Billetten

I needed a train to get me from here to there. The first time I saw one of these things was in June, 2006. I stared at while in an airport. It's all in German. I thought maybe osmosis could somehow work. I kept staring.

Lucky for me, a Swiss person in a hurry was standing behind me, waiting for me to just get on with it. I looked at him, he looked at me, I looked at the machine, looked back at him, he looked at me again. It was pretty clear I was either an idiot in his way, or an idiot just about to no longer be in his way.

He moved around me, pushed a button with the word Zurich on it, slid in a 20 Franc bill, hit the jackpot with change, grabbed his ticket, moved on without another glance at me. I was the invisible idiot now. Another 20 minutes passes. I'm still staring at this thing, and this time I allow more people to get their tickets. The red Zurich button is popular, so I do the same. I have a ticket, I'm going from the airport to Enge, but how to get to Enge is still a mystery to me. Again lucky I find a train sign that has the word Enge on it. It's not that I'm a guy and can't ask directions, I tried that. The directions that came back to me were just in sounds I didn't understand.

Fast forward 3 years later. I still hate these machines. I know how to use them now, I know the rules. It's a very simple system once you understand it. Crossing that chasm takes no time at all if someone explains it to you. I'm always having to go somewhere, and these things take my money, so, they annoy me. "What? You haven't bought a pass yet???" "No. Getting to it, right after I meet with 3000 people individually who have something I need, or need something I have." In the mean time, I get these fun little pieces of paper.

They're no fun. The probability of pulling one out and showing it to a train conductor or ticket auditor is 1 in 90. That's how many times I have seen an auditor. I met one when I thought I had the right ticket, crossing the right number of zones. I misunderstood the person who told me what I needed to buy. I was short a zone, the zone I was in at the time the auditor checked. You see, in Zurich, they don't check for tickets very often. In fact, it's very very rare that they check at all. But if you don't have one of these things, or a pass of some sort, you pay CHF 80, and they record your passport info. That's what happened to me on one of my work travel trips here. Now I know the rules.

I don't know what to do with these things until I get my pass. Here you can see a few, nicely offset by the color of the wood floors in my bedroom. CHF 4, CHF 6.20, CHF 6.20, CHF 6.20, CHF 4, one way, full price. I'm an idiot.