{Coding, Life}

Italy is an amazing country, and despite not being a huge country, geographically speaking it has every thing, amazing beaches, breath taking mountains, beautiful hills (i.e. Tuscany).

Many cities and small towns are so packed with history and art that if taken as a whole and placed in a museum people would pay to see them.

Of course I cannot talk about Italy and not mention how good and relatively inexpensive food is. And the reason why food is so good is that Italians are obsess about it, while we are having breakfast we are thinking what should we eat for lunch, and during lunch we often discuss with friends what we ate the night before and probably what we are going to eat for dinner.

While in England people have their local pub, Italians have their favorite Bar (Cafe), this is the Bar that makes the best cappuccino.
In London I have taken so many “Cafe Nero” and “Starbucks” that for me in Italy whichever Bar makes a great cappuccino.

So why I don’t want to go back and live in Italy ?
Well for me the following are the biggest problems:

Customer service is at a prehistoric level, places like post offices, banks, local council are a nightmare to go to, people on the other side of the transparent glass have no interest what so ever in what they are doing and more than often don’t actually know what they are doing.

The normal behavior is to make you feel a problem, and act as by issuing you a birth certificate, or cashing your check or sending your parcel is a huge personal favor they are doing to you, so they look annoyed and bored.
Of course by the time you reach the counter you are already tired by all the people trying to cut the queue in front of you.

When shopping in Italy is not unusual having to wait for shop keepers to finish their private conversation before they finally glance at you and, totally annoyed by your presence, ask you, what you want.

The lack of each other respect combined with the lack of civic education is reflected in Italians way of driving.
When I am driving in Italy I often feel like I am in a video game at level 20 with one life left.
The are no rules, the next car or scooter could dangerously come towards you from any direction.

Technology is another big weak point of Italy, as an example facebook is booming in Italy now, 2 years later than English speaking countries.
In Italy I.T. is often outsourced to ever growing agencies. This agencies act as intermediaries between the developers and the companies in need of IT services. Which translated in practical term means agencies get all the money and developers are exploited.

I am a Software Engineer, I love engineering and designing code, my skills are highly valued here in England and in many other countries, but in Italy to get any work I would have to subscribe to an agency which will use me (my skills) to make as much money as possible while trying to pay me the least possible.

So to summarize I am not going back to live to Italy because the day to day life in Italy for me is a straggle, traveling to work is as comfortable as crossing a battle field, going to a post office or bank means long unorganized queue at the end of which you are mistreated and/or misinformed and sometime even laugh at, getting a new internet connection could mean waiting months, and services in general are ridiculously unorganized, inefficient and always overpriced.

I love Italy, but once you lived out of it for enough time your prospective of how things should be and how things should work changes and it becomes very hard or in my case impossible to go back.

In my next post I will write a little about my 15 years in England, and how is now time for me to move out.