Compliment

Since I write my blog the frequent urge to write letters to the newspapers has fallen to almost zero.

But last week I felt an irresistible need to correct a factual error concerning the Belgian railraods in one of the paper's fora (readers' corner). So I corrected the error (pregnant women do travel first class without paying a supplement) but could not resist to answer a question on the forum concerning the railraod itself. So I wrote that the company will have to try to do better for punctuality, customer care and communications.

A furious answer came : my mail was outrageous and I was completely full of bitterness.

"Verzuring" in Flemish is one of the worst terms of abuse that politically correct people can use for those who do not agree with them. It means you are completely out of touch and do not know how to behave as a civilised person. Now, as a contrarian, I consider that a compliment.

I think I have some experience in the matter : I have been a daily, and very often frustrated, customer of the railroad for over twenty years, until I could take it no longer and switched to travel by car (a bad solution, but no worse than the train ... at least at that moment in time).

There was a second little squirmish between my correspondent and myself but it brought nothing new to the argument, his point being that in many other countries railroad service really stinks, so we should be happy with what we have. Yeah.

1 comment:

Pablo Carpintero said...

I could add that most of my mother's family worked for the railroad and were proud of it.
I am not quite convinced that they would still be so now.