VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
When it came to making a video about using QRIS and e-wallets in Banda Aceh, I had very bad timing. I came up with this idea just as Sumatra experienced extreme flooding and landslides, which knocked out power lines and transmission towers. Banda Aceh went into weeks of blackouts, and every time the electricity disappeared, mobile Internet disappeared with it. And the one thing you need to pay for things by scanning QRIS QR codes is mobile Internet.
Because of that and other factors and my own mistakes, I experienced a lot of failures while trying to shoot my QRIS video. This video is the (hopefully amusing) behind-the-scenes story of those failures.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to Planet Doug in Banda Aceh. And I recently posted a video about my experiences here using QRIS and an Indonesian e-wallet called GoPay. And if you’ve watched that video, you may not notice it. You may not see it in the video, but that was the toughest, most stressful, most frustrating video I’ve ever shot. And that had nothing to do with QRIS or GoPay, how that worked. QRIS and GoPay worked absolutely fine. I was really impressed with how it worked out. However, my timing was terrible. I was trying to shoot that video in the days right after all the floods and the landslides that took place here in Sumatra and in Aceh province in particular. And even though Banda Aceh itself was not affected badly by the floods, to be honest, when I was here and the floods were taking place up in the mountains, I didn’t really even know they were happening. I certainly didn’t know about the severity. The only evidence of anything going on down here was that the electricity went out and when the electricity goes, the internet goes and when the internet goes, you don’t have any information. So, I really didn’t know what was happening, but I was aware of it because we had blackouts. And the blackouts seemed to be kind of like rolling blackouts where there would be a blackout in this neighborhood and then the next day it would be in this neighborhood and then this neighborhood. And as amazing as QRIS is, as amazing as e-wallets are, you need the internet for it to work. If you don’t have mobile internet, you can’t use it. So, I ran into that over and over until I just about lost my mind.
One of the things I really wanted to capture for my QRIS video was using QRIS and an e-wallet to take a Grab car or a Gojek from Gojek. And I wanted to capture video of using QRIS to pay for a museum ticket here in Banda Aceh. There’s a very famous museum, the Tsunami Museum, which documents and memorializes the 2004 mega tsunami that hit Sumatra and caused so much damage and loss of life here in Banda Aceh. So, I wanted to go to that museum and I wanted to pay for my ticket with an e-wallet and I wanted to get there by Grab and pay for my Grab car by e-wallet. Basically, get two sequences at the same time. So, at my hotel on that day, I had mobile internet. Great. So, I thought everything was getting back to normal. So, I booked my Grab car. The Grab car came. I got into my Grab car. I went to the museum. But when I got there, it turned out that that neighborhood had one of the rolling blackouts. So, I’m talking to the Grab driver. Ah, bisa QRIS, can I pay with QRIS? And I’m so excited that I’m going to pay for a Grab ride using an e-wallet. And then I couldn’t do it because there was no mobile internet. The way that works is the Grab driver, he has to produce a QR code on his phone and then I scan it with my phone and I make the payment. But both of us have to be able to connect to the internet to do it and it failed and I had to pay with cash. So that was a total failure.
Then I go into the museum, the gates were open. I go into the museum grounds. I go up to the ticket counter. Tutup. The ticket counter is closed because there was a power failure and the museum wasn’t open. So, right out of the gate, Grab car and museum ticket, total failure. And even before that Grab failure, my Grab experience with QRIS failed. But not because of a blackout, not because of QRIS, not because of GoPay, but because of how dumb I am and my inexperience because I was doing something that really wasn’t that wise. I was trying to shoot a QRIS video while I was also learning how to use QRIS. I made a similar video when I was back in Malaysia about the Touch ‘n Go e-wallet and DuitNow in Malaysia. And that was a lot easier because by that point I had been using Touch ‘n Go for years. And I was an expert. I knew everything about Touch ‘n Go. I knew all the places I could go. I knew exactly how it worked and I knew exactly what I wanted to shoot. But here in Indonesia, this was my first time using QRIS and an e-wallet. So I was learning myself. So I was trying to learn how to use it in a certain situation and then I would do it again and film myself doing it properly. And I made so many mistakes along the way.
So, the first time I used Grab, where was I going? I can’t even remember where I was going anymore. I think the first time was also to the museum, but I’m not quite sure about that. But I booked a Grab car, hopped in the Grab car, we got to our destination, and I said to the driver, you know, bisa QRIS, can I pay? I would like to pay using QRIS and an e-wallet. And then the driver said, “Oh yeah, absolutely. No problem, QRIS. Bisa, bisa.” And then he went to his phone and then he was scrolling and tapping and scrolling and tapping and then he turned to me and said, “Can’t do it.” So it was a complete failure. And I think I did that two times and it didn’t work both times where the driver said to me, “Sorry, no, QRIS.” So, I started to think, you know, maybe QRIS, it doesn’t really work that well when it comes to Grab and that would be really, really disappointing. But then came another day, I went to immigration. I had to extend my tourist visa. So, I went to immigration and this time I just gave up on Grab. I just thought, “Ah, there’s no point even trying because it’s never going to work.” But it turns out my Grab driver, he spoke English really, really well. So when I was in the car, we just started chatting and I was chatting about this, that, and I told him about my project making a video featuring QRIS and how whenever I tried to use it in a Grab car, it wouldn’t work. The drivers couldn’t do it. And he told me, “Ah, you’re doing it wrong.” Like when you book your Grab car then you have to specify in advance you want to pay with QRIS. So before you book your Grab car you change your payment method from the default which is cash. You change it to QRIS. When you do that and then the driver looks he can call up the QR code. But if your payment method is cash and then you say at the end of the ride, oh, I’d like to pay with QRIS, they can’t do it because the payment method for that ride was set to cash. So again, it was my mistake. And then once I learned about that, then I changed the payment method to QRIS and then I ran into blackouts, blackout after blackout, and then it failed completely. So yeah, combination of blackouts and my inexperience made shooting this video very stressful and exhausting to be honest.
Another key segment that I wanted to film for this video was going to a Western fast food restaurant because in my mind I was thinking that this video is for other foreigners like me. I’m trying to tell other foreigners about QRIS. It’s like, hey, if you’re coming to Indonesia for your holiday or your business trip, you maybe you should think about downloading an e-wallet and using QRIS while you’re here. Look how convenient it is. Look how secure it is. Look how much fun it is. And that was my audience for the video. And I thought, a foreigner coming here, yeah, they’re here and they’re going to try the local food, of course, but from time to time they’re going to think, huh, you know, McDonald’s, KFC, Pizza Hut, I think that would be pretty good right now. So, a foreigner at one point in their trip is invariably going to go to a fast food restaurant at least once on their trip, maybe several times. So, I wanted to show how you do that at a fast food restaurant in particular. And I decided to go to KFC. And one reason I made that decision was because when I shot a Touch ‘n Go video here, I went to KFC and it worked beautifully and I knew exactly how it worked. So, for my QRIS video, I thought I’ll go back to the same KFC, which is at the Suzuya Mall. So I went to the Suzuya Mall, I go into KFC, and oddly enough, when I went to KFC at the Suzuya Mall, I had mobile internet. It was working. So, I thought, beautiful. This is going to work out great. So, I go into the KFC outlet. There isn’t a huge lineup, but there were maybe four people ahead of me and it took forever. And this is an issue that I’ve run into in places like KFC and at McDonald’s here in Banda Aceh. They do not pay enough staff. This was on a Sunday. KFC was pretty busy. A lot of Indonesians were out having a good time, going to the shopping mall for the day, making a family outing of it. So KFC, that’s a busy time for them. And they had one poor woman running the counter, one. And she was taking the orders and preparing the orders, and she was preparing orders for people that were in the lineup. And she was preparing orders for home delivery. It was absolutely insane. So, I’m in the lineup and you eventually get to that point where you just want to bail, right? It’s like that what they call the sunk cost fallacy where I’ve been waiting in line for 20 minutes and I haven’t even moved up by one person. Like, how much longer am I going to wait? But I’ve already invested so much time waiting in line. I don’t want to abandon it because now all that waiting was just a giant waste of time. And then the people in front of me, turns out that they were ordering food for a party that they were having at home, like 20 kids attending a birthday party or something. So, they were ordering buckets and buckets of fried chicken, a huge to-go delivery that they were taking home. And there was only one woman doing all of that. So, she gets the order. Oh, I would like three buckets of chicken, 15 drinks, you know, 18 orders. I mean, it was incredible. And that poor woman took the order. And to her credit, she did it in a very calm and methodical way. She wasn’t freaking out. She wasn’t rushing even, but she was just going about her business, completing that order, finalizing it while we are just waiting in line. And then we got to the next person ahead of me. Same thing. And there were families there, which means children running around screaming, yelling, banging on things. I was losing my mind. But I’m thinking, I’m working on a YouTube video. Tough it out. I’m working on a YouTube video. Get it done. This is your job. Don’t give up. So, I stayed in line. I finally get to the front after what felt like an eternity. And I made a mistake because I got so freaked out about how long I was waiting. I didn’t really triple-check my phone. I had checked it. I had double-checked it. Everything was working fine. So I go up to the counter. I place my order. One set, right? One piece of chicken, rice, and a drink. Very easy. Bisa QRIS. And she’s like, “Oh yeah, bisa. Bisa QRIS.” And they have that system at KFC where they have a terminal and they produce a QR code on their terminal. She calls up their QR code, shows it to me. I go to scan it with QRIS. My phone is frozen. QRIS is working fine. GoPay is working fine. Everything is great. My phone was frozen. I couldn’t manipulate the screen. And you know, I could have said to the woman, “Oh, do you mind if I reboot my phone? Do you mind waiting? I have to reboot, wait for it to connect to the internet, enter all of my security codes, wait for it to finish loading, and then reload GoPay and QRIS.” Or like, yeah, go ahead. I couldn’t do that to that poor woman. And I couldn’t do it to the people waiting in line behind me. So, I just says, “Oh, I’m sorry. My phone problems” and I paid in cash. So, that entire sequence was also a giant waste of time. And I didn’t even want KFC. I was only going there for the video. And as a YouTuber, you run into those situations all the time. And that was so crazy.
Anyway, I got my order, paid in cash, and then I sat down and ate my KFC. But then I’m thinking maybe I can snatch a little bit of victory from the jaws of defeat and because I’ve got mobile internet, I can call up a Grab car to take me back to my hotel, right? Pay for it with Grab with QRIS. I can at least capture that for the video. So I summon a Grab car and I specified I want to pay with QRIS. Everything’s fine. We get back to my neighborhood, this neighborhood where my hotel is located. Now the blackout is here. So I get back to my hotel. There used to be power at my hotel. But now that I’m returning to my neighborhood, the rolling blackouts have reached my neighborhood. I say to the driver, “Bisa QRIS,” he’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, bisa bisa.” And neither of us can do it because there’s no mobile internet. I mean, at that point, the world was telling me, you’re not supposed to be making a video about QRIS. Just give up. We are going to block you every time you try to film something. It’s kind of a miracle to be honest that I kept working on the video, but I did not give up.
So, I went about my life. I continued to shoot sequences for the QRIS video while I was doing other things. And then days later, days and days later, the blackouts were disappearing. And in fact, in my neighborhood, at my hotel, it seemed like the power had been restored fully. Like up until that point, most of the time we were running on generator power. So, I didn’t even know this, but my hotel happened to have a generator system. And then the whole neighborhood had no power. The power was gone. But then they turned on the generator during the nighttime. During the day, we had no power at all. But then at night, they would fire up the generator because that’s when all their guests would arrive and they want air conditioning in their rooms, things like that. So, they had to have a pretty powerful generator. But by this point, we had power 24 hours a day. So I thought, “Oh, my neighborhood has been restored to full power. Therefore, the blackouts are over.” So I thought, “Okay, maybe today is a good day to finally get my fast food sequence.” And this time I decided to go to McDonald’s because I mean I already had KFC for my Touch ‘n Go video rather than duplicating that. Huh. Why don’t we go to McDonald’s? And I hadn’t gone to McDonald’s up until this point because there’s only one McDonald’s in Banda Aceh which is amazing. There’s only one McDonald’s outlet here and it’s like 4 kilometers away. So it’s way outside of my neighborhood. So, I thought, “Okay, everything’s back on track. We got power. My phone is working. Everything’s cool. Let’s take a Grab car 4 km to McDonald’s. Two birds with one stone. Pay for Grab with QRIS. Finally. Pay for McDonald’s with QRIS. Finally. Fast food. Grab car. Perfect.” So, I summon my Grab car, payment set to QRIS. I get in the car. Nice guy driving it. We chatted on our way to McDonald’s. Then we get into that neighborhood near McDonald’s and my heart starts to sink because as we get into this neighborhood, I’m starting to hear the sound of generators. It’s a telltale sound. You hear generators, you know you’re in trouble. So, and that really surprised me because my neighborhood had power. The McDonald’s neighborhood was a much busier, more commercial district, a more upscale, modern part of the city. So, I’m figuring if I have power, they must have power, right? But we get to McDonald’s, the guy pulls in. He pulls in right to the front doors, right? And then it’s like, bisa, I’m so excited. I’m finally going to pay for my Grab car using QRIS. And then he starts fumbling around. Can’t do it. He fights. He fumbles. He’s looking. He’s doing this, doing that. He can’t come up with a QR code because we’re in a blackout. And this guy, to his credit, he was really trying hard. Now we have cars piled up behind us honking at us like, “Get out of the way. You’re blocking traffic. You’re blocking traffic.” And I’m freaking out and I’m talking to the Grab car driver and I’m looking behind me, all these angry people honking at us. I’m like, “Ah, we’re blocking traffic. Like, can we…” And then for whatever reason, he didn’t want to move. And it turns out he was blocking access to the drive-thru. And for some reason, he didn’t want to move. I was thinking, “Well, just go into the parking area.” And then he didn’t want to do that. So, cars are piling up behind us. People are blasting their horns, getting angry. He’s trying and he finally gets a QRIS code on his phone. He got like a little sniff of the internet somehow. Maybe he had a high-powered system in his Grab car. I don’t know. And he’s like, “Oh, QRIS code.” So I’m like, “Excellent.” So, and I’m trying to scan it. My phone scanned it and then it just went into a loop just waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting because I was in a mobile blackout. He got a connection. I didn’t. And then we’re waiting and I’m waiting and I’m just like, “Ah, come on. Come on. Come on.” They’re honking. They’re honking. And my Grab driver doesn’t want to move out of the way. And then I finally say to the guy, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Like, “It’s not going to work. I’ll pay with cash.” And I finally convinced him to get out of the way so the people could go through to the drive-thru.
Now we’re in the parking area. And again, the sunk cost fallacy came up in my mind again. I had invested so much time, so much energy in this sequence. I’d taken a Grab car 4 kilometers across town to a McDonald’s. I didn’t want to take a Grab car. I didn’t even want to go to McDonald’s. I only did it for the video. So, let’s try one more time. And by this time, of course, the Grab driver had shut down his system. And I said, “Well, bisa QRIS, can we try one more time?” He tries to call up a QRIS code. He gets one. I try to scan it. I still couldn’t get through. Now, he says, “Oh, why don’t I give you my Wi-Fi hotspot? Your mobile internet isn’t working, but I seem to have Wi-Fi, so why don’t we do a hotspot?” So, we go through the whole process of him giving me the password to his Wi-Fi hotspot. I get onto his Wi-Fi hotspot. That took time. Still wouldn’t work. And finally I was like, I’m done. I paid him. This is the—I totally forgot about this part of the story until now. And now I’m like, well, I have to pay in cash. QRIS isn’t going to work. Can I pay in cash? And he said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. Okay.” So, I go into my wallet and all I have are 100,000 rupiah notes and 50,000 rupiah notes. And that’s one of the huge advantages of using an e-wallet and QRIS, you don’t have to worry about having small change cuz nobody in Indonesia ever has enough change. But if you use an e-wallet, you don’t have to have change. But now I had to pay with cash. So I showed the guy like all I have is a 50,000 rupiah note. Sorry. And I’m apologizing and I’m handing it over to him and he’s like I don’t have enough change for that. The bill I think was 21,000 and he couldn’t come up with 29,000 in change. He’s going through his wallet and he’s like, “I don’t have enough change for that.” And he basically said to me, “I have 20.” Like, “I have 20,000. That’s all I have, but I can’t pay with QRIS. I don’t have the correct change. He doesn’t have the correct change.” And I just said to the guy, “Oh, that’s fine. And just give me the 20 and you know just we’ll call it good” as we say in English you know we’ll just call it good so he got a 9,000 rupiah tip. I normally tip these guys anyway but anyway it was so funny that the main advantage to using QRIS for me is you don’t have to worry about small change correct change and my QRIS would fail again and again and again not because of QRIS but because of the blackout and I got stuck where I didn’t have enough change and they didn’t have enough change. And that happened over and over and it was so ironic.
So anyway, I pay the guy, he goes away cuz he told me, “Oh, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to use QRIS in McDonald’s either because I don’t have mobile internet.” He says, “No, no, that’s fine. You can use their Wi-Fi. So when you go into McDonald’s, just sign up to their Wi-Fi and then you can use QRIS.” So I thought, okay, at least I can get that. So I got out of the Grab car. I let him go. I go into McDonald’s and then nothing I could do would connect to the McDonald’s Wi-Fi. I tried over and over and over. They had one of those complicated systems. It wasn’t a direct connection. You had to get redirected to a website and on the website you had to enter a username and I hate those systems and it wouldn’t work for whatever reason. Maybe I needed mobile internet to be able to even do it. I don’t know. But I tried again and again and again and it wouldn’t work. And I know someone out there is going to be saying, “Why didn’t you just ask for help? Just go up to the McDonald’s staff. Can you help me?” And everybody tells me that all the time. I tell one of these behind-the-scenes stories about some difficulty I’m having overseas and they say, “Why don’t you just ask for help?” But people don’t realize how hard it is to do that in another country when you don’t speak the language. And it turns out, of course, McDonald’s, they had their own power, but they weren’t hooked up to the grid either. So they had no power either. So the whole place was—they were still operating cuz they had a generator I guess but the generator only supplied limited power and just like KFC they are permanently understaffed. There was like one poor woman behind the counter and the McDonald’s lobby area was filled with people waiting for their order. It was taking forever for McDonald’s to process people’s orders. Big lineup of people, tons of people waiting. There was no way for me to go up to a McDonald’s staff member and say, “Can you help me sign up to your Wi-Fi?” There’s just no way. And even if they did take the time to try to help me, I know from experience it wouldn’t work. They would try. It would fail. And anyway, I eventually had to give up. So, I couldn’t film the McDonald’s sequence either because I couldn’t use QRIS because of the power blackout.
So now I walk out of McDonald’s thinking, “Well, that was a waste of time. I’ve wasted an entire day on this project.” And then I go outside and I’m thinking, “How am I going to get back to my hotel?” Because I’m in a power blackout neighborhood. I have no access to mobile internet. I can’t even use the Grab app or Gojek to summon a Grab car. Right. So I was like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, now I can’t even use a Grab car to get back to my hotel.” Of course, I could have used like a becak or something like that. But by that point, I was so stressed out. I was so frustrated. I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with any other issues. And I just said, “Well, one of my claims to fame is I like to walk places. I end up walking.” So I thought 4 km to be honest isn’t that far for me. And I thought, ah, I’ll just walk back. So, I take a Grab all the way to McDonald’s, pay for the Grab, try to get a meal at McDonald’s, everything fails, and then I walk all the way back in the Sumatran sun all the way back to my hotel. And then on the way, I happen to pass a Mixue, the Chinese fast food chain, like the ice cream chain. And I thought, huh, maybe I can film myself getting an ice cream cone at Mixue, right? And then I can film it, you know, paying for it with QRIS. So I’m at this Mixue, I look inside, there’s nobody inside. No lineup, no people. Awesome. So I have to film an introductory sequence. So I’m outside and I’m filming myself. You know, I’m going to use QRIS to get an ice cream cone at Mixue. And then as I’m filming that introductory thing, two families show up. Two complete families. One in a car, one on a scooter. Mother, father, bunch of children. They all pour into Mixue. And now I’ve got this huge crowd in front of me in line. And I’m like, “Oh, for Pete’s sake. I missed my moment.” Again, I’m thinking, well, I’ve already filmed the intro. Just wait in line. Get your ice cream cone. The kids are screaming and yelling, running around. Takes forever because they have so many things to order. I finally get to the front of the line. I try to order my ice cream cone. Oh, I’m sorry, sir. We have no cones. And this was doubly frustrating because this was the second time I’d been to Mixue to film a QRIS sequence and the first time I went in they had no ice cream. I went in there to get an ice cream and they says, “Oh, we don’t have ice cream today at Mixue.” So I left without—I could have switched to a drink, I guess, but I wasn’t in the mood so I just left. This time they said, well, we don’t have any cones, you know, would you like a drink instead? And well, they didn’t say that. They just said they were speaking Indonesian and it was hard to understand them, but I understood that they could not give me an ice cream cone. They had no cones. Maybe he meant no ice cream, but he was saying no cones. And I was so frustrated, hot, sweaty after 4 kilometers of walking. And I just said, “Oh, thank you very much, but no, thank you.” And I just turned around and left.
So, I never got a fast food sequence for my QRIS video. I never got a Grab car sequence because of the blackouts. It failed every single time. Of course, all the time that this was happening, I did have video. It’s like in every sequence at McDonald’s, at Kentucky Fried Chicken, every Grab car ride, going to the museum, every failure, I actually had video of the failure because my camera was running fine. There was no mobile internet, but at least my GoPro doesn’t require the internet. And for most YouTube videos, as a travel vlogger, failure is just as good as success. Like it doesn’t matter what happens during your day. You know, you’re trying to go to the museum and you can’t buy a ticket because the museum is closed. Well, you keep that in the video because that is your real life experience. Failure is often more interesting in a video than success. You go to the dock to get on a boat across the river and it’s like problem after problem after problem. Well, you keep that in the video because that’s the real-world experience. So all the time that all of my QRIS attempts were failing, I was thinking, well, I mean, I can keep this in the video because it is a real experience. But to be honest, it would not have been fair because my video was about how QRIS works and I was living through an extreme situation. The video wasn’t how does QRIS work after major flooding, a national disaster and power blackouts where there’s no mobile internet. I mean, that is such an extreme situation. Nobody else, no other foreigner is going to come to Indonesia, try to use QRIS, and run into that situation. So, even though I wasn’t able to pay with QRIS, I couldn’t keep it in the video because the failure had nothing to do with QRIS. The problem was the blackouts because of the flooding and the landslides. And it was so sad. Like a normal Planet Doug video consists of a lot of failures because everything fails all the time. And here I was filming failure after failure after failure, but I couldn’t use any of that in the video itself. So yeah, that was kind of ironic as well.
Another perhaps interesting behind-the-scenes story is connected to the very first time I tried to use QRIS for the video. And well, I just realized there’s two behind-the-scenes stories. I’ll start with the first one. So, I wanted to shoot an introduction to the video. And instead of just sitting in my hotel room standing on a random street, I thought, well, let’s try to make this video a bit special and let’s go to a beautiful location, an iconic location for Banda Aceh. So I decided to go to the main mosque here, Baiturrahman. I think it’s called Masjid Raya Baiturrahman. That huge stunning mosque. Famous, as I said in one of my videos, maybe in my QRIS video. It’s famous for its beauty and for its history and for the fact that it survived the tsunami. So, I thought, okay, I’m going to shoot my video introduction, my opening with the mosque behind me as a backdrop because nothing says Indonesia more than a mosque. Nothing says Banda Aceh more than the visual of that iconic mosque. So, beautiful day. I’m all ready. Got my GoPros ready. All my batteries are charged. I got everything ready to go. I head out into the brutally hot sun. That’s another aspect to any video you shoot in Sumatra. It’s brutally hot here all the time. So, I walk from my hotel all the way to the mosque. And the mosque has a big wall all around it with two entrances, I think, one on each side. I’m just about to go up to the gate to go into the mosque. I look down at my legs. I’m wearing shorts. It’s like, oh, how dumb can I be? I mean, I’m smarter than that. I know that if you’re going to go to a mosque, a Hindu temple, any place of worship, a Christian church, which is probably more casual, I’m going to wear long pants. I’m going to wear a shirt with a collar and buttons. I know that. I’ve been to mosques everywhere. I’ve been to temples and I always put on long pants. Here I am going there deliberately to shoot the intro to my video and I forget. I guess I’m so focused on QRIS GoPay the video. I totally forgot about the dress code. And I walk all the way there and I’m wearing shorts. And who knows, maybe they would look at me and go, “Okay, he’s a foreigner. We’ll let him in.” I mean, they wouldn’t let me into the mosque, obviously wearing shorts, but maybe they would let me go into the grounds of the mosque, and that’s all I wanted to do. But I didn’t want to put them in that position. So I thought, okay, nah, can’t do it. And then I thought, well, I made the effort to come all the way here. Maybe I can stand on the sidewalk next to the street. I’ve still got the mosque behind me, but I can film through and over the fence, and I can still get that iconic Indonesian atmosphere. And I set up my tripod. I got everything ready and I tried to do it, but it was hopeless. The people walking by, the roar of the traffic, I was so unsettled by that point. I kept making mistakes. I kept having to restart the video over and over and over. I was stumbling over my words. And I got hot. I got sweaty. I got stressed out. I was so frustrated. And I thought, “Okay, another day. Total failure.” And I just gave up and walked back to my hotel.
When that first attempt failed, I was so stressed out and already really tired and hot and sweaty. I just gave up that day and I decided to try again another morning when I could wake up and be fresh and ready to go. So, I waited one or two days. I can’t remember how long it was. And then I went back to the mosque. This time I remembered to wear long pants and everything worked out very well. This time I went into the mosque grounds and I shot my introduction and then I shot I think it was my very first QRIS sequence. But then I did some funny things because of my own inexperience. Like I said, while I was shooting this video, I was doing a lot of these things for the first time and I was learning as I go, which is not a good idea for a how-to YouTube video. If you’re going to make a how-to guide, you should be an expert in the subject, but that’s just how things worked out. So anyway, I did make some small mistakes. The first mistake was not really about QRIS. It was about my lack of understanding what was going on, but it had an impact on my video shooting, which is a kind of a funny story because on my way into the mosque, I noticed there was a small building, a little shack, and that’s where you take your shoes and your sandals off and you leave them there because you’re not allowed to wear shoes and sandals into the mosque grounds, of course. So, I did that. I took off my sandals and I left them there. But I noticed a box, a metal box with a padlock on it and it had a slot on the top and there were QRIS codes on the box like stickers that showed the QRIS symbol and the QR code. So I thought, ah, a mosque donation box. That is perfect for my video. I was so excited when I saw that. So I made a mental note. Okay, on your way out of the mosque after shooting the introduction, let’s give a donation to the mosque by scanning that QRIS code. I thought, wow, that is absolutely perfect. So, I’m still there at the mosque and I film the sequence. I start off by saying, “Here I am at the famous mosque.” And one way you can use QRIS is to make a donation at a mosque. Yeah. So that’s my introduction to that little bit. And then I go over to the shack and I film that completely. I talk I show it. I talk about it. I get out my phone. I get out Gojek and then I go up to the QR code and I say, “Okay, this is how you make a donation to the mosque. You scan the QR code. It’s so easy. Look how incredible this is.” But then something weird happened because after I scanned the code, the payment window came up and it said 1,000 rupiah. And I wasn’t expecting that. I thought it would be like a blank form. So then I stuttered and I went, “Oh, oh, so it looks like they’re suggesting 1,000 rupiah, but you can enter any amount you want.” So then I start trying to enter a higher amount, but it wouldn’t work. No matter what I did, I couldn’t change the 1,000 rupiah. It was baked into the donation. And I was like, “Well, that’s weird.” So, my entire example was failing. It was just like I didn’t know what I was doing. And then I looked up at the top and it said sandal and shoe storage in Indonesian. So, I was like, “Oh, this isn’t a donation box for the mosque. This is a donation box for a like 1,000 rupiah fee for storing your shoes. They’re saying you can leave your shoes here and if you like you can kick in 1,000 rupiah for this service and you scan the QR code and it’s an automatic 1,000 rupiah to this shoe storage place at the mosque.”
I had filmed the whole thing, filmed the intro, filmed the process, filmed the procedure, and all of it I couldn’t use because I didn’t understand what this place was. So, I had to reset with my new understanding and redo the entire sequence. So, I started all the way from the beginning. So, here I am at the mosque. Here is a shoe storage place. And look, they have a metal box where you can put 1,000 rupiah in cash through the slot or you can scan the QR code. And then this time I got it right because on my second attempt I understood how it worked. I understood what was going on. And then I filmed the whole thing and I was like, “Ah, thank goodness I got it right this time.” You know, only two attempts. But then I’m done and I realized I needed screenshots because when I talk about all these things, I’m just showing my phone and you on the video you can’t see my phone because of the reflection. It’s too small. So what I like to do is in the video insert a big image of the screenshot and I say, “Okay, you click on this button and then on the screenshot I have an arrow pointing to that button.” This time I forgot to take the screenshots. So it was too late to get them because I already made the donation. All the screenshots, you know, the screens on my phone were gone. So even though I’d shot the video two times and I’d already made the donation twice. I had to do it a third time just so I could get the screenshots. Right. So now I went back up to the box. I didn’t have to film it this time, but I took, you know, I scanned the QR code and then every screen that came up, I paused, took a screenshot of it. Then I went to the donation window, you know, with 1,000 rupiah in it. Took a screenshot. Then I got the confirmation screen. You have paid 1,000 rupiah. Took a screenshot. So basically, I mean, obviously the amount of money is not what’s important here because the donation was 1,000 rupiah, but I ended up donating 3,000 rupiah because I had to do it three times for the video. So that was pretty funny.
I remember I also had a very difficult time filming the segment where I demonstrate how you top up your e-wallet and technically it should be very easy to do. I know how to do it and it should just happen smoothly. So the most convenient and the most straightforward way for us to do it is to go to a store. You go to a convenience store like Indomaret. You give them money and then they put the money into your e-wallet and there’s a procedure for doing that. And I was going to demonstrate how it works. So I started off as these things always do back at my hotel and there happened to be an Indomaret right across the road. And you might think perfect. It’s so easy. You don’t even have to go anywhere. Cross the street, top up your e-wallet, film it, you’re done. But I knew from experience that that particular Indomaret just seems to be technologically clueless. Nothing ever works there. Like something might work at an Indomaret in another part of town, but at this one, I don’t know. You go in there and say, “Can I pay with this? Can I use this card? Can I scan this?” and nothing ever works. I don’t know why everything fails at that Indomaret. So I thought, okay, let’s not even try. So I ended up traveling all the way back to my old neighborhood because I knew there were two Indomarets there and I had better luck at those ones and I’m familiar with them. So I traveled all the way across town to another Indomaret. On the way, it starts raining. So now I’m out there in the rain trying to film the introductions to this sequence, holding an umbrella, trying to keep my microphones and my GoPro dry, you know, trying to keep the rain off my glasses so I can see what I’m doing. Rain is hitting your smartphone screen, which makes it harder to scroll and click on things. Everything becomes 10 times more difficult when it’s raining. But again, I made the effort to go all the way out there. Okay, it’s raining, but let’s just keep trying to get this done. I go into Indomaret. I’d already started the top-up procedure because you go into the app and then you choose how much you want to top up and then the app gives you a barcode and you go into Indomaret, show them the barcode, they scan it, you give them the money, you’re done. So, I’m filming the whole sequence. I go in. Network error. They scan the barcode and then we’re waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. I’ve got people piling up behind me in line. You know, I hate bothering people. I hate being a nuisance. So, now I start getting stressed out. I start getting frustrated. I’m like, “Come on, come on, come on, come on.” And they try and they try and they try and they eventually tell me, “Sorry, we can’t do it.” Network error, but I don’t know where the error is coming from. It could be their computer. It could be out there in the internet. It could be the power blackouts. I just don’t know. So, I’m thinking, well, maybe it’s specific to this Indomaret. Let’s go to the second one and try again. It’s just up the street a couple of blocks. So I go out into the rain, walking down the rain with my umbrella getting soaking wet. I go to the second Indomaret, filming the introduction, talking about what I’m going to do. Then I go into that Indomaret. Same exact sequence. Network error, and they couldn’t top up my e-wallet. And again, this normally would have been good content for my video because it’s demonstrating a real-world situation where QRIS and e-wallets can fail. And that’s just as important in one of these videos as successes. But I couldn’t really use it in the video because I’m pretty sure the failure was related to the blackouts because the internet is down and it’s not fair to show all these failures when it’s got nothing to do with QRIS or e-wallets. It’s only because of the landslides, the flooding, the power lines being down, and the lack of internet. So that was another—it was like practically an entire day that I wasted because I find I can do a lot of useful work in the morning. I wake up fresh, full of energy. My brain is firing. I’m focused and then I can work really efficiently and get things done until about 1:00 and then my brain just shuts down and I can keep working. I mean, I can keep editing videos, but shooting video, going to new places, doing deep dives, going out exploring, all of that for me has to happen in the morning. Afternoon and evening. I just lose my mojo. I become tired. I’m stressed out. I make mistakes. Even if I film video, it comes across as unenergetic and just because yeah, my whole body and brain just shuts down. So every morning when I went out to shoot a QRIS segment and it takes a long time because you got to go there, film it all and then come back again. It takes up the whole morning and this whole topping up at Indomaret sequence completely failed and it wasted pretty much an entire day because I lost the whole morning trying to do it and then by the time the morning was gone. I couldn’t really keep going and I just had to restart again the next day and I finally found an Indomaret where I could top up successfully and then it worked out beautifully. But it took several attempts to get it done.
I’ll end this video with just a couple more stories that illustrate all the problems I ran into. As I’m telling these stories, I get reminded of more and more and more. Even I forgot just how difficult it was to shoot this video. It’s really funny. There was another time again when it came to shooting segments about using QRIS. I didn’t want to have all the same situations, right? I wanted to demonstrate a variety of locations. A whole set of different places where you can go, different types of places. So, one thing I wanted to show was going to a local restaurant. I mean, sure, you can use QRIS at a big fancy coffee shop, fancy mall, fancy fast food chain restaurants like Kentucky Fried Chicken. But what about the little shop across the street where you get mie Aceh or mie bakso. That’s what I wanted to capture as well. And when I shot my Touch ‘n Go video, I found this little restaurant in my old neighborhood. Just a tiny place, family-run, typical Indonesian spot where they had a nice QRIS code on display on the outside. And that’s a little bit unusual here in Banda Aceh. You don’t see a lot of places where they post the QRIS code in the window or on the outside. You don’t see that a lot. So, this shop was kind of special and I filmed it for my Touch ‘n Go video. So, I thought, well, I don’t know of any other place where you can get a local meal and they have the QRIS code on display on the outside. So, yeah, I didn’t really want to duplicate it, but I thought, okay, why not? It’s a unique situation. Let’s go back there. So, again, I’m here in my hotel, completely different part of town. I travel all the way back to my old neighborhood to the other part of town only to go to this one restaurant to have lunch and to film a QRIS segment. I get there, the restaurant is gone. Completely gone. They demolished it. They tore out the entire interior of the restaurant and they were rebuilding it, turning it into something else. I mean, it was like the universe was telling me, “Okay, you want to make a video about QRIS and e-wallets? Well, we are not going to let you.” I mean, the universe was going to the extent of figuring out even the restaurant where I wanted to film a segment and tore it down before I got there. It was absolutely insane.
And I had one other opportunity to do this. In that old neighborhood, there was a mie Aceh restaurant. My favorite restaurant in all of Banda Aceh. When I was living in that my old neighborhood, I went there all the time and they accepted QRIS. They had a nice QRIS code on the desk. And for my Touch ‘n Go video, I went there, I got a meal, scanned the code, and I included it in my Touch ‘n Go video. And I didn’t want to do the same thing for my QRIS video. But in my new neighborhood, I found another one, an equally amazing mie Aceh restaurant. Even better, better food than my other place. Like it was better food and they accepted QRIS. And I went there for lunch all the time. And then when I thought I was going to make the QRIS video, that place was going to be a centerpiece in the video that I’m going to go there and shoot a segment buying local food, hanging out with the local people. So, see, you don’t have to use QRIS in fancy stores. You can use QRIS in a local restaurant just like this. So, I decide to go there one day. It’s within walking distance. It’s a bit far, but I can walk. Hot sunny day. I walk all the way there the day I decide to shoot the QRIS video segment. They’re closed, completely shut down. And I have no idea why. And they stayed closed. It feels like 3 weeks. Like so much time went by and I kept returning over and over and over. I kept returning to that neighborhood hoping to get a good lunch and film a mie Aceh QRIS segment and I’m pretty sure the universe said okay Planet Doug you want to shoot QRIS video segment at this restaurant okay the owner is going to take a 3-week holiday the whole family is going on vacation and they’re going to be closed for 3 weeks it’s like oh yeah, it’s just it never ever ended. I ran into so many problems. It took so long to complete the video. The time investment, the energy investment was like absolutely off the charts. I’ve never struggled so much to make a YouTube video in my life. It was so funny.
So, yeah, those are my behind-the-scenes stories. So, I have more, believe it or not. I could tell more difficulties I ran into while shooting this video, but I think I’ve talked long enough. I’m into my second cup of local sanger ice coffee. Time to shut down. I hope you found those stories a little bit interesting. Gave you a little bit of insight into the real life of a perhaps unskilled YouTuber like me. I have an idea that the really good YouTubers out there, the successful ones, I don’t think they struggle as much as I do. I don’t know what it is about me and the world I live in, but it is a struggle to make these videos, but this one was such an extreme example, I had to talk about it. And with that, shutting down. And I’ll see you in the next video. And if you want to see the result of all this effort, of course, go watch the QRIS video. I’ll put the thumbnail here. And you can watch that video from the perspective of ah you knew like now you know what was going on behind the scenes as I was shooting all those segments. It was not as easy as it looks on video in the final product. All right, shutting down. See you next time.