Contract fun

Last October my boss asked me to sign a bit of paper. Neither he nor I understood it but when I signed it I became legally employed.

Because I'm thinking about getting a car loan I asked the bank what I would need. The main thing is my nomina or pay slip so I asked my boss how I could get hold of my pay slips. He said I should go and see his asesor, a sort of accountant.

At the asesor's office they gave me a bunch of pay slips, dating from now back to October and a copy of my contract. I was asked to sign copies of each one and to get my boss to sign them too as he'd not yet seen them!

With a bit of time to decipher the legal language of the contract I worked out my pay, social security and tax rates and I think I got an idea of how the contract system works. If I'm right there are standard contracts for different sorts of work called models. They relate to types of work so office based work might be type 400 for part time junior, 401 for full time junior etc. whilst contracts for mine workers might be 600, 601 etc. Each type of contract records basic detail - the length of the contract if it's part time, name, address, social security number etc with some variations from model to model. The contract then ties in to a certain "convenio" or agreement. I think that there are standard agreements for most jobs but that if, for instance, I worked for Ford my Union would negotiate better conditions for me than the basic convenio for the job. In either case my contract model such and such would get most of its detail about sick pay, dismissal, holiday etc from the convenio.

So I went back to the asesor to ask to see the convenio that related to my contract and also to ask about my tax situation. I've been paying pay as you earn type tax but, because I only worked three months of the year I don't think I will actually have any tax to pay so I may be due a refund. It was a difficult conversation as the person who normally deals with our firm wasn't there and I was grappling with the concept of the contractual process as well as the Spanish. The woman who checked it out didn't understand why there were pay slips for June when my contract expired in May (!) and my question about seeing the convenio threw her all together. Yes she supposed there was a convenio but she had no idea where she could find a copy of it. She asked me to come back when our usual person was there and she put my various questions on a "Post it" to pass on to our person. I am pretty sure I will need to start again with our person as she will never have seen the "Post it".

Very Spanish. A very official looking process with very smart forms but the people who you expect to understand them don't really know much more than you despite handling these things all the time. There will, eventually, be a resolution but it will just take a few more visits.

ADSL

We have been offline, except for a very slow dial up connection for a couple of weeks now. When Ya.com let us down we ordered a connection from Telefonica (equivalent to BT in the UK). I rang them tonight to find out what was happening as we hadn't heard anything.

Nothing's happening said the man: I have no orders showing on my screen. Delivery is now promised for 20 June.

Victory

Bowing to public pressure (or so I am told) the winners of the election of 27 May joined with the runners up to form the majority group. The Mayor will be from the winning Partido Popular and the "Deputy Mayor" will be the front runner from the second placed Union Central Liberal. The coalition will have 9 of the 13 seats on the council.

So the stories about the briefcases full of money were untrue which is rather good to know. Maybe it's a sign of the (less corrupt) times.

Personal service

I was buying a book in the newsagents when my next door neighbour came in to buy some brown paper. She wanted to wrap some clothes for posting to the UK that her son had left behind on his recent visit. I helped my neighbour with the Spanish to buy the paper and tape and I explained why she wanted it to the people behind the counter.

They asked her if she would like them to wrap the clothes up for her.

Spaniards are still like that. Nice I thought.

Caga y vete

Albacete is one of the provinces that make up the Autonomous Community of Castilla La Mancha - Don Quijote country.

It's only 150kms from where we live now and Maggie may be interested in a job there so we went to have a cup of coffee.

Now Albacete is not an exciting place. The Blue Guide has it pretty much right when it says "A dull provincial capital in the centre of a flat, uninteresting, but fertile plain." I've been there three times and not been able to find anything much to do. The first and most memorable time a pal and I were there around Christmastime. A cold wind was whistling across that fertile plain and we spent the evening in a porn cinema as just about the only available refuge (an excuse that I've stuck to over the years).

Yesterday the sun was shining, we enjoyed a drink in a very pleasant bar with a literary theme, the set meal in the restaurant was passable, the tourist office person was pleasant enough and the shops and general ambience was nice. It was good too that as English speakers we seemed to have novelty value.

Oh and the porn cinema is now an arts cinema.

Stolen Moments

We have lost our Internet connection so it's been a bit difficult to Blog anything recently.

However, just to finish off the election stuff.

Basically we had a draw. There are 13 seats on the council. The PP got 5, UCL 4, PSOE 2, PSD 1 and BLOC 1. A right wing coalition of PP and PSD is quite possible as is a centre left coalition of UCL and PSOE. Six seats each. So Juan Carlos of the BLOC with just 400 votes holds the balance of power. If the coalitions go ahead and he chooses to join one or the other then a three party set up would gain power. Juan Carlos may even get to be Mayor for two of the four years that make up the term of office.

My local informant told me that briefcases of money were being offered and that he thought the PP would win. The PP apparently has more money than Ramon of the UCL.

Voting; The unexpurgated version

We did it. We went and voted. An odd experience.

For a start all the candidates, or at least a good number of them, were just hanging around the polling station. I think that in the UK candidates have to stay some set distance from the ballot box but apparently not so in Spain. The current Mayor said hello to us, the second on the list for the centrist party had to step aside to let us pass, the socialist party candidate, our pal Eli, did the cheek kissing thing and a woman on the conservative list who I'd talked to at one of the meetings explained which table I needed to go to. That was a bit disconcerting because I felt there was a touch of personal pressure even for someone as unknown as Maggie and I; it must be really tricky if you're friends with one of the candidates but aren't a big fan of their policies.

The system is actually simple enough. Each of the parties, five in our case, puts forward a list of candidates. The list is printed on white paper for the town elections. There is a similar list, printed on sepia paper, for the district elections. As European citizens we only have the right to vote in the local elections. We take along our voting card, prove that it's ours by showing some form of ID and then pop our list of names, inside an envelope (again white for the locals and sepia for the district), into the transparent ballot box. Then we're done.

One complication was that in their election pamphleteering the various candidates provides the white lists and envelopes to make it easier for you to vote for them. I didn't understand, beforehand, how that could work. Could I simply pop along to the voting station and drop my ready prepared list into the ballot box? If I could then I could make multiple votes depending on how many lists I'd managed to get my hands on. However,as you turn up at your voting table the person in charge of the voting table ensures that you have the right to vote and that you only place the number and type of votes that you are entitled to into the ballot box.

Voters are allocated a voting table based on where they live and what their name is, a neutral person administers the table. This meant that Maggie and I had to go to different tables in different rooms. We had to face the system alone. I went to my table, told them who I was and proved it was me with my passport. They expected me to have my voting envelope ready to go into the box. I'd expected, like the UK system, to be given my ballot paper as I handed over my voter registration card. No problem though, I just went to the curtained off voting booth where I collected the white candidate list, put it inside my white envelope. I was then allowed to put my single vote into the local ballot box. If I had tried to put more than one list (say for two different parties) into the same envelope my vote would be void. If I put two or more lists for the same party into my envelope that would be checked by the returning officer but considered to be one vote for the party list. It is also possible to put a blank piece of paper inside the envelope to show that you don't want to vote for any of the candidates. If those blank votes were to outnumber the votes cast for the actual candidates I think that the election has to be re-run.

On her table Maggie had a problem in that they wanted her ID and she didn't see why they needed that when she had the voter registration card. In the UK the card is considered to be proof of identity. They compounded the difficulty by asking specifically for her Residencia (see the earlier blog about how we can't get one anymore) rather than simply asking for ID but she got to vote OK in the end.

The only difficulty I had was with my name. In the UK there is often someone outside the polling station who asks to see your card. I presume they're just checking turnout. In Spain there is someone from each party on the voting table each with their list of registered voters. Probably the idea is that if they know old such and such will vote for them and if s/he hasn't turned up towards the end of the voting day they send someone around to bring them in to vote. So each of the five party reps was trying to work out what I was called; it's all to do with Spaniards having two surnames. The alphabetical lists are based on the first of those two surnames. Ricardo Perez Brotons, for instance, would be listed under P for Perez. So they were not only trying to work out the spelling of my (for them) very complicated name but they were also scouring the Js for Christopher John Thompson. Fortunately my Spanish held together and it all became a bit of a laugh.

Jorge Drexler, the Uruguayan singer songwriter was on in Elda at the Teatro Castelar last night.

We'd bought our tickets through a system run by one of the local banks (pay online, pick up from a machine in most of their branches) so when we turned up at the door we had no idea where we were supposed to go. Whenever I'm lost and confused I get cross and that's what happened as we wandered around the foyer. Maggie applied a much better approach and asked one of the theatre staff where the seats were. He directed her in English. Good seats, a box about a metre higher than the stage, right at the front, maybe 20 metres from the man. Plenty of room to shuffle, good view.

The theatre was a bit like the ones in both Yecla and Villena that we've been to. Dark "Edwardian" places with boxes, balconies, gilded columns, marble detail. Elda was mainly red velvet and dark wood. No ice cream though.

Señor Drexler was good too, nice gentle songs, very intimate and cosy with the audience. He told us when he broke his finger nail and set about filing it down and he explained how he'd ended up with his ankle and foot in plaster. He and his band seemed to have a good time throughout.

If you don't know who he is then think back to the film "The Motorcycle Diaries", the one about the journey through South America that formed many of Che Guevara's revolutionary ideas. Drexler wrote the song "On the other side of the river"- Al otro lado del rió - and it won an Oscar in 2004 for the best song. Drexler was a bit cross about the way his song was interpreted by Antonio Banderas and Carlos Santana at the ceremony - a bit too Mills and Boon - so instead of an acceptance speech he just sang the song and left clutching the statuette.

Free gifts

The local elections are this Sunday so all of the parties are running a series of last minutes meetings. I went to listen to Ramón Cerdá from the UCL (Central Liberal Union) last night. The meeting was fine but as it's the fourth I've been to I'm getting used to the routine.

However, if the meetings follow a similar pattern the gifts don't! I am becoming a bit of a connoisseur. The Conservative PP definitely won out on this competition - a calculator with pen set and an electronic thermometer, the UCL gave away a nice little notepad and a fag lighter but their biro didn't click in and out properly. The Socialists didn't do so well - their fag lighter is OK but the biro is shaped like a space rocket with a wide bit where the main engines should be, presumably so it will stand up - most odd.

Fiesta Fatigue

The first of the village fiestas around Pinoso took place over this weekend in Rodriguillo and we, sort of, failed to turn up. We did have a look on our way back from the market at Algueña but we didn't go for the dancing or the gachamigas or the barraca. In fact the thing I noticed most was the wiring on the wall in the photo. I just left the picture of the horse and cart to add a touch of Spanishness.

We went to the Moors and Christians in Petrer too. No pictures from there either. Is Fiesta fatigue setting in?

Red Tape

Last Thursday I queued for my resident certficate or "resdencia" at the Alicante Foreigners' Office run by the National Police Force. Whilst I waited at the front of the queue I heard the police officer guarding the gate say to tens of people "From Monday the system changes and you will be able to apply for a residencia at any National Police Station" - he would then go on to ask people where they lived and tell them which their nearest station was.

Maggie had, like me, been booked in for an appointment for the old style residencia card and she'd booked time off work to go and do it. Today was the day. We thought we had the choice of our local office in Elda (queue from 7.30am to get a ticket for the session that starts at 10am - or at least it was last time we tried it), go to Elche, where Maggie works, and where neither of us knew the system or go to Alicante which has always been the main office and where I knew the system from as recently as last week. We chose Alicante. Unfortunately, as of today, Alicante no longer issues residencias to pople who do not live in its immediate catchment area. We tried Elche too but they told us the same.

So not only did Maggie hold, in her hand, a letter calling her to an appointment that had been cancelled but the place she had been called to is no longer willing to issue paperwork to her. There will be lots of other foreigners making the same wasted journey to Alicante from all parts of the province.

Anyway, in a bid to salvage something from the morning I suggested we get our European Health Card (the replacement for the old E111) from the local Social Security office in Elche. We found it OK, waited about 90 minutes to be served and then were told that because we are both on temporary contracts we could only have temporary cover of up to three months in any one calendar year. We took what we could get.

Because I was a bit peeved about this I've just done a little research on the European Health Card. The legislation is exactly the same for the UK as it is for Spain. The validity of the card is at the discretion of member states (Spain chose 1 year for full time workers, 3 months for "temporary" workers and 4 years for pensioners, whilst the UK chose 4 years for everybody with some exceptions). The card can be issued to everyone within the health care system (in Spain that's workers, pensioners and their dependants whilst in the UK it's almost all residents).

So the same legislation, with only some very subtle differences at local level, has given me a much worse deal in Spain. I've always missed out on those Rail Card deals too!