Santiago has turned 25 this week–and we will be celebrating his birthday this week at our Thursday night Happy Hour at the UruguayLiving.com offices. Directions at: http://www.sociedadsouthron.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=874&p=5453#p5453
We invite you to join with us in celebrating someone so central to all of us who participate in UruguayLiving or the SociedadSouthron forum.
Fifty-five weeks ago Santiago Galli starting working at the UruguayLiving.com office. At that time we were working out of a small house just off the Rambla in Carrasco. We had no proper offices. The Copperhead had a bedroom upstairs and worked from the dining room table, I lived and worked in a converted garage built into the house right next door to the dining room. When we hired Santi we had to put him at a small desk in the lobby at the top of the spiral staircase.
Santi must have run up and down those stairs 100 times each day–I think he needs to do that again because the “good life” is starting to show around his beltline.
In many way, Santiago has been a key element in making UruguayLiving “work”. Those of you for whom he has called taxis, made reservations, helped open bank accounts or order telephone and internet service know just how valuable he has been.
He has been even more valuable in getting things done for our company–always with a smile and a polite word: he simply charms people into letting him have his way. And the staff he has assembled is every bit as good at their respective jobs as is Santi–without them, UruguayLiving, not to mention our “real” businesses), would be far poorer.
I love to tell the story of how Santiago came to work for us.
We had an advert in the newspaper for a staff assistant and marketing person. We received hundreds of the worst, most boring CVs (resumes to you Yankees) one can imagine: pages and pages of certificates, courses, and the like–inevitably starting with where they attended elementary school and working forwards from there.
I looked at these until my eyes rolled into the back of my head and I was ready to scream.
Then I came across one application with a cover letter. How unique! One phrase in the letter struck me. In contradistinction to the usual laundry list of qualifications, he wrote the following:
I have NO qualifications whatsoever for this job, but I think it would be fun and I would like to try it.
That got him an interview, a job offer and a job–the rest, as they say is history.
There is one funny side to the story: Santi was afraid to apply, and his mother, our good friend Doctora Bonetti, made him…
Mother always knows best! (As I wrote that, I heard a crack of thunder–I think my mother saw it and was pleased that I finally admitted it…)
By the way, Santiago was given the southron name Jimbo because Santiago means Saint James, from which we took the southron dimimutive Jimbo…after all “The Saint” was already taken.
