Mateusz Dembiński's Red Tape Hot Box
It is often the case in life that things just cannot be planned beforehand, and that the monotony is, from time to time, broken by little surprises. Most of us like surprises - as long as they are pleasant ones, of course. Unfortunately, not all of them are.
My trip to Zakopane during the Christmas holidays is a case in point. The first unpleasant surprise came when my friend and I were settled in his car and ready to set off. Only then did we discover that the vehicle's transmission was broken, and we had no choice but to unpack the car, take our belongings and head for the train station. Once there, another surprise awaited us, this time a happy one: an express train to our destination was about to leave in five minutes. We didn't have tickets, but this didn't matter because we knew we could buy them from the conductor on the train.
We installed ourselves in an empty compartment and waited for the conductor. When he finally arrived, we beamed at him and said that we would like to buy tickets, explaining - somewhat unnecessarily - that we did not have time to purchase them beforehand. The conductor beamed back at us, saying that, of course, we could buy tickets, although they would cost an extra zł. 8. We nodded understandingly, appreciating the additional service he was about to perform in selling us the tickets.
Then we got our unhappy surprise, when the conductor added that we would have to pay a penalty charge of zł. 120, prompting stares of disbelief. The reason, he explained while filling out the penalty form, was that we were supposed to find him before he found us, so that we could declare that we needed to buy tickets.
In other words, we were supposed to run back and forth through all nine wagons, hauling our luggage behind us as we looked into each and every compartment, just so we could find him first and buy the tickets. But since we failed to find him first in this PKP game of "fox and geese," he considered us stowaways and penalised us.
What really annoyed us, however, were PKP's regulations, which are unclear and filled with tiny loopholes that escape passengers' notice and inevitably work to their disadvantage. But we learned our lesson, and next time we'll try to have everything planned beforehand so as to avoid any more "unexpected" surprises.
Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at mdembinski@wbj.pl.
My trip to Zakopane during the Christmas holidays is a case in point. The first unpleasant surprise came when my friend and I were settled in his car and ready to set off. Only then did we discover that the vehicle's transmission was broken, and we had no choice but to unpack the car, take our belongings and head for the train station. Once there, another surprise awaited us, this time a happy one: an express train to our destination was about to leave in five minutes. We didn't have tickets, but this didn't matter because we knew we could buy them from the conductor on the train.
We installed ourselves in an empty compartment and waited for the conductor. When he finally arrived, we beamed at him and said that we would like to buy tickets, explaining - somewhat unnecessarily - that we did not have time to purchase them beforehand. The conductor beamed back at us, saying that, of course, we could buy tickets, although they would cost an extra zł. 8. We nodded understandingly, appreciating the additional service he was about to perform in selling us the tickets.
Then we got our unhappy surprise, when the conductor added that we would have to pay a penalty charge of zł. 120, prompting stares of disbelief. The reason, he explained while filling out the penalty form, was that we were supposed to find him before he found us, so that we could declare that we needed to buy tickets.
In other words, we were supposed to run back and forth through all nine wagons, hauling our luggage behind us as we looked into each and every compartment, just so we could find him first and buy the tickets. But since we failed to find him first in this PKP game of "fox and geese," he considered us stowaways and penalised us.
What really annoyed us, however, were PKP's regulations, which are unclear and filled with tiny loopholes that escape passengers' notice and inevitably work to their disadvantage. But we learned our lesson, and next time we'll try to have everything planned beforehand so as to avoid any more "unexpected" surprises.
Red tape bugging you? Tell Mateusz about it at mdembinski@wbj.pl.
