LAST DAY IN GEX
Today I didn‘t leave the house. I woke up too late, when I heard a door close, to ride with Craig when he took Mary to work. I spent part of the rest of the day processing photographs but spent much, too much, time trying to nail down my rail trip to Aschaffenburg tomorrow. I got the Eurail app, as the very pleasant woman in the railroad office told me to. I had already located the train connections I wanted to make, I was even told that I was all set and ready to go. But all I had was a printed schedule that didn‘t look official enough to me. I was also told that on several legs of the trip that reservations, which cost $8.80 for each leg, were optional. I didn‘t know if without a reservation I would be allowed on the train but might have to stand. So I decided to get reservations on the longest legs, both tomorrow and on Saturday when I would be going on to Winsen. But I couldn‘t make the website work. I would click on a reservation but when I clicked on the payment button there was nothing there. About the 20th time I did that, the $8.80 charge appeared. But I still had to fill in a lot of information before I could hit the pay now button. But with one step to go my card was declined, all of my cards were “not acceptable on this website.” I gave up but was now, after an hour and a half, almost crying not able to give up. I went back and in a separate place entered one of my rejected cards and it was accepted.
I think that over two days I made one visit to the railway office and spent four hours on line trying to get something that looked like a ticket, something that would take a nine year old ten minutes. I was muttering and irritated beyond belief. As a last resort I read the instructions, which were quite clear and very simple. I followed them and in five minutes had my ticket with the QR code to show the conductor.
And what is the moral of this story? It isn’t just to read the instructions. I had read them and they didn’t tell me how to find the train or how to get reservations. They were only useful after I had floundered around with nothing to guide me except intuition, but my intuition was wrong. To whoever set up the system it was so simple that an idiot could easily buy a ticket. But whoever it was had a different intuition from me, a different sense of what to do. I wasn’t an idiot, I was wandering in a swamp and only after circling and circling was I able to get out of the swamp and was ready for the easy to do instructions.
This is not the first time for me or, I believe, for anyone reading this that what seemed like a simple online procedure was almost impossible to follow. Susie and I had the same experience trying to get an on line Indian visa last year. It took hours. Luckily it is a ten year visit and I’ll never have to do it again.
Usually an automated system asks me to choose one of five possibilities, none of them remotely connected to what I am interested in, with the most likely, but obviously wrong choice, leading me on a wild goose chase. And when I give up and start over, the whole maddening process repeats itself right from the beginning.
I have six more travel days, I’m sure I won’t remember how I got through this one, but I’m guessing it will be easier.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 