| Lap Around the Train |
| "Sold", as in "sold on", is quite similar to "attached to", red being used to denote danger. It was the West Art of Now Award on the KunstRai which inspired this odd association. |
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*About the title Lap Around the Train
There has been a tremendous fuss in the Netherlands in recent months about
the infamous "lap around the church", the gist of which is that under the
new railway timetable system train drivers have been assigned "regular
routes". The train drivers do not like this at all: they claim that the new
system, which they consider was rammed down their throats without proper
consultation, will add an unacceptable level of predictability and thus,
monotony to their work, which in turn will impact on their concentration,
which in turn could jeopardise their passengers' safety. Several train
strikes later, not to mention days on end of footage on the evening news of
grim-looking representatives from the unions and the management of
Netherlands Railways, gearing up for yet another frustrating round of
negotiations, the deadlock has slightly eased for now - but as the new
timetable is about to come into effect, it's anyone's guess what will happen
later this week. I can't seem to get my head around last week's train crash, especially where it concerns the dilemma of whether I should or should not Do Something, whether I should kick up a major fuss about Something Having Gone Terribly Awry. Leaving aside for the moment what would happen if my suspicions turned out to have been entirely misplaced, I am still grappling with the question as to the extent to which this qualifies as one of those instances where one should feel morally obliged to report wrongs and if so, if an item posted on a web site which is accessible to the general public even though not all of the general public grace it with their presence could be deemed to suffice, or if not, if one should make an effort to bring the relevant experts up to speed on one's experiences or, possibly more straightforwardly still, file an official report. I therefore decided to ring up one of the major dailies. The editor declined jotting down my name - he knew what I was talking about and the intelligence of his journalists was more than ample to cope, should he need to, in addition to which his editors were clever enough to ferret things out for themselves - sleep tight, in other words. Is it my job to take the newspapers to task? Of course not, for this would cut them off from their sources, hypothetically speaking. Which confers at least one legal and functional aspect on crime, in that it represents the scot-free dissemination of bad news. Conscience duly soothed, is what you might think. And yet something was still niggling away, so I picked up the telephone again and called up Netherlands Railways' adversary, this being ROVER, the association which fosters the interests of those who travel by train. The first thing ROVER came up with (we were still on the telephone) was that the tractor had had no business sitting on the track - which aptly demonstrates what an unassuming lot we travellers are. Although I had heard someone else say exactly the same thing before, I certainly wouldn't have expected ROVER to come up with this breathtakingly insightful comment. It is true that every sensible remark thereafter acted as balm to my pour tormented soul. Which does not detract from my starting to feel a bit silly after all these experiences. Whenever I file a complaint with a world-renowned coffeemaker manufacturer, they invariably assure me that I'm the first unhappy customer ever, and it's more of the same from light bulb manufacturers, bicycle makers, banks … Which brings me to another dilemma, which although it looks less pernicious may be a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing too. The KunstRAI (the annual art fair at the RAI Conference Centre in this wonderful city) operates an awards scheme which is sponsored by a cigarette manufacturer. I'm not quite so other-worldly as to be unable to imagine that a similar symbiosis could come to fruition involving trade fairs such as, say, the MotorRAI (motorcycles), Housekeeping Fair (all things domestic) or HISWA (boats) (they're all held in the same venue, by the way), but what does surprise me is that a sector which with the blessing of quite a few basks in the notion that what it produces is 100% good news for the salvation of mankind is evidently willing to have the wool pulled over its eyes by a manufacturer which is under strict government instructions to print on the packaging of the products it makes that the consequences of their use could be lethal. The awards scheme has been in operation for many years. For exactly as many years as my dilemma, in fact. |