The hot and the cold

PTV rant

More PTV fun (hell) yesterday... this time it's about the temperature. Now we're coming into the season where it's 4 seasons in one day...

The day started out at a nice 21-22deg. Now I know this is perfect for most people but for me this was cold (plus it was grey windy) and enough for me to need to wear a cardigan. So I get in the train and what do they have? Air conditioning blasting out at probably 15 degrees. I felt like I was sitting in a refrigerator about to die of hypothermia.

[ As the hubby asks me - Do Australians have to have aircon everywhere all the time? I agree with him. Even when it's not hot it's just there, on everywhere, all the time... It fucks up your skin and is a waste of energy. But as I tell him - you guys do the same in winter, everywhere is heated to seemingly 30deg in winter in Europe. as soon as I walk into a shop from 0 deg outside wearing my heavy winter coat I start sweating .. so it seems that Australians are really really afraid of the heat and Europeans are really really afraid of the cold while I'm really intolerant to both freezing airconditioning and sauna-like heating.]

Cut to the afternoon.. it's now 28deg and sunny (ie pretty hot) and I'm in a tram. A really fucking crowded tram. A really really small, old tram (why does Melbourne still use these old trams like a poor country/city? It's not 'cute'.. having one for tourism purposes is enough, but there are sooo many of these old trams which are TOO SMALL to fit the number of people and are completely useless for disabled people, prams and those with luggage with those huge gigantic steps)..

Anyway, despite the fact that it's not peak hour the tram is packed like sardines. I feel like I can hardly breathe. A rude group of middle aged Korean tourists push on (despite the fact that the tram is already full) and I'm ready to swear at them. 

I'm dripping sweat from every pore. The windows aren't even open and even if they are, I can't feel anything because now the tram has stopped at an intersection for what feels like an eternity. Still with my traumatised state from pickpockets in Europe I think to myself this is the perfect time for a pickpocket to go through my backpack. I look behind me and luckily it's only and old Australian man and an old Asian lady, hardly the type...

After what seems like an eternity we finally get through the intersection. and that group of 6 of so Koreans get off! after 1 stop?! ARGH. I get off too, after I'm now dying from HyPERthermia because I couldn't move enough to take my cardigan off. FFS.

And another thing: Why tf do the machines keep printing out receipts? EVERY single bloody machine at the train station spits out a receipt for every customer even though you say NO I don't want a fucking receipt. How much of a waste of paper is that every day?

Oh and I forgot to mention I got lost for like the 6th time (and twice in one day), despite that fact that I can read English perfectly fine and I never got lost in any other city, I still can't make sense of their useless tram maps and bus timetables.

It would be good to have someone working for PTV who actually uses it. I'm pretty sure they are all baby boomers who drive everywhere who don't have a fucking clue about what a mess it is and how user-UNfriendly it is. I constantly have tourists and random lost people ask ME for direction. If the maps actually made sense then people would't have to!

And they seem to have soooooo many staff, which I'll give credit for, are nice, and are helpful most of the time but they could save heaps of money but not employing hundreds of staff to just stand around most of the time, and put up useful signs. Should I be mad at the PTV head honchos for bad decision making/planning or for their graphic designers who can't design a map for shit? I could design a better one blindfolded.

Fuck, PTV is hell. It makes France look actually functional and organised. Apart from the random strikes and the ticket machines which tell me my card doesn't work when it does, and never get fixed when they're broken, I can't even remember having so many problems using public transport in France. And they have trams that fit more than like 10 people in them!