Arriva: still a disaster, and this time you can’t blame Austin

Is there an English equivalent of the Maltese word bezzul? I can't think one up on the spot. The only possibility that springs to mind is 'loser'... at least, the way it is used as an insult in so many Hollywood movies:

"Loser!"

"Loser, yo' mama!"

And so on, and so forth, and so fifth.

But let's face it, that word alone does not even begin to fill the enormous linguistic lacuna left by the non-existence of a suitable English equivalent for bezzul.

Unlike the Maltese epithet, 'loser' does not automatically conjure up a vision of universal futility and existential angst. Nor does it contain within itself the implicit hint of 'accursedness', whereby a bezzul is condemned to carry the seeds of his or her ill fortune for all eternity. ('Losers', by way of contrast, can always become winners tomorrow, depending on the luck of the draw.)

Besides, the English word cannot be transformed through a simple sleight of pronunciation into a transitive verb, which automatically transfers one's cursed state of 'bezzul-ness' (or bezzul-dom... bezzul-ity... bezzul-itude... whatever) onto others.

Being an ordinary loser is not contagious - except perhaps in some specific environments, say, around the blackjack table in a casino - so losers cannot make losers of other people, as your traditional bezzul supposedly has the ability to do.

One last thing - and I admit this is an unfair comparison for purely cultural reasons - in Hollywood movies, one does not respond to the 'loser' insult by simply extending one's index and pinkie in the direction of the vituperator, in a pseudo-Satanic 'goat's head' configuration which is separately, and for entirely unrelated reasons, also synonymous with heavy metal singers like Ronnie James Dio (among other unparalleled paragons of coolness).

So all things considered, I think we can all safely agree that 'loser' is nowhere near as satisfactory a descriptive term as bezzul; and on this front alone the Maltese language clearly abundantly defecates all over its many rivals in the international linguistic arena. (So all together now: LOSERS!)

Anyway, by now you will probably be wondering what degree of spectacular misfortune may have got me contemplating the nature and meaning of bezzul-ocrity.

Let's just say I have spent just over a week without a car (for reasons which involve a whole bunch of weird noises which sound as if a clutch of dragon eggs may have just hatched in the carburetor... you know, ordinary boring car stuff like that) and have therefore been compelled, through sheer necessity, to rely on the local bus service.

Allow me to emphasise the fact that I elected to use the bus service in particular - and not, say, the overhead monorail or the underground - because... um... that's pretty much the extent of Malta's public transport network right there. Yes, that's right. It is now 2013, and we have never come round to even discussing alternative methods of transporting ourselves to various parts of an island that could fit quite comfortably into New York's Central Park... no, not even after a prominent local businessman once suggested a centralised, circular overhead monorail system to relieve traffic congestion. (And oh! How everyone laughed at the time! I wonder how many of you are still laughing at the idea now.)

But anyway, the fact remains that as things stand today, the only options available are the bus, or the car which makes those dragon-egg-hatching noises and whose exhaust pipe has in any case already fallen off, or to walk, which is naturally unthinkable.

So the bus it was, and thus, verily, did my lamentations begin.

And this is what led me to conclude that I must, in fact, be a bezzul. No other explanation for it. We all know (because this was the word of Austin, and Austin was always right) that the Arriva bus service is simply flawless in every respect. It runs like clockwork, which I suppose means you have to wind it up every so often like a rusty squeezebox. And besides, since there has been a change in government, but no discernable corresponding change in the standards of service, nobody is actually complaining about it any more.

Clearly, then, there cannot be a problem. So why has the same perfect and flawless service been such a complete and utter DISASTER for the past eight or so days ¬- that is, the only eight days I have actually been forced to use it?

Because of me, obviously. Maybe I transferred my accursed state of bezzul-acity onto the entire public transport service just by virtue of having chosen to actually use it.

Or perhaps those buses just don't like me - which is fair enough, I suppose; after all, the feeling is entirely mutual - and when they found out about my car problems, they rubbed their front wheels together with glee and said, "Bingo, folks! It's payback time!"

Then they figured out which routes I was planning to use and sabotaged them all, one by one, starting with Bus 22 from Gzira (the bus stop itself is called 'Imperu', by the way, which sort of makes you wonder what century Transport Malta is currently in), which quite simply did not run on time ONCE in the past week. 

Now, before proceeding with my litany of complaints, a small but very important disclaimer. I have been writing articles in newspapers since 1997, and - with maybe one or two exceptions towards the beginning - I have set myself some very clear rules of engagement on how to set about tackling issues pertaining to service (or the lack thereof).

These include an absolute prohibition on me using this column to air gripes and complaints of a purely personal nature. There have been a few exceptions (this article being a case in point) but I'd like to think I have generally stuck to this rule over the years, and this I did for multiple reasons.

One: it is simply bad form to give the impression - however erroneous - that one is trying to extract some form of freebie or other out of any particular company or service provider. That, to me, is infra dig. In fact I am consistently surprised how so many of my colleagues indulge in this glorified form of blackmail almost on a weekly basis - banging on and on about what lousy service they got at this or that restaurant (for instance), in what can only be described as a naked ruse to land themselves a free meal at the next restaurant they choose to visit.

Two: I feel there is an overwhelming mismatch of firepower involved here. Put simply, it's unfair to force an ordinary company to respond to a prominent article in a Sunday paper by means of a letter which will not - for purely practical reasons - be given the same prominence or have the same impact.

And yes, I am perfectly aware that some companies out there often deserve nothing less, but as a certain Danish schizoid once put it, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"

Yet another reason is that... well, quite frankly I don't think anything could be less interesting than reading about other people's recent altercations with a shopkeeper, or an argument at the nearest post office or a minor exchange of opinions with a civil servant, etc.

I mean seriously, guys, don't you have anything slightly more substantial to sink your claws into this week?

But of course I am about to break all of the above rules of engagement - not just because of a one-off freak argument with a bus driver (though I had one of those too... and quite frankly I consider myself remarkably lucky to still be alive) - but because the entire experience was so perfectly horrible, such an absolute and utter nightmare from every perspective, that it would almost be criminal not to warn the general public what they might be getting themselves into, should they all decide to do what Michael Stipe did at the end of the music video for 'Everybody Hurts'. (Incidentally, if everyone in that video got onto an Arriva bus after abandoning their cars on the motorway, well, it would sort of explain the title of the song.)

OK, let's start with the bleedingly obvious. Buses don't keep to the times as displayed on the timetable at every bus stop. Now, I'd understand if one, maybe two buses missed their appointment with a Gzira bus-stop in the eight or nine days I've been using that particular route. But the truth is that it was late every goddamn time. This morning, for instance, it was three-quarters of an hour late... I kid you not, I waited from 9.30 to 10.14am - which is the time the 9.44 bus finally arrived, and much the same happened yesterday, the day before and the day before that, too.

Nor was it just route 22 from Gzira to San Gwann that seemed magically incapable of sticking to within reasonable approximation of that timetable: ALL the other buses I tried were exactly the same. In fact I couldn't help getting the impression that the service, in this respect, has remained completely unchanged from the old days of the Orange Conglomerate it purported to replace.

Only back then, there was no such thing as a timetable to stick to at all... you just got on to the next bus whenever it showed up, and that was it. Today, the exact same general principle applies; the only difference being that we now have a timetable affixed to every bus stop... you know, just rub our noses in the fact that this hopeless service could be so much better for all concerned, if it only observed its own goddamn rules.

Then there were the little incidents on the buses themselves. Like I said I must be a bezzul. How else to explain that I encountered some form of problem on practically every bus I took?

Some of these, I admit, bordered on the comical: for instance, when a (local) bus driver took a wrong turning into Mrabat street - somewhere in that vaguely defined hinterland between Sliema, St Julian's and Kappara - instead of going up to Ta' Giorni hill at the traffic lights.

Incredibly, the driver asked what looked like an British tourist to direct him as he REVERSED some 100 yards all the way up to just before the bridge... and (as British tourists so often tend to) this particular specimen made a right royal hash of things and directed the bus right into, and subsequently up onto, the pavement.

Which reminds me: remember that noise made by those dragon eggs which hatched in my carburetor? Well, my car doesn't have the same sort of hydraulic system you'd expect to find in the bowels of a vehicle the size of an overfed brontosaurus. So the noise on this occasion sounded more like Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities, after accidentally puncturing his scrotum sac on one of the sharper and pointier artifacts from the horde of Thror.  

And once that humungous howl of draconian agony eventually subsided, we discovered that the entire bus had got itself got wedged, and was now unable to perform the hairpin turn its driver had evidently planned to take.

The result? Miles and miles of traffic in all directions, as far as the eye could see, and horns blaring as far as the ear could hear... until, at the utmost end of all hope: 'The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!" Etc...

And it didn't stop there. Later that same day, I found myself - for the umpteenth time - standing at a bus stop, this time in St Julian's, waiting for the 225 (the one that takes you all the way to the Gozo ferry) which was by that time already well over a half-hour past its scheduled appointment.

Sure enough the bus eventually did turn up... and of course, by then it was too full to take in any more passengers, resulting in another half-hour wait, etc. (Note that this was when I had the aforementioned altercation with the bus driver, who arbitrarily decided to be inflexible just on one regulation - the one about a maximum number of passengers - while ignoring all others, including strict adherence to Arriva's own timetable, as well as the need to keep his own identity tag on display, etc.)

But by far the most disheartening aspect of this entire Arriva experience was dealing with the customer care department on the number supplied at every bus stop. From the employees of this department I learnt a number of very useful things: for instance, that it is actually the passengers' fault when a bus is late. Always, without exception.

One customer care official even resorted to the baldest lie I have ever heard over the phone: telling me that the reason there was only one bus 22 between 9 and 11am on Friday 7 June was that it was a public holiday... 'so the Sunday schedule applies'.

Small snag: the Sunday schedule was identical to the Friday one. So there should still have been three buses in that time.

In the end, after pointless dealings with various customer-care employees, I advised one of them to change the department's name from 'Customer Care' to 'Customer Don't-Really-Give-A-Shit'.

That, at least, would be more honest.

Meanwhile I will leave you all with the following unanswerable conundrum: if, for the past two years, we all held Austin Gatt responsible for the unmitigated fiasco called 'Arriva', who takes political responsibility for the same fiasco now?

And since the Labour opposition howled so loudly - louder event than Smaug after that little scrotum incident - why has it done nothing whatsoever to actually improve the service in the three months it's been in power?

Just asking, that's all...