Sometimes size doesn't matter.
Common sense assumes that given
a tiny piece of Lego
, whose weight is barely 50 grams and which could enter the country in any neighbor's pocket, the desire to receive it to correct a factory defect should not become a
bureaucratic odyssey
.
And even less so in a
libertarian State
like the one Argentina launched three months ago.
Lego, as everyone knows, is an
extremely precise
interlocking toy .
When a piece is missing from the box, assembly inevitably breaks down.
You have to get the part, which at first glance
does not seem like a problem
: like any large global company concerned about its prestige and the loyalty of its customers, Lego has an efficient after-sales service.
A message is sent to the company through its website and
in about 30 days
- in a normal country - the claimed object may be received.
You want is you have it.
At no cost
, not even for shipping, from Germany so that the child excited about unlocking Batman's truncated motorcycle project, made of dozens of assembled parts, can finally calm his anxiety.
What happens if the recipient is not at home when the shipment arrives? Lego is asked naively
,
in case no one is home at that moment, without realizing that none of that matters because it is about to fall into the networks of the
Argentine labyrinth
.
The answer, no less naive and at the same time seductive, is that in this case the tiny object can be
deposited in the property's mailbox
.
The order to Lego was made
in the first days of January
, when the libertarian chainsaw had just been turned on.
Based on the promised deadlines, the piece should have arrived in the country, at the latest, at the beginning of February.
But time continued to pass without news until the end of the month: bell, Correo Argentino.
The Lego piece?
How much naivety.
Lego promises to send the missing piece in around 30 days, but then the Argentine labyrinth starts.
What has arrived is a letter, dated February 28, 2024, that advises the following: “We received an international shipment from Germany that was classified
for home delivery
.
Declared content: Toy Parts.
Declared weight: 0.050 kg”.
Then, the letter orders you to enter the international shipping portal “to make the content declaration and
pay fees
.”
That is, payment for something that
is originally free
.
And indeed, the remnants of the criticized parasitic caste are present to remember that, in order to continue advancing with the procedure,
in the "libertarian State" one must pay
as much as had to be done during the "totalitarian State", with full validity of a mysterious mathematical premise: percentage of zero would give more than zero.
What follows is to enter new data on a Soviet website to make an appointment and personally attend to do “the content knowledge acquisition” in order to proceed to
“complete the declaration and payment management”
, with the warning that there are a time limit, until March 15.
And if it is exceeded, the shipment
will be returned to the country of origin
.
One of the messages sent by email from the Argentine Mail keeps the shipment on hold.
And if the holder cannot go to the Latvia ticket offices - this is the case - and delegates the procedure to a third party, the latter must carry a printed declaration signed by the first.
But there is an option to be represented in the process by Customs and thus avoid going to the Withdrawal office, a button that excites and then disappoints because it is
pressed again and again without a response
, and reload the information just in case and try it. again with no luck, until you reach the point where you say enough is enough.
At the closing of this note, the tiny 50 gram piece given by Lego is still
abandoned
in some dark corner of Customs, waiting
for
the Argentine bureaucracy to make a boy happy.
The reason for the event in question obviously has its share of
frivolity
- it is pure bourgeois entertainment - but its ridiculousness is symptomatic of much of what, already naturalized, hinders the possibility of a
normal country
;
and metaphorical too, in the
unusual micro obstacles
that prevent finishing what has been started.
The company's after-sales service sends missing parts of Lego products to customers for free.
As things stand, the feeling grows that
“Door to Door”
could become a song by Serrat rather than – to paraphrase Borges – a completely invented service.
And although
the turn
to try to remove the Lego piece is formally requested, the cherry on top is a
Kafkaesque detail
: the first available date is March 19 - four days after the limit tolerated by the State -, so the hope that By then they have not
deported those three centimeters of recreational merchandise to Europe,
it is rather scarce.
Meanwhile, we have to sublimate the unease and imagine that,
depending on the outcome
of the story of the unfinished motorcycle, it could be the inspiration for a new film script for a children's saga, like “free the Lego piece”, or in its default, and riding the impotence caused by
unreasons beyond
one's own will, feed another of those beautiful depressive films in the Kaurismäki style.
In the meantime, this is not intended to be more than an ephemeral complaint in a
Clarín
link .
P.S.