Stop Thief!

Given that I have already explained my experience of the corruption in Italian government, I think I can now say I clearly understand the Italian working person’s response to it: getting as much money as the can from people they can sucker into giving it to them. Loredana, for example, who processed the one night we didn‘t stay there on my credit card so I couldn‘t refuse to pay her in cash. If I spend too much time recounting the experience we had on the train from Rome to Florence here, I’ll just get upset again (at myself as well as the conductor), despite the fact that I was vindicated in the end by a patient and generous customer service representative in the Firenze SMN station.

When the conductor came through the car to check tickets and stamp Euro rail passes, he targeted four English-speaking travelers and found “errors” on our passes and demanded 50 euro from each of us or he would call the police. That’s a shit load of money; do the math. Mom and I were two of the people he pursued, along with Naomi and Heath, two Aussies in their twenties backpacking through Europe who got engaged last week in Scotland. But, we didn’t find that out until several hours later--they were further down the car.

The scam he ran on us was a little different that the one he ran on N and H; he said our validation stamp was missing (which it was, but we had been told on the platform by another Trenitalia conductor that it would be stamped on the train) but that he would “validate” it for 100 euro and “give” us another day on our pass--which he clearly thought was a win/win situation, but he didn’t use that phrase.

After all four of us had given him our money--complaining all the time and arguing with him that he was wrong--because we saw no other way out of the situation, a group of Americans sitting behind us in the far end of the car told us that they had been on the receiving end of the same scam the day before but had no money to give, so the conductor just walked away. Naomi and I went after him and heatedly demanded our money back, but suddenly he didn’t understand us and said, in broken English, if we had a problem, we had to speak to the authorities in Florence. We screamed a little while longer, took his badge number and went back to our respective seats.

The four of us rendezvoused on the platform in Florence and made for Trenitalia information, which sent us to their customer service office. Naomi and I went in alone and, on behalf of all four of us, I made our case to Signore Franco. An hour later, I had convinced him to give us our money back. Because we each had proof that our passes had been tampered with (a change of date on ours, a validation stamp on theirs) he helped us fill out complaint forms, approved our refund, made several sets of photocopies of passes, reservations, receipts, and we will all get our money mailed back to our home addresses.

Really. Don’t laugh. I believe him. I really think we will, because if we don’t, we still have copies of our approved request to take it further once we get home.

Seriously, I don’t like that look on your face.

I heard that.