How many people find it difficult to ask for help?
My male side wants to work things out for himself, but luckily, my female side will ask for help if I find myself out of my depth. The result is that I do all I can, then ask.
For over a week, I'd been given the run-around by a Thai repair shop where I'd taken my broken juicer, but two new staff members, a lady and her son, in my apartment building offered to call the repair shop for me.
They quickly found out that I had to bring in all the plastic parts of the machine before they'd fix the jammed switch.
I'd personally visited the repair shop twice about the juicer, but they'd never told me that.
I'd also been asking the lady and her son at the office about a package I'd been expecting in the mail, so today after I'd found out through the tracking number that it was on hold in Bangkok (I live in Songkhla, on the southern end of Thailand), and after I'd tried in vain to call the post office, they offered, on their own call the Bangkok post office and find out what happened.
Turned out, the post office was about to close, since in Thailand it's Saturday, May 5th, so they said they'd call them on Monday.
Funny, I don't like to ask for help and as someone else said, I too have driven round and round looking for the place where I want to got to, however once I have decided that I need/must have help of this sort, I start asking everywhere. It is almost like I break a barrier or past a tipping point.
I agree with you entirely on the male/female attitude to asking for help. Before satnav, I have been driven round and round places by men who refused to stop and ask for directions! I also know from experience that it is so much easier if you can get a native speaker to deal with a problem for you - I have given up on several occasions because I couldn't get across what I wanted. I don't believe it was always my fault or my inadequate language skills. Some of the time the person at the other end decided I was a foreigner, therefore they couldn't understand me, so they wouldn't try.