un viaggio su un treno italiano

On May 31st, 2008, I rode the train from Lausanne to Bologna. The train arrived into Milan five minutes late, which squeezed my transfer time to ten minutes. Milano Centrale is an end-stop station, so you have to walk up to the head of the station, down to the platform of your connecting train, and then up to your assigned car on that train. Approaching Milan, I might have been capable of understanding the connecting train info, but the noise of my fellow passengers coupled with the sound quality of the audio system -- a warble on par with Charlie Brown's teacher -- made this impossible. Of course, my car was at the back end of the train, almost still in the Alps. The platforms were jammed with people. I ran half the length of the platform like a panicked participant of Smear the Queer. I stopped to read the schedule and found my train. Only eight minutes. I made it to the general area and looked at the main train listings overhead, which listed a different platform than what I'd read. The hordes of people, the missing letters on the arrival board, the mismatch between the current and posted listings...this was not Italy; it was India. I found my train with two minutes to spare. There was no one on the platform, and all doors were closed. I ran to my car, but the door would not open. I ran back to the head and found a train employee.

"Questo e' il mio treno. Che pasa?"
She answered in English. "It is eh-closed-eh. You can go to eh-track-eh nine."
I showed her my ticket. "Questo biglietto e' bene?"
"Si, bene, bene."

It turned out the ticket was not entirely bene. I boarded the other train. I went from a nice express service with a reserved seat to a slower service where I kept having to move seats because ticket holders with reservations kept showing up at the seats I kept choosing to sit in. When the ticket master came, I offered a short Italian version of my situation, finishing with "the lady in Milan told me this ticket was good." Given that random scrap of information, he looked at me with a serious dose of contempt, squinching up his face to say only: "Non e' bene." How much? "Costa otto euro il cambio." (The change will cost you eight euros.)

I could feel a volcano roiling within. What change? This was no voluntary change, Signore! What about the late train? What about the hordes? What about the sealed doors two minutes prior to departure? I did the best I could within your shite system. I had a paid, express reservation, but now I'm a homeless scrub shuffling from seat to seat. It's not my fault!!

I looked closely at that pinched, unsympathetic face again and decided to save my breath. How, after all, do you say "In Milan, there was a discrepancy of information available to passengers" in Italian? And would such a claim find the miniscule customer service node of this gentleman's brain?

It's beautiful how money makes problems disappear. I paid my eight euros and was free of him. Still, I was left with the feeling that Italy owed me one.