Keinen Service

Germany and the service industry – a match cooked up and baked to perfection in the very depths of hell. 

Anyone who has ever tried to find information about a train ticket will know the horrors of spending hours looking on obscure and outdated websites about which service covers what region, what ticket is valid till which border, when do the cheaper time-bound tickets become valid and which of the many “offers” saves you a few cents on this expensive not-so-public transport service. The fact that Deutsche Bahn is a private company run for profit, on the one hand; while on the other hand the German State actively dissuades people from buying cars by providing little to no parking facilities in cities – simply boggles the mind. I have spent a long hours researching several websites on whether my SWB issued job ticket is valid to take me to the neighbouring state, and if not, which is the add-on ticket I need to buy. 

Try to shift house and you are confronted with more problems. If, after several months of maniacally checking websites and applying for houses, you find somewhere reasonably pleasant to live, at a rent you can afford, you can forget about anything being straightforward. After the life has been sucked out of you while trying to quit your own internet, water and electricity contracts, you can wait a month or 2 to get new contracts in place. Internet providers are notoriously unhelpful and the queue is several months long. They seem to get away with this because everyone is equally bad. 

This seems to be the norm for the “service” industry in Germany. I called and emailed the gym Fitness First to quit my contract, after it ran its 1-year course. I was told that all was fine, and it was taken care of. 2 months later I see that I am still being charged. When I call to find out what’s wrong, the lady tells me that I quit the contract too late, that it is automatically renewed for another year, and that an email was sent to me alerting me of this. The fact that the email was sent to an out-of-order email address, which I had already reported on phone, and used the new one to email them, did not phase her from being unhelpful, unfriendly and downright rude. Why is this industry so blind to the fact that even if I do get forced to pay for another year, I will most likely not return to their gym thereafter? Considering my relative youth, that would mean they probably lose 20-30 years of my business because they are just cold and ruthless. Yes, maybe legally they are partially in the right (as she repeatedly kept telling me dismissively). But that’s not how every human transaction needs to be handled, if you are in service. Because the experience is what keeps customers coming back right? Isn’t it better to take a customer friendly approach, accept that the email was erroneously sent to an old address, and try to find a solution that is fair?

Then there is the adamant refusal to accept card payment. You go to a bar to drink – they don’t accept cards. You try to buy a ticket on a train, only cash and exact change please. Why is it such a big deal, you ask? Why don't I just carry cash? I do, but its not like ATMs are found on every corner. There is a single Deutsche Bank ATM in the whole of Bonn, a city with a population of over 3 lakhs (3 hundred thousand). And withdrawing from non-affiliated ATMs cost 5€ per transaction. What era does this banking sector belong to, really? I once got shouted at by a taxi driver for trying to pay less than 10€ by card. I wanted to use my card so I would have a receipt, and be able get a reimbursement from work. I later figured out that taxi drivers have to probably pay a surcharge if they accept card payments?

1.   Why? Why does the regulation not encourage cashless transactions? Are we or are we not living in the 21^st century?
2. Since when is it my job to know this, and to somehow from the kindness of my heart care enough to produce cash after an intercontinental journey that’s lasted close to 24 hours? Just so that this unpleasant taxi driver does not lose some money?

Whether it is a restaurant or a shop, whether the server is impatient and rude, the cashier is unfriendly and the people stocking the shelves won’t take a step out of their way to assist you, what experience do you have in the end? Don’t these businesses understand the concept of customer loyalty at all? If you don’t want to be nice to be nice, at the very least do it for business. 

My econ brain keeps wondering why this has become the status quo. It is not because these service professionals are underpaid, because there is a minimum wage limit. Is it because they are not trained? More likely the firms themselves don’t care about any service standards. My mind keeps going back to the “kirana dukaan” aka kiosk near my childhood home. Germany has much to learn from these humble neighbourhood shops – that give you monthly or more credit based ONLY on trust (they write down the account in a notebook and you square it every now and then), that remember you along with hundreds of customers they see daily, that will sometimes agree to deliver only a litre of milk, because they know that the next time you need your monthly groceries, you will think of them. Competition is intense, the incentive to be a profitable business is stark. Does the provision of this German social safety net play into making people lazy then? So what if they are fired for being rude to a customer (which they won’t be) – unemployment benefits are abound. 

Don’t even get me started on the bureaucracy. Dealing with it is almost as difficult as spelling it. You go to the foreigner’s office, and God help you if you cannot speak German. You could get lucky and have someone good assigned to your case. But if not, they will send you on the runaround until your legs fall off and you plead for mercy. I am fighting a losing battle to reverse a callous and lazy decision which could just cost me my visa. From not being able to spell my name (after enunciating and spelling it out 3 times military style), to wrong information being handed out, to the utter lack of will to work, I have seen a lot. But what really gets my goat, every single time, is the completely high-horsey, facetious, this-is-the-rule-and-we-cant-work-around-it-even-if-we-did-when-we-fucked-you-over, condescending, bordering on inhumane interactions. 

Sometimes I wonder if it is just the all-round terribleness of German food that makes Germans so grumpy and irritable all the time. If you have seen an old person react too slowly to the changing streetlight or delaying getting into a train by a nano-second, thereby making a nearby German lose 1 whole second of his life, causing him/her to tscchkkk irritably and loudly to all and sundry, you will know what I mean. 

This is a very bitter post, and I apologise if I ruined your mood. Thanks for not moving along mid-post. Nostalgia is a powerful tool, it no doubt colours my memories of home. Possibly I am focusing on the rouge rikshawallas too little, and on the friendly postman too much. Even discounting this, as well as correcting for overwhelming homesickness aggravated by the fact that borders are closed and COVID looms over travel for the foreseeable future, the scale is still tipped in favour of India for daily life just being friendlier and warmer. While headlines discuss the hordes of Germans landing in Malle for their yearly vacations, there is no talk of expats who cannot visit their families during this spectacularly long drawn out difficult time, and have some weeks of respite from the Germanness of Germany.