The following texts were written from the grand halls of Milano Stazione Centrale Waiting Room. They chronicle the descent into madness that was...
Independence Day Weekend.
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Words cannot describe how much I hate J.P. Morgan's hellish apparition, Chase Bank. In fact, one of the first things I am going to do when I get home is track down the computer that froze my card and simply scream at it like a deranged species of howler monkey for a few hours before putting my foot up its cold silicon ass. I bay for the blood of this computer.
It couldn't have been more perfect. The day I arrived in Rome, I was ready to go. Things had just started looking up after the last fiasco with Chase not two days prior, and I was fully prepared to start enjoying my trip again. That is, I was going to, until I tried to withdraw 20 Euro. I couldn't read Italian, but my stomach immediately froze with dread when my card was returned with no money.
I spent the next six hours trying in vain to reach the Chase customer service line. "You bastards!" I wanted to shout into the receiver. "Unfreeze my card, you boobs!" But, alas, the international nature of the call ceaselessly stopped me in my tracks. After blowing through every phone in the tri-city area, I wandered into a grocery store. There, I overheard a horrifying conversation next to me: "Happy 4th of July." Happy day before Sunday.
All at once, it hit me: The bank and its customer service line would be unreachable for the next 48 hours. Somewhere in Hell, Satan was looking up at Chase, saying "wow". Saturday, the fourth. It's a good thing not many people in that particular grocery store understood English cursing. Although, if they could, this performance would have surely gotten a sound round of applause.
I rationed out some of my meager cash assets to send out an SOS e-mail to home, and began killing time until Monday.
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Monday morning. I'm astounded that as I've started sleeping on wood and stone, my dreams have become more and more frequent and vivid. To my dismay, however, none of these dreams could satiate my bloodlust toward Chase J.P. Morgan. It's just been a lot of elevators with no walls and amusement parks. Don't quite know how that works into the whole scheme of things.
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I was reminded just how fragile it all is. A simple computer command from a thousand miles away had effectively turned me into a hobo with a laptop. For the first time in my life, I was forced to hold out my hat (I had found a hat, how ominous is that) for bread money. Not something I thought I'd be doing on my trip. I had over $500 at my disposal, but a nightmarish cocktail of computer code and bank holidays had made it as if it didn't even exist. I was trapped in a country where English was closer to Esperanto than Lingua Franca, and where I was constantly mocked by lines of food and drink I knew I could eat to my heart's content in only a slight variation of my current situation. My mind continued to return to the grim specter of J.P. Morgan, his withered claw of a hand flipping the Tourist/Vagrant switch on the floor with no number in Chase Tower, Dallas.
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When my mind was not intent on re-enacting my favorite scene from Office Space with the Chase mainframe, I thought of home. My family, my friends, my dog, and most importantly, the vast array of cheap food readily available within walking distance of any given point in the city of Dallas. A half-liter of Coke is almost $3.00 over here. I'm simply dumbfounded, as I and every other red-white-and-blue-blooded American is fully used to paying that for a 12-pack of 12-ounce cans in the States. It's the little things that put everything into perspective.
We've got it made in America. For all my heated bashing of the corporate sprawl, I am well aware of its benefits: Innovation is spread quickly and efficiently, mass-production ensures affordability, and not one person can say with a straight face that our financial institutions didn't make everything we have today possible.
This is not to say that those benefits will stop me from calling the Ghostbusters on J.P. Morgan.
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In the waiting room of Milano Centrale, there is a blown-up child's drawing of the station. There's something pure and uncensored about the drawings of a child. Among the eight people drawn in the station, only one is smiling. The rest have looks of confusion, anger, surprise and sadness on their pink crayon faces.
I can't help but feel like I'm not the first one this has happened to.
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