Jun
Thais Who Think: Do They Exist?
Filed Under (Thailand Tales) by iris on 26-06-2008
Since I moved here a year ago, not a day goes by that I don’t read from one blog or another about how intellectually inferior the Thais are from the rest of the world. It’s all good reading, but one can never appreciate the magnitude of such claims until one sees it for herself. A scene that I witnessed earlier this evening is a very good example of the average Thai brain’s, umm, capacity.
On the way to dinner, the boyfriend and I stopped by an ATM kiosk to take out some money. As I waited for the guy ahead of me to finish his transaction, I glanced over at the other ATM where two university students were withdrawing 200 baht. I didn’t think much of it because the guy before me had finished, so I stepped up to the machine and did my thing. Done, I stepped away, and the boyfriend took over.
While waiting for him to finish, I managed to glance over at the other ATM again where the same two university students were clearly struggling with their transaction. Curious, I surreptitiously took a peek at what they were up to. They were still trying to withdraw 200 baht, except that the machine had run out of 100 baht bills, as what was apparent from the on-screen message telling them that it was only dispensing 1,000 baht denominations and asking them to enter another amount. They keyed-in 200 baht again, and naturally, the machine returned with the same error. They did this over and over and over and over and over. And just for the record, the on-screen message was both in English AND Thai, so there could be no doubt about what it was trying to say.
By the time the boyfriend finished his transaction and we were leaving the kiosk, they were still at it. Considering the fact that they were already there while the guy ahead of me started his transaction and they were still there when the boyfriend and I finished ours, I’d say they’ve been going around in circles for almost 10 minutes. And these were university students, as what was obvious from the uniforms they were wearing.
They say two heads are better than one. That seems to be true anywhere but in Thailand where two heads don’t even equal a brain.
