Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
When it's time to sign up the kids for camp every summer, they mail you the blank enroll-
ment forms that you need to fill out for each child, along with the vouchers that you can
only pay at the post office. You wait in line at the P.O., pay your fees and take your proof
of payment to City Hall. You wait your turn there to find out that you also need to pay a
health insurance fee. Off you go to the health service to get your form. You fill it out the
voucher and then wait in line at the post office to pay the fee. Then you return to the health
service with the voucher paid, and they stamp it. You take that to City Hall along with the
accompanying enrollment forms and proofs of payment that you brought in earlier.
The second time you do this, you get smarter; you pay both vouchers during the first trip
to the post office. Then you return to City Hall to a full corridor of waiting parents each
holding their forms and vouchers. Processing each enrollment takes the clerk about fif-
teen minutes of hunt-and-peck typing; all the relevant data about name, age and address
and place of birth is re-entered each year, even if your kids are regulars. At 12:00 noon,
sharp, the clerk leaves for lunch, and he doesn't return until the day after next. Signups are
handled only between 10 am and 12 noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The rest of the time
the clerk moves to a different office where he fulfills some other mysterious function.
Youmay wonder whythey don't just send youa form that youcan fill out at home and mail
back with a check. If you propose it, they might listen respectfully, but they know that the
likelihood of gaining approval from all of the relevant councils and administrative bodies
would require a lifetime of perseverance; the path of least resistance is simply to live with
the existing system. It's like being trapped in a skit co-written by Kafka and John Belushi.
Living here, you quickly realize that you will blow a gasket if you can't learn to expect
unreasonable delays whenever you try to get something done. In California by noon we
would have had six or seven items crossed off our list. In Italy when we tackle something
serious like changing our dialing plan or requesting an address change for a bill, we plan
on a serious morning's effort to get the ball rolling, and a few more days spent afterwards
to find out what's holding things up. (“You have no record of our change order? How is
that possible?) You learn to breathe deeply.
***
Watching the road construction comedies is a source of ongoing amusement. Sometime
back in the mid-nineties they began enlarging the two-lane road that led from our area into
the city of Siena. It was being transformed into a highway with two lanes running in each
direction. Ten years later they were still working on it. We watched all the preparations
for a section of the roadbed just a couple miles out of Siena. It was bulldozed, flattened
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