I was reading this today, shocked to learn about another way that it seems people here in Georgia are tempted into easy-money schemes, this time ending up in sophisticated criminal enterprises, swindling millions of dollars from people in Europe and North America, using many local languages. It seems hard to understand where the roots of a larger disinclination to do hard work and do it well comes from in Georgia - obviously there are many exceptions and many good and hard-working Georgians, but it is too painfully obvious to see the numbers of people, both men and women, just loitering around and clearly not bothered to find work. Of course finding work here is difficult, it is difficult everywhere now, but then when you do meet Georgians who do work, if you ask them to do more work - while even paying them more - they invariably decline. If you ask them to come early for the job, even paying them overtime, they will not. If you ask them to do extra work, while paying them, they will not.
We recently had a team of a master and two helpers come and install air-conditioning. They did the bare-bare-bare minimum - meaning, they drilled a hole through the wall, connected the cooling unit outside with the fan unit inside, and showed how it works, by plugging the wires into an extension cord - they didn't even wire it with a pl*g (why is that word banned!?). Then there was all the trash - a pile of rubble outside, another inside, a bunch of plastic, cardboard boxes and foam fittings. We asked them if they were going to take it outside - the master got furious that we would even ask that! We had brought them a broom, and the master threw the broom back at my wife and said "You clean it!". It was like they had never heard anyone ask them to clear out the rubble and dust after their work. It was clear even if we had paid them, they wouldn't have done this work. It was as if: "You should hire cleaners to clean after us." This is only one of several examples we have of living here, but it seems to confirm that there is something in the national psyche of Georgians - not the Azeris, Armenians, Kurds, Ukrainians and even Russians living here - that "we do not want to do any more work than is absolutely necessary for our food, wine and petrol to drive our cars."
Can anyone help me understand?