My cockup, their conspiracy

It’s not easy being relatively chaotic if you’re trying to live an organised life.

That was confirmed on a recent trip to Germany. I couldn’t find a direct flight from Valencia, where I now live, to Frankfurt. That isn’t quite the same thing as saying that there is no such flight, only that if there is, I haven’t found it yet. So instead I decided to take the train to Madrid and fly from there.

The train service is remarkable. An hour and forty minutes for a trip that takes three to three-and-a-half hours by car. Far, far beyond anything being achieved in Britain, the nation that pioneered railway travel in Europe.

The other great thing about travelling via Madrid was that I could go up the evening before and have dinner with my sons, who live there, and my daughter-in-law and my daughter-out-law. Who live there too.

The plan was to travel at 4:15, to have drinks and dinner in the evening.

I bought the ticket on line. Sadly, I must have been thinking too hard about the flight because when I came to travel, I discovered that I’d booked myself onto a train for the same day as the flight – which would have meant missing the plane – and not for the evening before.

“Thinking too hard about the flight?” my son Nicky interjects. “You mean not thinking at all.”

Ah, well. His judgement is harsher but perhaps more accurate than mine. Which is a little kinder.

In any case, I decided there wasn’t really a problem. I’d taken a flexible ticket, perhaps unconsciously aware that I was screwing up, so I had only to go to the station early and change the reservation.

It wasn’t that simple. There wasn’t a 4:15 that day, so the first train I could get on was the 5:10. But then the ticket agent corrected himself.

“Sorry – no. That train’s fully booked. And – oh, dear – so’s the 7:15. The first I can get you on is the 8:15. The last seat.”

“OK,” I said, “but every train I’ve ever caught in Spain has no-shows. Could I wait by an earlier train and if, just before it’s due to leave, there’s a spare seat, grab it?”

He shrugged.

“If they let you onto the platform, you can try.”

That wasn’t going to happen. Renfe, the national railway operator in Spain, posts staff at the entrance to platforms to check tickets, and there was no way they were going to let me near a train I wasn’t booked on. I’m not sure how to say “more than my job’s worth” in Spanish, or whether there is any such expression in the language, but that was absolutely the attitude they were taking.

It seems that against me all fate had conspired. Or at least, all Renfe.

In the end I had to take the 8:15.

Renfe's high-speed AVE trains
Fast, efficient, comfortable. With flexible service? Not so much

Now I know that the cockup was entirely my fault. But I find there’s something attractive about company employees trying to help out even someone who’s created his problems himself. You know, the “let’s see if we can find a solution” attitude as opposed to the jobsworth mentality.

After all, what does it cost them?

They could have helped had they wanted to. You’ll remember that I’d been assigned the last available seat on the 8:15. And yet, when I got on, I found a dozen seats, just in my carriage and the next, which stayed empty for the whole trip. I’m sure there were empty seats on the 5:10 and the 7:15 too.

It’s funny. A French high-speed train once stopped at a station it wasn’t due to call at, just to help my wife Danielle by allowing her to leave it there. A friend of mine who got on the wrong high-speed train in Germany was allowed off at an abandoned station, and was picked up there by the next high-speed train – the one he should have been on – although the station had been out of use for years.

Ah, well. Not everyone has the same view of customer service.

At least the sons and the partners stood by me. They turned out to meet me, not at 6:00 as intended, but at 10:00, which in Spain is the traditional time for dinner anyway. So we ate well in a restaurant near the station. Their warmth and sympathy made me feel a lot less foolish and a lot less annoyed. In any case, hanging around at the station in Valencia for four hours had been less painful than might be imagined – Danielle stayed with me until she had to go and walk the dogs, and I did some work afterwards. A longer wait in the station than I’d planned, but not a waste of time.

Still. I’ve got to learn to overcome my chaotic inclinations and live the organised existence I crave. Especially in Spain, where Renfe conspires so majestically against such sad little cockup merchants as me.