hardware store on a day when people tend to indulge in home remodeling?). During my quest, a baffled clerk at the front of one appliance stores answeres my request with, “Para enchufes?”—“For electric plugs?”—as if I’d asked her to purchase a monkey.

My inate sarcasm takes the day: “No—para mis pies,” bubbles into my mouth.

No—for my feet.