Blown-Off? Or an Overblown Reaction?

As a journalist, how do you know when an interviewee is blowing you off? Inventing urgent, last minute engagements that “lamentably” require canceling his or her engagement with you? Sometimes it’s obvious. One day recently it seemed obvious. Now I’m not so sure.

I was on the bullet train from Barcelona (where I live) to Madrid (where I would live if it had a beach). Several days earlier I’d booked an appointment with the Mayor of a small, rural town on the outskirts of the capital. I was going to interview him about a recent zoning change that had sent property taxes up by as much as 80,000 percent. Don’t bother counting the zeros. There are four of them after the 8. For the poor farmers affected by the change, those zeros have been like little capsules of cyanide.

On the day of the trip I awoke at 4:30 a.m., rushed to the train station, felt the bullet train pull out at 6 a.m. sharp, then felt my cellphone vibrating at 8:22 a.m. – about eight minutes out from Madrid’s Atocha station. It was the Mayor’s press guy calling.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but something’s come up today. The Mayor is going to be in Madrid all day long. Can we move the interview to Monday?”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid we can’t. My train from Barcelona is pulling in now. We’ve had the interview set up for days.”

“Well, the Mayor is going to be tied up all day. Let’s move it to Monday. No pasa nada. No big deal.”

“No, actually, it is a big deal,” I said. “I got up at 4:30 a.m. in Barcelona to get here for this interview. I can’t just come back on Monday.”

“You’re coming from Barcelona?” the guy said. “Well, I will call his secretary when she gets in and then get back to you. But you must understand, this is life in politics.”

When we’d hung up I thought, I should have said, “And this is life in journalism. We don’t cross half a country by train to be given a rain check.” I was getting angrier and angrier. This was a classic blow-off, dando largas, as they say in Spanish. The art of putting the other guy off indefinitely.

Truth be told, I’d been surprised that the Mayor had accepted to be interviewed to begin with. He’d been taking a lot heat on this story. My angle was less about whether he’d done something wrong in rezoning the farmlands and more about a nation still getting stung by a massive collapse in the construction sector. About how difficult it is for towns and municipalities to raise their own taxes. But still, I’d been pleasantly surprised when he’d agreed to talk in person.

Now I thought, he’s having second thoughts. Getting cold feet. Of course he is. The foreign press is coming. I wrote the press guy an email.

Hello. If the Mayor is going to be in Madrid all day long, I’m sure he’d have the courtesy to give me 15 minutes of his time, at some point in the day. Since, after all, I am in the Madrid region, having caught a train at 6 a.m. in order to be able to make our meeting. Salutations from the Madrid train station.

Surely this would work. There isn’t a Spanish politician who doesn’t take at least a two-hour lunch break. The guy would definitely have time to meet – if he wanted to. If he claimed he was too busy, I’d have my proof that I was being snubbed. The day passed. No call-back. I went about my business, driving around the outskirts of the capital doing interviews for this story and for another. Then at 2:14 p.m. I got an email from the press guy.

He told me that the mayor had gotten out of his meeting in Madrid and was already making his way back to his village. He assumed that it was, of course, too late for me to meet the Mayor in person, but would I be interested in a phone interview? Once again, he wrote, forgive us for today’s problems.

I wrote back:

Not to worry … I’m actually in the village right now. Can I pop into your offices in an hour, at 4 p.m.?

The minutes passed and no response came. I stayed in the village, interviewing the affected farmers and others, until after 5 p.m. Still no message. Conclusion: I’d been yanked around. At 8:28 p.m., back in Madrid now and waiting for my train home, I wrote the following email:

“I suppose another important and urgent issue came up once the Mayor had returned to his office, and for that reason no one responded when I announced that I was actually in the village. Such is life in politics, right? I’m sorry that we weren’t able to talk and that his voice will not appear in the story. We don’t usually do telephone interviews. Although I did find a clip of the Mayor talking to a Spanish TV station about how the rezoning was going to benefit everyone, or something to that effect. I suppose I can use that.”

No response, until 8:51 a.m. the following morning:

Just got your messages. City Hall closes at 3 p.m. and you wrote one minute before closing. I was already on my way home to eat. Otherwise I’m sure the Mayor would have seen you. I understand your frustration but I see no need to be ironic.

He went on to repeat how the Mayor had had no choice but to cancel the original interview, how they’d offered another time, how they’d not known that I’d come in from Barcelona expressly for this, and how, with all due respect, the entire affairs of a town cannot just be pushed to the side in order to attend to me. And finally, that the Mayor is always eager to work with the press, come back anytime, and sorry once again for the inconvenience.

Still miffed, I wrote back: You’re the Mayor’s press officer and you don’t have a smartphone with Internet? Given that you knew I’d just come 400 miles, didn’t it occur to you, out of courtesy, to check your email at home while you were eating, since less than an hour earlier you’d written to me with another proposition? I ended with a cheeky jibe about being used to working in “another world” where people behave differently (read, better).

Over the next few days I ruminated on what had happened. This is Spain, I told myself, don’t sweat it. Canceling appointments at the last minute, calling it quits after lunch, not following up on your own correspondence – these things are part and parcel of life here.

It was worse, in Mexico. In fact, back in 2004, out for my very last interview with NPR before leaving that post, I was told face to face by the secretary of the head of Mexico City’s Water Department, in the lobby of its headquarters, that her boss simply wasn’t in and she wasn’t sure when he might be back. I turned on my heels. “But where are you going?” she called. She seemed surprised that I wasn’t making a stink. “I don’t know, I said, “and I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

That was my parting, petty shot at a culture that put little value on punctuality. That secretary, no doubt, was glad to see the sarcastic gringo go.

So now, in Spain, here I was, still a gringo – or “guiri” – as they call foreigners (and tourists) here, with his own ideas about work, responsibility and politeness, expecting the world to conform to his way of thinking. Expecting that Mayor to apologize for blowing me off. He didn’t, but I got a final email from his press guy. He started out referring to my comments about smart phones.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he wrote. “Smartphones? No, I don’t have one. And with budget cuts were not even allowed to make outgoing calls from the fixed lines at city hall without permission. And don’t even get me started about the extra hours I work for the mayor, without compensation. I don’t know how other people treat you, but I do my job the best I possibly can, despite our lack of resources, sacrificing time that could be spent with my family. I’m not trying to justify myself, just to make the point that we did want to attend to your petition. The mayor talks to all journalists, even those most critical of him… “

Many days have passed now and, having had time to reflect on our exchange, it is quickly dawning on me that I’ve been a heel. I’d gone out there to do a story on a town so desperate for cash it was willing to risk driving its own citizens from their land. But it had never occurred to me that I’d come up against that cash shortfall myself, in the form of the town’s press officer. A guy struggling to do his job on a shoestring, just like his boss, the Mayor, in the midst of a spectacular economic crisis that does not abate.

My gut still says that the Mayor could have made room for me. But it’s time to write his press officer an apology.

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