What they didn't tell you about the Balkans...
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Having been home for almost 3 weeks I have noticed things that never either bothered me or came to my attention, but this time, I could not help but be annoyed by it all.
I don't know if that is to do with all age, perhaps. I have noticed that many things pray on my mind, like my father's obsession with Hepatitis A, now I wash my hands regularly, when people have a nasty cough in the bus or tube, I envision TB infecting me and I actually shiver with that thought. When kids are snotty, it repulses me etc...
But this trip, I noticed the way banks work in Croatia. They are built on bureaucratic strata no one can permeate but the fittest few, stubborn enough to go fetch one hundred thousand confirmations, tax stamps and photocopies of their every shred of existence.
I was not that strong. I mostly bitched about it all the time to everyone that would listen, hailing UK as the golden place to live, the land of the free.
Customer service is a concept that is foreign to those living in foreign land I guess and one only notices that when exiled for a while, somewhere more civilised. I discussed this extensively with few of my friends and they all said that they fear shops where they need to ask a shop assistant for some assistance.
But banks are the best.
By careful calculation, I deduced that they operate on the basis of Dante's Inferno.
Lower ground floor:
One enters and encounters big information desk, no one there though. You take a ticket that says A809 and enter the huge hall with about 50 chairs and 15 checkouts, of whom half or less are working.
After pushing through the crowd to see the numbers on the screen you see that number A670 is being served. This is where you realise you are in trouble for the first time.
An hour or so later, you reach the desk. The ladies that work behind it are perfectly made up yet have no formal banking experience. They don't understand anything you ask and they treat you with disdain laced with apathetic hatred. They never crack a smile and I doubt that is because they had botox. This is when you know you are really in trouble.
For those that have some money, first floor is the destination, where one can invest or enquire about such stuff.
First floor starts with a reception desk that has a girl behind it, who is still clueless but polite. She can smile.
Same rule with tickets, only you are seen within 5 minutes by a personal banker that smiles excessively and calls you madam. She knows her stuff. Or at least you feel like someone is treating you like a person so you don't even mind if she gives you wrong advice.
Second floor is for big businesses that deal with corporate lawyers. I never ventured there but in my imagination, one gets champagne and strawberries at the reception and the red carpet sees you to the comfy office with leather seats where lawyers lick your arse till it's raw.
You are seen straight away because they have one client a day if that.
What they don't understand, operating such class system, is that it is the mortals on the ground floor that feed them.
Moving swiftly away from banks, another interesting thing about my country is that every woman over 50 wears a fur coat. It is a status symbol for those that have no money. I even remember that my mum had a fox trim on her coat, she did not have the money for the whole fox, just a trim.
Some women wear a fox around their neck, feet dangling and all with the beast biting its own tail as a clasp. Classy. It is, however, a very unflattering item, colours are drab, one cannot get it wet and it makes you 3 times fatter, and that is not even mentioning the animals. Some like to think that they died of natural causes (if you can call being gassed in an unventilated room a natural cause these days).
But to have a whole coat...now that is prestigeous, also something that died in the seventies but nobody told them.
I was so entranced by what I noticed that I even dared to take a photo of an unsuspecting woman on the tram with my phone camera, to prove my point.
Should I ever turn into something like that, somebody please shoot me and make a coat out of me.
I don't know if that is to do with all age, perhaps. I have noticed that many things pray on my mind, like my father's obsession with Hepatitis A, now I wash my hands regularly, when people have a nasty cough in the bus or tube, I envision TB infecting me and I actually shiver with that thought. When kids are snotty, it repulses me etc...
But this trip, I noticed the way banks work in Croatia. They are built on bureaucratic strata no one can permeate but the fittest few, stubborn enough to go fetch one hundred thousand confirmations, tax stamps and photocopies of their every shred of existence.
I was not that strong. I mostly bitched about it all the time to everyone that would listen, hailing UK as the golden place to live, the land of the free.
Customer service is a concept that is foreign to those living in foreign land I guess and one only notices that when exiled for a while, somewhere more civilised. I discussed this extensively with few of my friends and they all said that they fear shops where they need to ask a shop assistant for some assistance.
But banks are the best.
By careful calculation, I deduced that they operate on the basis of Dante's Inferno.
Lower ground floor:
One enters and encounters big information desk, no one there though. You take a ticket that says A809 and enter the huge hall with about 50 chairs and 15 checkouts, of whom half or less are working.
After pushing through the crowd to see the numbers on the screen you see that number A670 is being served. This is where you realise you are in trouble for the first time.
An hour or so later, you reach the desk. The ladies that work behind it are perfectly made up yet have no formal banking experience. They don't understand anything you ask and they treat you with disdain laced with apathetic hatred. They never crack a smile and I doubt that is because they had botox. This is when you know you are really in trouble.
For those that have some money, first floor is the destination, where one can invest or enquire about such stuff.
First floor starts with a reception desk that has a girl behind it, who is still clueless but polite. She can smile.
Same rule with tickets, only you are seen within 5 minutes by a personal banker that smiles excessively and calls you madam. She knows her stuff. Or at least you feel like someone is treating you like a person so you don't even mind if she gives you wrong advice.
Second floor is for big businesses that deal with corporate lawyers. I never ventured there but in my imagination, one gets champagne and strawberries at the reception and the red carpet sees you to the comfy office with leather seats where lawyers lick your arse till it's raw.
You are seen straight away because they have one client a day if that.
What they don't understand, operating such class system, is that it is the mortals on the ground floor that feed them.
Moving swiftly away from banks, another interesting thing about my country is that every woman over 50 wears a fur coat. It is a status symbol for those that have no money. I even remember that my mum had a fox trim on her coat, she did not have the money for the whole fox, just a trim.
Some women wear a fox around their neck, feet dangling and all with the beast biting its own tail as a clasp. Classy. It is, however, a very unflattering item, colours are drab, one cannot get it wet and it makes you 3 times fatter, and that is not even mentioning the animals. Some like to think that they died of natural causes (if you can call being gassed in an unventilated room a natural cause these days).
But to have a whole coat...now that is prestigeous, also something that died in the seventies but nobody told them.
I was so entranced by what I noticed that I even dared to take a photo of an unsuspecting woman on the tram with my phone camera, to prove my point.
Should I ever turn into something like that, somebody please shoot me and make a coat out of me.
posted by Martina Dove at 11:06 am
2 Comments:
As long as you stop waxing I will.
Darling, aspiring to look like Liz H does not happen with hirsute patches, the necessity brings me to it, please understand.
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