A rant about a trying to do things right, but never finishing because no one knows what the hell they are doing and why they don't give a crap about it. Buckle up, start this playlist (picked to set the mood and isolate yourself from external burdens) and let's dive into some fascinating clusterfuck.

Preface

Let me set a scene for you - you're young, energetic and full of ideas. You're excited to build your house, you got your piece of land, you got all of the permits necessary to start the construction. For those who're unfamiliar with the process - getting the permit requires you to get the approval of all major infrastructure providers (gas, water, elecricity, phone lines). The process is logically designed this way to eliminate any risks of cutting through existing infrastructure as well as to give the companies the heads up that there's a construction and a new consumer will be joining the network / grid. This should also help them plan the development of certain communities ahead of time.

From the title of the article, some of you probably guessed that this is not the case - and oh boy you're in for a treat on how horrible everything works in reality.

People who personally know me might argue - well, you moved away from the capital city, you should've expected that and other roadblocks. As if that was really the case¹.

At first this might sound like a very local issue that is only relevant to me w.r.t. experience with a single company and that the cause can be something random, bad mood of a single secretary even. I hear you, I thought that as well. However when the issues keep piling up and persist, it forces you to think that they are systematic and that the root causes are stemming from something deeper than mismanagement. Getting things done without hustle seems like a statistical improbability rather than statistical certainty.

I've dealt with this and talked about this so much, that I feel like I'm going mad, asking for something unfathomable. I hope writing this will keep me grounded and help me feel a bit sane.

Ok, give us an intro and what's this about?

We have 3 main infrastructure providers in Armenia:

• Water - Veolia Djur (owned by the French Veolia).
• Electricity - Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) - up until recently owned and managed by Tashir, currently owned and managed by the Armenian government.
• Gas - Gazprom Armenia - well, the name says it all.

The order in which those providers are listed is not unintentional - I've listed them in the decreasing order of "how many fucks" are given. Some of you might find the correlation that it increases in order of chance that someone might die because of their poor service and ignorance.

To a normal person, the process of getting the infrastructure connected to your house should be pretty straightforward - you apply, they come, they connect. Worst case they might send you an invoice that costs you more than actually building the house or what have you. In reality, it's a nightmare. The amount of mental gymnastics required for the process deserves to be a separate sport where the prize for the first place should be a fully paid rehab at some nice beach.

I'll go over each of them in a separate section, leaving the cream of the crop for the end.

Gas

Even thought lately there's a lot of hate towards everything russian, the company is the easiest to work with. I'm mentioning the russian part since I'm convinced that a lot of guidelines that they follow come from russian or soviet ones. Or perhaps since they know their fuck-up can blow up (pun intended) on someone's face.

It is possible to have issues with them and building the pipelines is generally super fucking expensive, but they do eventually get things done, except when they have to talk with municipal authorities. They hate each other, since no one clearly understands the ground lease laws. If you're in between their jurisdictions, you're in a world of pain where the main characters are man-children. Unless you put your big boy pants on and sacrifice your time to chase them all, the issues are fixed half a year later, if the town council doesn't decide to change the rules or certain people bother to show up.

They have so many welding groups (all doing different parts, mind you) that the coordination headwind is immense and you as a consumer have to deal with 15 random people in different departments just to get 2 meters of pipes welded together.

Electricity

Overheard conversation of two electricians at their division, discussing setup of a meter and circuit breakers:
- Do you have a screwdriver?
- No, why the fuck am I supposed to have one?

In the recent years, Armenia has subsidized and encouraged purchase of electric cars and installation of solar panels. The grid buys the excess energy produced by these installations, which seems like a normal practice. But enter the lack of planing and a special blend of armenian mentality and you end up in a circus of absurdity, nepotism, conspiracy to commit fraud and criminal inaction.

When we did the planning for the house, we tried to plan things ahead - what appliances we're going to install (roughly), what floor heating are we going to use, what redundancy to have in case of emergencies. We estimated that 10KWh for single-phase electric power should be enough for us during peak usage. We decided not to opt-in for the solar panel installations, because of the uncertainty on what the future holds for the grid and the policies around it. A couple of our neighbors have solar panel installations (without power storage, as it's not subsidized and is fairly expensive to setup). Obviously they bought electric cars to charge with reduced electricity prices and use heat pumps or something like this as a central heating system.

So far this sounds like a reasonable thing and you might think "So where's the umph?". No one properly took into account that most of the cars are being charged at night and that it's simply colder at night. The grid is unable to withstand the increased load during peak hours (instead of getting 220V +- 10%, you get 172V and trust me that's me being generous). However, that's not entirely on the provider - the consumers that are doing those setups mostly lie about their planned consumption, get contracts for 10KWh of three-phase electricity (as it's the minimum both in KWh and price) and then just bribe someone to make the connection for the higher KWh.

What gives a piece of mind is that karma is a bitch - they struggle more, as everything for them works on electricity (stoves, central heating, etc.).

Despite all of this, the company is still responsible for performing it's duties as per contractual obligations. However when required to do that, they usually find an excuse about not having money to fix the issues. It's funny that they mention that as the connection fees have skyrocketed in the past years, they constantly print out bonds for $200M or $300M (with yields ~9.7%) and have actually offered to reduce the prices as they have excess profits².

Water

Ah, Veolia Djur, the creme of the crop. I don't know a single person who is at least non annoyed with their service quality. If you ever see a street being fucked up for the N-th time in the same month, it's Veolia, believe me. This company is the reason why the idea of this whole rant was conceived. However I'm so tired of this company that I'll write a couple of things for you to get some understanding without diving into details and remembering every single curse word I know.

• Water unaccounted for (leaks) - ~69%³
• I got my connection after fighting with them for 5 years.
• If you dig a 0.5km long, 1.2m deep trench to lay water pipes and offer them to use the same trench for no additional cost to give water to other people, they'll tell you to fuck off as they are (and this is a direct quote) "not a charity". 2 weeks later they will dig the same trench and damage your pipes.
• For this one you need to hold on to your titties, as I swear I wish was exaggerating - Once they fined me for $400 "because of illegal connection". When I ordered a cab, the driver saw where I was going and that I was visibly angry. Once he learned the reason why I was so furious, he opened his glovebox where a traumatic handgun was stored and told me to "խփի դրանց, ես տեր եմ".⁴

So what's wrong with that and why the fuck lament is for the country?

This is actually the part where the personal rant begins. Perhaps a proper therapist might say there are deeper reasons, but whatever. Well, if you ask me I'll say - everything, really, myself included. My fault is that it seems like I want to be felt like a pariah in any case, who doesn't want to conform to any norms and will always try to find the strongest edge case to convince people that we are as good as long as we are together and share the same very subjective values. But that's just the worms in my head. That's just my understanding from what I was taught and what I learned for myself from my upbringing.

I've talked with handful of people that wanted to change things for the better, felt the same way, tried to compromise, given all of the pushback from the other established "norms". They are mostly ignored and dismissed, however a lot of things that work today are solely because of their efforts and it all rests on their shoulders. I can appreciate that even though there's some things that are barely working, they're working only due to those people. But those people are not known to the wider public, yet alone appreciated.

But let me try to be more specific about the rest. From the countless hours I've spend trying to find common ground with different representatives, I could see the same patterns as I see every day in the society. Everyone simply cares about themselves, which in itself is totally fine, to some extent. However, there's no human decency, respect, empathy or dignity.

I do realize that most people who are responsible for the proper order of things that I've mentioned above are living the same way. Their managers, supervisors, directors also think the same way. It is that simply noone gives a single fuck and noone knows how to properly do things. When approached with something actionable, it suddenly turns out they are not responsible for it, yet they get paid for it. Who's responsible is yet to be known. And this can be generalized to the whole country and population / society we live in.

Everything is done at the expense of others. People spend money because it's not "their money anyways" (some people think about loans this way), people connect to gas grid because someone else built it, people dump trash on someone else's land because it's someone else's problem now. That's not using the opportunity, that's pure selfishness and abuse.

We slowly stop caring and I would argue that even animals are more connected and considerate to each other than we are now.

Perhaps that is common in other countries and cultures, I'm not arguing against that or judging. What triggers me and grinds my gears is the fact that armenians always brag about being connected, facing hardships together, having very strong bonds and community, but in reality it's a ghost from a very distant past. Everything seems corrupt to the core and shattered. There's no proper scaffolding for developing masculine or feminine identities, yet alone pillars of becoming a decent human being with a bit of sense of responsibility and dignity. Everyone seems to be a self-loving peacock who's freaking cool, can fuck (which in certain cases ends up being a rape really, but that's a topic for another conversation) and find weed on a daily basis, but becomes a stray dog when faced with solving real issues or not letting the system spit and shit on your face or dealing with peacocks with bigger cocks. And that's the hypernormal now.

I'm convinced that we've lost so much because of that and this is me not being a pessimist, but rather someone who wants to be an optimist and constantly hits a wall. I'm just seeing things deteriorate at a faster pace than we are willing to admit. I'm willing to admit when I'm wrong, but I've seen some many other people complain about this, but not willing to admit anything. Class action lawsuit? Nope - we're too busy (plot twist they are not actually). Beating the shit out of the people who doesn't want to take responsibility as it was in the good old days? Nope - there are laws. Seems like we don't want to notice those things and deal with them, but let them slide and let the future generation deal with it. Let me remind you how that ended up last time - we lost part of our fatherland.

I'm not trying to be a moralist or anything, but unless I've been too drunk on your high and mighty toasts and missed the memo on "oops, you know what, fuck what we cared about for the past 200 years, let's just go back to another basic instincints of cheating, not giving a fuck, yada yada at our cores", I kind of missed where we took the wrong U-Turn. I would like to blame to political system for this to be honest, but I can only speculate that this is where we'd end up anyways.

But as long as noone answers those questions, solves those issues, gives me a clear moral guidelines going forward, I live in a country of almost, I live in a country that never existed.