My personal account of living real life in real Venice, and more
I walk out the front door and sooner rather than later I notice things that make me ponder. Sometimes I ponder deeply and fruitlessly, and sometimes I do Ponder Lite and just absorb the beauty.
Here are some recent places and things that made me look twice:
The statement has long since become a cliche’: “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
But the saying doesn’t hint at the means by which the insanity is inflicted. I can enlighten you.
It’s bureaucracy. Which makes sense, considering the apparent skills of the many people (I am pointing no fingers, nor naming names — they know who they are), the individuals, groups, political parties, sewing circles, volleyball teams, whoever it may be that creates ever more complicated regulations for achieving the simplest ends.
Naturally I have a personal case study to submit as evidence. And it will not surprise anyone to hear that it involves the ACTV. The public transport — I hesitate to call it a system, much less a service — organization is like an enormous special-needs class (no disrespect meant to the real thing).
We have known for years that the ACTV issues a free monthly pass to Venetians who are 75 years old or more (note: there will be a catch to this, because it is too simple). I knew it when Lino reached that landmark, and when he passed the subsequent landmark. I became obsessed with the fact that we were paying for something each month that he could get for free.
So what was holding me, him, us back? The application process. Because while the ACTV may say that they want you to have this benefit (something they have never said, but let’s pretend), they struggle painfully against providing it.
Other Venetians who have the free pass, including some of our close relatives, have pounded on us several times a year with the hammerblows of “It’s really easy to get.” I knew that couldn’t be true.
But guess what? I found out this morning that it was, in fact, easy to get — up until Dec. 31, 2014. But we started the application process on January 28, just after a mass of new regulations went into effect, and discovered ourselves at the foot of the bureaucratic equivalent of the North Face of the Eiger. Yet another example of the “You should’ve been here yesterday” that haunts my life.
But we didn’t know that detail when we turned for succor to one extremely tired but meticulous and conscientious man in an office dedicated to helping citizens with various forms of paperwork — an office run, not by the city, may I note, but by one of the many labor unions. Say what you will about unions, this is one spot on the globe where generations of sacrifice and effort have borne some kind of fruit.
I may have mentioned that the applicant has to be 75 or over. Now comes the catch. It’s not enough to be old — you also have to be poor (a maximum annual income of 16,631.71 euros, or $18,757.60). Happily, I guess, we are in that category. But don’t take our word for it. They want proof.
Here is what Lino had to bring to the sainted man embroiled in completing our application process for the ACTV free pass:
His ID card (to confirm date of birth, also residency, also citizenship, I guess).
His codice fiscale (like a Social Security number).
A statement from the bank summarizing our average monthly balance.
A document from the bank detailing our mortgage, our monthly payments, and when it will be paid off.
A many-page document from our accountant which itemizes his income and outgo for 2014, as sent to the Income Tax people.
The document registered with the “catasto,” a city agency for which I cannot find an intelligible translation. This details the precise dimensions of our domicile and assigns an official assessment of its value. Just to make sure that we’re not buying an apartment the size of a Welcome mat for 800,000 euros (not the price) on an income that’s below the poverty line. You know how sneaky those rich people are, pretending to be poor, which in fact is not a joke. I give the ACTV slight credit for attempting to ensure that we’re not in that category of person, although that category of person often manages to find a way to — as the saying goes here — have their wife drunk and the cask of wine still full. If you get my drift. I say, Make the rule Age or Destitution, but not both. But no.
My ID card.
My codice fiscale.
Acquiring these documents entailed two trips to the bank, one trip to the accountant, and two trips to the union office, where we had to wait for most of one morning for our turn, like sitting in a hospital emergency room without a serious emergency.
NOW we have to wait 15 days, then call the sainted man to find out if he’s got the approval, so we can take the ACTV application form to the ACTV office and get the pass. Lino says the two-week wait is because all our information will be sent to some federal office where our data will be compared with their data, just in case Lino turns out to be one of those devious rich people who tries to pull a fast one.
I might be inclined to applaud the organization’s efforts to avoid being exploited, but there are so many loopholes through which the rich easily pass that it seems ludicrous to devastate everybody’s gonads just to show that you can.
But I may not be seeing this the right — I mean the ACTV — way.
Just give him the pass already.
I’ve been having a little trouble lately finding diverting things to write about, which accounts, in part, for the work slowdown in my posting.
The fact is, so many things are going wrong around the most beautiful city in the world that humor is hard to find — even that bitter, crackly humor that used to be easier to pick up than manna in the morning.
The vaporettos have reached Third-World levels of crowding, especially the #2 from Tronchetto. The human body is 60 percent water, but these bodies are packed onto these vehicles with a force which evidently removes all liquids (in the form of sweat, or tears — I stop there) and leaves only the hide and gristle of thousands of tourists per day compressed in really harsh ways.
That might not matter except that the vaporettos of various lines have acquired the habit recently of breaking down in mid-run. Motors that stop, or rudders that cease to respond, which sometimes happens near other boats, such as gondolas. There have been several cases in a very short stretch of time.
Did I mention gondolas? There have been other collisions recently between motorized boats (vaporetto, taxi) and the floating symbol of Venice. August 17 is the first anniversary of the death of Professor Joachim Vogel in his gondola, and although the legal process has reached some conclusions (gondolier exonerated, three vaporetto drivers convicted of various breaches), the traffic situation has not changed at all.
The agonized city-wide soul-searching caused by this totally predictable tragedy led to the creation of a list of 26 proposed changes in the traffic patterns and the assorted uses of the aquatic spaces by specific types of boat. In other words, a plan to ease the jams and minimize, if not eliminate, the problems of too many boats in too small a space. See above: Nothing has changed.
Well fine, you say. Avoid taking a vaporetto (or gondola), and you’ll be okay. And that’s true, except that there is also the increasing chaos created by the ever-more-aggressive itinerant illegal vendors proliferating in the Piazza San Marco and environs. They sell corn to feed to the pigeons, counterfeit handbags and sunglasses, long-stemmed red roses, and toys of various sorts.
Well fine, you say. Avoid the Piazza San Marco. That would be one solution.
But what is happening here is that although enforcement of the laws was a bit random in the past, ever since the government was decapitated (June 4), the town has become a sort of Dodge City for every kind of independent (translation: illegal) operator.
I did discover something funny, though. There are laws — that’s not the funny part — which behave sort of like blank bullets.
For example: A 28-year-old homeless man from Kosovo named Imer Tosca was drunk at 3:00 AM the other morning. None of that carries a huge humor load. But wait.
He didn’t want to waste time standing around waiting for the rare vaporetto at that hour which would take him to the Lido.
So he untied one of the vaporettos which is moored at night in front of the Arsenal, turned on the ignition, and drove it away. A patrolling ACTV security boat almost immediately noticed this — hard to miss, considering that the three vaporettos that had been tied to his were now floating around, going adrift — and gave chase. So did the police. But neither of those facts made much difference to him. When the police tried to stop him, he tried to ram their boat. Actually he did that twice.
He was finally overcome, and taken to jail. He was released the next day BECAUSE…. a new law which was passed to ease the pressure in the prisons (disastrously overcrowded, too, even worse than the vaporettos), states that any person committing a crime or misdemeanor which rates a sentence of fewer than three years in prison is not to be sent to prison, but placed on house arrest.
Did I mention the perp was homeless? Having no domicile, he couldn’t be placed on house arrest, so he was let go.
Next day….. he and some friends got drunk and proceeded to brawl in the cloister of the basilica of Sant’ Antonio in Padova. He was hauled in again. And let go again. Why?
Because with the rap sheet they discovered he had built up since he was 12, he should now be expelled from Italy.
Except that he is officially designated as a stateless person. He has no country. I don’t know how those documents get worked out, but it means that there was no country to expel him to. So here he stays.
He may be drunk and homeless, for which I’m very sorry, but until he kills somebody, I feel a very unpleasant sort of admiration for him.
On a more modest, but no less perplexing note, there was Olga, the Slovakian girl with the horse. Her being Slovakian doesn’t really matter to the story, I just thought I’d throw it in.
A few days ago some distress calls began to come into the highway police from drivers on the Ponte della Liberta’. They were being forced to slow down and change lanes (creating stress for themselves and other drivers who weren’t so alert) to avoid hitting a girl who was walking along, leading a horse. The horse was saddled to the hilt with all sorts of Western gear, so I’m not really sure why she was walking rather than riding. Maybe the horse was tired.
Never mind. She was creating a hazardous situation, so the police sent out an escort which would alert the drivers behind her (kind of like a “wide load” sign on a truck). They accompanied her safely to the end of the bridge — Piazzale Roma — where she turned around and crossed the bridge again, with escort, and went on her mysterious way.
The next day, it was made known that she had been cited for various infractions. None of them specifically mentioned unlawful use of a quadropedic vehicle, but they did mention her endangering the safety of the drivers (41 euros), and also for allowing the horse to leave the bridge dirtier than she had found it (25 euros).
She had been walking from Austria to Bussolengo (near Verona) for the past two months — again, why she was walking with a perfectly good horse, rather than riding, I have no idea — and said she wanted to come to Venice to take a picture, and was planning to turn around and leave anyway. That is, there were no further plans, such as swimming him to the Piazza San Marco, or riding him up the campanile, or whatever other effervescent ideas come fizzing into people’s minds in the summer here.
Also, she said there were no signs indicating that it was forbidden to take a horse across the bridge. Very true. Everyone admitted that. No one observed that there were no signs forbidding bringing aardvarks over the bridge on skateboards, either, or prohibiting the passage of Laotian rock rats clinging to low-flying birthday balloons.
Come to think of it, there aren’t any signs that forbid the untying and taking of a vaporetto in the middle of the night.
We need to make a whole lot of new rules around here. “Don’t act silly” doesn’t go far enough.
As all the world knows — or that part of the world that reads this blog — the ACTV, or Azienda del Consorzio Trasporti Veneziano, is the local public transport company. When it’s in the mood.
The ACTV is an apex predator, which means it can do anything it wants. Strike? Bring it on. Send boats to the shop for repairs on a holiday weekend? You bet. Raise ticket prices again? Great idea. Do we regret any possible inconvenience? With all our hearts.
People in other human settlements might regard public transport as a public service. The administrators of the ACTV seem to regard transport as a favor, an onerous, tiresome, inconvenient and irritating sort of favor they’re compelled to grant the traveling public, like having to take your mother-in-law to the gynecologist on Saturday morning because you promised five months ago.
I can almost hear the murmuring soundtrack in the administrators’ brains. It says: “If only we didn’t have to haul all those people around every day, and repair boats, and go out in unpleasant weather, running a transport company could be so much fun. But no.”
I bring all this up not because two days ago the Gazzettino reported that two ticket-sellers have been fired for having recycled vaporetto tickets, pocketing large amounts of free money. That is a non-story because there will always be more. I say this because there always are more.
No, I bring it up because this weekend is election time all over Europe, in which the citizens of the EU are voting for their representatives in the European Parliament. Sunday will be election day in Italy. Yes, Italians vote on Sunday.
And who will be working the polling places? Employees of the ACTV. Why does this matter? Because bus and vaporetto service on Sunday is almost certainly going to be curtailed for lack of drivers, ticket-sellers, and so forth. The agency is alerting us to this already.
Sunday, you may recall, is a peak day for day-tripping tourists, especially when the weather is sunny, which it is expected to be. Just another example of how thoughtless people are regarding the ACTV’s convenience, to want to come to Venice on a Sunday.
Here is how the long-suffering officers of the ACTV phrase it, on the company’s website (translated by me):
“…seeing the experience of the past years…we estimate that an increased and unpredictable number of employees could be called to serve at the polling places… in past years, the phenomenon was so pronounced as to oblige the company to suppress some runs, whether of boats or of buses.
“Therefore the same risk may be run this year, and given the unpredictability of the absences, the possibility can’t be excluded that the agency could be constrained to apply reductions of service (vaporetto and bus) without being able to indicate in advance the lines or the precise runs that could be involved.”
I dwell with incredulous eyes on the lavish phrases of warning and exculpation. Why are the absences unpredictable? Why would the agency be constrained to limit service? Do they not have enough employees to go around? Why can’t you indicate in advance the lines and times that could be involved? And why, now that I’m busy asking questions, can’t you prepared to call in replacements? This election was scheduled months ago. It’s not like the fog.
If you would like to ask something, you might inquire as to what kind of idea of public service this might be. It’s the “We can do whatever we want because you have no alternative” idea.
And as long as there are questions in the air, you may further ask why ACTV employees have been given this assignment — and why they will get time off with pay to provide this manpower, especially considering that the people working the polling places also get paid. The answer is simple: Because getting money twice to do virtually nothing is a wonderful way to spend the day.
You may then ask (as I did) why ACTV employees enjoy this little perk, and not, say, members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, or the Red Cross, or the World Wildlife Fund, or someone else.
Because the ACTV contracts stipulate that their members will be allowed time off with pay for providing this service.
This is a marvelous clause, and if their contract were to contain similarly marvelous clauses, it would only make me more astonished that they ever bother to go on strike. It’s a wonderful life on Planet ACTV.
But I noticed that, at least as Lino explained it to me, the contract doesn’t stipulate that ACTV employees must be called. So why doesn’t the Board of Elections ring up the grain millers, or the Red Cross, etc., and just tell the ACTV employees “Sorry, but you’re going to have to go to work today. The panda-counters will supervise the voting. You’re going to have to do your job carrying thousands of people around the lagoon. Bummer.”
I don’t know why. But all this makes me think disagreeable thoughts. The ACTV is eager to take money by fining a passenger who hasn’t beeped his ticket before boarding, even if the ticket is a monthly pass which obviously has been paid in full. They demand this immaterial beeping, and punish non-compliers. We demand a boat every 12 or 20 or 30 minutes, or whatever the timetable is at the moment, and we get “Sorry, we can’t guarantee service because we’ve been constrained, obliged, and otherwise compelled to suspend runs by forces beyond our control, beyond even our ability to predict, which causes us to feel distress at the plight we have inflicted on you totally against our will, even though we’re inflicting it anyway.”
The world belongs to the ACTV, in the same way that it belongs to killer whales, Nile crocodiles, Harpy eagles. Because although you can kill these creatures, if you really try, you can’t possibly make them afraid. Or even vaguely apprehensive.
If you don’t think this could be a correct assessment, you should know that the ACTV has announced a 24-hour strike for May 30.