Poste Italiane

Yesterday I received a call from a store I had ordered some items from; I placed the order almost a month ago, but they what I needed was out of stock and it took this long also due to the truck drivers’ strike of last week that pretty much paralysed Italy.

On the phone, they told me that they had shipped the items and gave me a tracking number for Poste Italiane’s tracking service. The service name is PaccoCelere1Plus, which would be translated as QuickPackage1Plus. “1″ means next-day delivery, and Plus means that the price has gone up because they added origin pick-up service which is only available in a handful of towns. So, anyway, I paid 12 euros for this kind of shipment (instead of the usual 15.30, but that’s probably because this store buys pre-paid batches of forms, so they pay less).

All of yesterday the tracking code wasn’t working. No surprise there: “real time” is an optimistic phrase at best. This morning I tried it again and it said that the package was last seen in Pescara (less than 20 km from where I live) and it was out for delivery. Great! That courier’s trucks usually come to my part of town in the afternoon; a month ago they came here at 4 pm, more or less.

At around 3:30 I left the house, but before leaving I saw the truck passing by. It didn’t stop, but I didn’t worry as it probably had something else to deliver farther away, and I thought it would stop here on its way back. After a while I got a call from my mother (whom I had asked to keep an eye on that) informing me that it did indeed go back, but didn’t stop.

I came home at 4:30 or so and checked the tracking again: it was “awaiting delivery” in the Pescara deposit. I tried calling 803160, which is Poste Italiane’s only call center; it’s a toll-free number, at least. I dug into the menu system: 1 for postal service (Poste Italiane isn’t only about postal services; they also double as a bank and, more recently, as a mobile carrier; and none of those services are carried out properly), 1 to have information about packages, 3 to talk with an operator. I got a few seconds of Vivaldi, something that sounds extremely bad on a phone line, and a female voice on tape told me: “The number you have dialed is busy at this time, please hold the line”. I held the line, I really did, but it didn’t take much effort: after two seconds the connection dropped. I tried several more times and, not getting any farther than the destroyed Vivaldi and the tape, I decided to look for the Pescara’s SDA deposit. SDA is the name of the courier division of Poste Italiane, and I don’t even want to know what it means (perhaps “Seriously Damaged Appliances” knowing how they handle packages).

I went to www.sda.it and couldn’t find the number of the local deposits anywhere. I just googled for “sda pescara” and there it was. I called the number and immediately a tape asked me to dial the number of the extension I needed or just wait. It sounded to me like one of those “if anybody has anything to say against this marriage, speak up now or shut up for ever”, but I still had some faith and trust, so I waited. Some ringing tone, and another tape told me that all the operators were busy, but advised me to wait. I only pay a flat fee for landline calls, so I waited. It kept ringing, but nobody ever picked up. I gave up.

I tried to call the national SDA call center, which is a 199 number – that’s mildly expensive. The first thing I got was another tape telling me that it was a free message, but the call would cost 14.25 cents per minute (when exactly you start start paying is left as a surprise for when you get your phone bill, they like to entertain like that). I went through another menu: 2 for information and help, 0 to talk to an operator. I heard another ringing tone, and after some thirty seconds I heard a microdrop in the connection, followed by another ringing tone; the call was probably forwarded to some other office. This happened several times, at which point I got Vivaldi and the “user is busy” tape again; instead of having the call dropped, however, I got some silence, then the Vivaldi mantra again, and then another tape recorded with what sounded like a 1970 cassette recorder that welcomed me (again?) and told me that really, they were all busy, but they’d get to me at some point before the Sun will finally explode, so I should have kept waiting because otherwise I’d “lose the reached priority”. Now, I would have waited, but I was paying 14 cents per minute and at this point even the dear Vivaldi had been replaced by this very low quality recording with yet another female voice telling me to keep my priority while her esses transparently blended into an unintelligible mixture of effs, vees and some other consonant only pertaining to ancient Sanskrit.

I therefore tried calling Pescara again, and after a few more attempts I managed to get ahold of a woman with a quite annoying voice who told me that I was a customer, so I had to call the call center because they couldn’t give me any information, not even telling me whether I could go and pick it up myself. I was honestly too surprised by her answer so I didn’t think about asking her what exactly they have a phone number for, since customers can’t inquire about their own shipments.

I tried calling the call center again and again and again, giving up and retrying, always getting routed to a different tape with pretty much the same reason. Between one attempt and the other I tried the Poste Italiane number, at least to get a quick Vivaldi fix.

In the end – and mind you, all of this took place in over an hour so I was very frustrated at that point – I called Pescara again and told the same annoyingly-voiced woman that the call center wasn’t even answering. She sounded irritated by my cheek, and bitterly replied that I had to insist with them because they couldn’t tell me anything. When I asked why I had to call somebody elsewhere (who wasn’t even picking up) while I was talking with a person who works at the very same place where my package was kept in, she just said that that’s how it works. At that point, frustrated by the whole situation (I coudln’t even go and pick it up myself because it would have had to be “unlocked” first, and guess who would have to do that? right, the call center!) and by her tone, I told her that they’re a bunch of incompetents and she said… “okay, thank you”. I kid you not, she said “okay, thank you”! I managed to control myself and limit myself to a “go to…” which I self-censored as I preferred to hang up before completing the phrase.

Now you might think that I’m just exaggerating, but this happens every time. Problems with Poste Italiane happen every single day, and I will write a post with a recap of what has happened to me even just lately, and I could bring hundreds of examples of other people going through the very same. It is just not normal that, for instance, an envelope from Hong Kong takes three (3) days to arrive to Milan and then eighteen (18) days to be delivered to the end user. It is not normal that a small package from the US is handled by the customs on December 6th and I still haven’t received it. And it is just not normal that this package going from Civitanova Marche to Chieti passes through Rome, effectively doubling the distance to be covered.

What bothers me the most though is that I haven’t been able to talk with anybody about this problem: the Poste Italiane number just dropped the connection; the Pescara office refused to tell me anything; the SDA call center, for which I had to pay a hefty 14 cents per minute (I think I spent well over €3 for nothing today) led nowhere.

But it’s really just the way it works here, it’s the same with any company, really. They thrive on the fact that customers just get disheartened and give up, accepting to bow their heads and pay for services that are not even provided properly.

Oh and obviously why the truck guy didn’t stop here even though he passed my house twice is still to be unknown. Maybe he didn’t feel like stopping but had to consume some more fuel, but who cares? They’ll claim nobody was home, and I will have no way to prove that my mother was home. After all, if they didn’t stop, how could they see her?

Phone tapping

Italy’s biggest scandals as of late have a common trait: they all involve phone tapping (intercettazioni telefoniche). Many personalities, suspected of acting wrong (something that is very often much more than a suspicion), have had their phones tapped; actually, many common people have had their phones tapped, and that has been a scandal on its own.

The irony is that the people whose phones are tapped and are consequently prosecuted often complain that their privacy has been threatened.

Such is the most recent case, which involves mr. Silvio Berlusconi, construction and television tycoon turned politician. The story of his success is sparkling with darkness, more than any other Italian politician – and that is definitely something. But back to the current news.

An Italian newspaper, Repubblica, reports that mr. Berlusconi (leader of the right-wing coalition) has been trying to buy some senators’ votes to make the current government to collapse. It’s not hard, as it risks toppling whenever there is Parliament activity: the majority is very, very narrow, possibly because there have been some poll-rigging by the right-wing coalition during the elections in April 2006. But more on that in another post.

Berlusconi had some talks with an important personality inside RAI (Angelo Saccà), the public broadcaster, who wasn’t feeling at ease there and wanted to start his own production company and cooperate with a production project. A right-wing politician, mr. Urbani, advises him to have “a man of Berlusconi’s” in there, and the whole thing begins: he is asked to have a few young actresses star in some fiction, one of which is a relative of an unknown left-wing senator who “might come in handy make the government topple”.

Indeed, another senator, Pietro Fuda, who was in Berlusconi’s party at first but then moved to a left-wing party, was reported to have said that “his heart keeps beating to the right[-wing side of the Parliament], even though today he is forced to stay on the left and that anyway, should they touch [Berlusconi's] interests and things, [Berlusconi] can feel safe: [I] will help him in Parliament”.

This is what the Italian political scene is like: a bunch of people caring for their own interests and nothing else; people who claim that the public spending has to be cut and impose taxes on the populace while they make in a month what most people barely make in a year or two. It only takes 31 months in Parliament to obtain a fat life annuity: that is two years and seven months. More on the public spending in another post.

Going back to the sale and purchase of votes, the surreal Italian way appears: not only the Police has got recordings of Berlusconi’s calls made through the cell phone of one of his bodyguards where he actively tries to bribe for votes; not only a left-wing senator elected in Australia (Nino Randazzo) whom he had been trying to bribe by suggesting he’d be the Secretary of State in his next government reported it all; not only there have been open talks of overthrowing the current majority (which had been claimed as illegal because of alleged left-wing elctoral intrigues, the only case in the world where a then-minority coalition would have managed to do it without being able to control the media and the whole electoral system, are you beginning to see the pattern?), but the number one suspected has the courage to say that his privacy has been threatened.

And not only that, but he also goes to the Secretary of Justice, mr. Clemente Mastella (leader of a left-centre-right-wherever-it’s-more-convenient-to-be-in-a-given-moment party) to formally complain about it, and what the Secretary say? That he is right, that this phone tapping is getting out of hand and people are sick of it. Actually, the only people who are sick of phone tapping are those who have something to hide, which by no surprise includes most, if not all, the political chaste. After all, mr. Mastella is indicted himself for bribery and for this reason tried and succeeded in having the prosecutor who was investigating on him to be removed from his job.

In addition to the “privacy threat”, mr. Berlusconi saw it fit to pour some more gasoline on the constant fire of Italian politics, by claiming once again that there is a communist conspiracy about him, that the judges are soviet red, and a plethora of other less than elegant claims.

But then again, what can you expect from somebody who, on the very first day of European presidency (thankfully, states take turns every six months so we didn’t have time to do many long-term pan-European damages), responded this way to a German Member of the European Parliament (mr. Schultz) who had inquired him about the conflict of interest he was having benefits from: “A friend of mine is making a film about Nazi concentration camps; I shall suggest you to star as a kapo”. You can read the whole story about it on the BBC website. Great way to start the Italian semester of presidency, wasn’t it?

National healthcare

Italy, unlike the United States, does have a national healthcare system (servizio sanitario nazionale). It is funded through indirect taxes and allows citizens to obtain health assistance almost for free.

The most common example of it is the so-called base doctor (medico di base), to whom you can go to get help on minor matters and to have drugs prescribed. In case you need something more specific, he or she will refer you to a public specialist by filling a medical recipe (really! it’s called ricetta medica!) that you will hand to the public hospital to book your visit. More likely than not, you have to pay some money to the hospital for it; prices vary depending on the kind of the examination, on the region you are in, and sometimes even on the hospital. Last year, I paid €22 (around $33) for a dermatological examination, plus some €10 ($14) as an additional tax that the region had decided to impose. Not too bad, considering that if I had gone to a private specialist I would have wound up paying no less than €100 ($140).

Everything fine? Not really. The waiting lists tend to be very long, including for simple medical visits. I had to wait over a month for mine, and it’s not uncommon to wait several months either. A few weeks ago, the media briefly reported how a woman, during her 8th month of pregnancy, was told to go back to the hospital after 5-6 months to have some amniotic test done to assess the health of the soon-to-be-born baby. I cannot find any newspaper report about it right now, but I swear I’m not making this up.

However, you can have pretty much any exam and surgery for free, including organ transplants. Especially for surgeries, though, there are two things required from you: that you live long enough to be summoned for it, and that everything goes smoothly. No, I’m not talking about how your body reacts to the surgery. I’m talking about how it’s carried out: it often made the news that some people died, or otherwise felt very sick, after surgeries because the team accidentally forgot items such as scissors and gauze inside the patient. Again, I’m not making this up. Have a look at this article (in Italian): this man died after 7 months of agony following a surgery because they had forgotten a 7 x 14 cm gauze and a “piece of fabric” inside him. And you have to hope that nothing else goes wrong, because you might, say, die because the hospital undergoes an electrical black out (it happened to a 16-year-old girl last year) or for uknown causes during a routine tonsillectomy (it happened to another 16-year-old girl a few days ago, in the same hospital).

Bad hospital, you say? Yes, I don’t deny that, especially since, being in the South, it’s probably in the hand of some Mafia-like criminal organisation. However, in the biggest hospital in Rome, the “Umberto I”, patients are moved from one ward to another, and to and from surgery rooms, using underground tunnels with water leaking from asbestos pipes (absestos, amianto in Italian, has been banned because proved carcinogenic) while cute pets such as rats and giant cockroaches run through forgotten boxes of forgotten radioactive and contagious material to keep them some company and, one would hope, encourage them that they – these beasts – are nothing compared to what they might find in the surgery room. A journalist managed to get into the hospital as a medical orderly and reported it all; here is an article about it.

Funny enough, the only dental care provided by the national healthcare system is the fixing of cavity. Anything else is not covered, and you have to go to some specialist on your own and pay for it out of your own pocket, possibly after agreeing on some loan.

This is not, anyhow, to say that everything is wrong with it. There are very good professionals in the public healthcare field, and I am confident that they outnumber the unreliable ones. The main problem lies in the very deep and unbreakable bureaucracy that permeates the whole country. I will write extensively about it in future posts.

Oh, and by the way: in italian, “drugs” (droga / droghe) are illicit ones, like marijuana or cocaine. Meds are medicinale / medicinali, or in everyday speech, medicina / medicine.