Sitting in a taxi in Yogyakarta (Java, Indonesia) from my hotel to the airport, I learned another lesson about Indonesian culture. “Where is the taximeter?” I was asking the driver in Indonesian after greeting him friendly. “It’s there.” He pointed towards the mirror where I could see red numbers on a black scale saying: 15.550 IDR. Which is not a lot of money from a western point of view. But it got my attention. “Why is there already a price on it although we haven’t moved an inch?” I was asking. “It’s because I was waiting already for ten minutes”, the man replied. “But noone asked you do to this”, I responded. Taxi driver: “The hotel was ordering the taxi straight away, so I came straight away.” Now that I found interesting because I was listening to the phone call the receptionist made earlier and he asked him to be there at 5:45 sharp. Apparently the driver decided himself to be there 10 minutes too early. Me: “But I heard what the receptionist was saying on the phone: He ordered you to be here at 5:45 sharp.” Taxi driver: “No, they were asking me to come as soon as possible.” To underline his statement, he pulled the car over. I immediately felt we need to find a solution to get over this problem if I still want to catch my plane.
Blaming it all on the person who is not there. That’s so Indonesian. Avoiding conflicts and trying to keep the face. Maybe I was smiling when realizing this. The taxi driver couldn’t get out of this without admitting that he did a mistake. But when doing this, he would lose his face. What now? When in Rome, do as the Romans do, I was thinking. So, I did the same he was doing: I started blaming it all on the poor receptionist at the hotel: “Actually, I was thinking they had already ordered the taxi yesterday. But they just forgot.” Silence. “Yes, they were also ordering the taxi too early”, the taxi driver says. “So, it was not my fault”, I said and asked “but who is going to pay for it?” Silence again. “What”, I was saying, “if we just share it at the end because it was none of our faults?” The taxi driver turned around: “That’s okay.” Smiling. It worked. He could keep his face and I didn’t pay the sum myself.