Travel Reference
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“Wait a minute,” he says to the clerk. “It seems to me that before the War that street used
to be called Via della Porta. Give that a try.”
Bingo!We'rein.ItseemsthatViadellaPorta,thestreetaddressfiftyyearsago,wasentered
into the computer system for some reason as the primary key, and my current address is in
there only as an alternate address to which they can mail statements. I sit there marveling
that the national electric company runs a database application where the primary address
field can't be changed and the secondary address field can't be searched. It will be a while
before Oracle needs to worry about competition from this quarter.
***
America's economic strength derives in large measure from its huge, efficient mega-cor-
porations. Italy is a land with a vast number of small businesses that produce small quantit-
ies of quality items. In general, big companies in Italy are a disaster. Italians don't seem to
have that secondary layer of skills at manipulation of abstractions that would enable them
to manage and integrate companies as huge as GM or GE or G anything. Individuals are
typically bright and capable, but once they are incorporated into an organization of any
size, beware! One can only hope that at some point Italians will learn to step aside when
it comes to software, infrastructure design, project management or large systems integra-
tion and hire Germans, Israelis or Americans—people who are actually good at this kind of
stuff.
The net result is that local life at the personal level is delightful, while institutional, bur-
eaucratic and corporate encounters are horrendous. Imagine calling a company and talk-
ing with an operator who is in a room that she shares with a hundred other operators,
all of whom are shouting to make themselves heard over the noise that they are creating.
Whatever positive attitudes, courtesy and customer service skills your operator may have
had when she arrived, the context guarantees that she will be transformed into a bitter,
short-tempered and ineffective creature before sundown. This is not just a fanciful meta-
phor for Italian corporate infrastructure; it's a description of real-world conditions.
After a while you learn that, as a rule of thumb, when you're dealing with any small busi-
ness where you can see the people and count them on your fingers, you will have a positive
experience. When you deal with products or services offered by any type of organization
bigger than a football team, gird thy loins and don't forget to take yourblood pressure med-
ication!
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