Service With a Snarl and Frown

Although, the Soviet Union is only a memory, the Soviet attitude of “Don’t bother me, go to hell, I’ve got better things to do than help you” attitude still lives on in its full glory. I like to affectionately call this….“service with a snarl and a frown”! You’d think after 25 years of traveling extensively throughout Russia and the ex-Soviet republics I’d become accustomed to this. However, whenever I stumble upon it and get discouraged, I still have to tell myself “it’s not personal, it’s just the Soviet/Russian way”.

This attitude was on full display when I tried to load my bag “up” onto the train from Vladivostok to Khabarovsk. I used the preposition “up” because the train’s wagon is a good six or so feet from the actual platform. There are stairs, but they are nearly vertical and don’t exactly enable one to easily get luggage on board. But this wasn’t going to get in my way, plus if I got into trouble there was a steward standing right next to me, ready to at least give me hand? He wouldn’t let me fail? Right!?! Wrong!

Much like the famous Greek myth of Sisyphus, where the man rolls the boulder up the hill, only to have it fall back each time, I was in a similar dilemma.  I spent what felt like an eternity, but in reality probably was only 5 minutes wrestling with the bag only to fail until I finally got it up!! Once I finally got into the wagon I was scolded by the stewardess for dragging my bag and causing the carpet to do all sorts of contortions. I just couldn't win!

But the mother of all Soviet “service with a snarl and a frown” was still to come. After suffering through trying to manage my bag I knew I could not travel this way all the way across the nation, not with eleven pounds of books weighing me down. My stubborn self kept saying to me “you can do this, after all it’s good exercise”, but eventually my practical side won out!! I had no other choice, either I sent them home or probably wind up injured.

The next step would be to find a service to send them home. I seriously thought about Russian Post as an option, after all it would be cheaper but that came with real risks! First of all it would for sure be slower, but the real worry was these very special books may end up stolen or in some remote Far Eastern outpost sitting for months waiting to be shipped. Therefore it’d have to be DHL! I knew it wouldn’t be cheap, but it was the safest, quickest and easiest option………so I thought. Never assume anything in Russia….especially in regards to something being easy!!!

I packed up my bag with the eleven pounds or 5.5 kgs worth of books and head to DHL. The office buried deep inside a rather rundown building that shared an office with a travel agency. This was not exactly the local UPS store or Kinko’s/FedEx, but whatever worked!! I walked up to the counter and told the girl I needed to send these books. She weighed them and snarled back, “it’ll be expensive”. I knew that but told her I needed to send these books and was willing to pay. At this point it seemed she didn’t want my business telling me to go to UPS about six blocks away and that they’d be a bit cheaper. I appreciated her telling about UPS, but still felt she would rather not help me. So I figured I better try UPS and set out looking for them.

After getting lost at least four times (Google maps always seems to frustrates me) I found the building. I asked the security officer if he knew where UPS was. He looked at me like I was smoking crack. He instructed me to go into the building and look. I walked in and the doors were painted the kinda light brown color of UPS. I thought maybe this was a good sign, but as luck had it there was no UPS and in all likely hood it went out of business. Therefore my only option now was either go back and face “Miss Snarl” or carry them home! So….I swallowed my pride knowing that no way was I going to carry these across Russia. When she saw me walk back in the building her eyes about rolled out of her sockets. She probably thought, “not this guy again”.

I told her UPS was gone and I had no other options but to send it through them. She replied kind of surly, “but there ARE other options!” and called another UPS store a couple of kilometers away. But they didn’t answer either, forcing her to deal with me, albeit grudgingly. She started the process by printing out three pages of paperwork I’d need to fill out and then asked me if I knew how to write in Russian. I said yes I knew how to write in Russian. She replied, “but do you know how to write cursive Russian”??? I said yes. Quickly she pointed out all the different lines and gave me instructions.

I started to fill out the first line and she scolded me saying I wasn’t writing it correctly. I was perplexed to why. She told firmly and kind of angrily “you NEED to write the date out in cursive”. So, instead of writing it out simply as 16 апреля (16^th April), I had to write out шестнадцатого апреля or shest’natstovo aprelya or sixteenth of April. I crossed out what I’d written and tried to correct it. She was NOT happy, and took the sheet from me throwing it away, basically saying try again! To think I was still on line number 1 and had another ten or so to go plus two more pages after that. Looked like I’d be there a while!

I tried again but couldn’t fit the month, the date and the year plus the city and province into just one small line. And to add insult to injury, I accidentally made a small penmanship error writing out the date, the sixteenth. At this point she was nearly enraged. She printed another sheet and instructed me to do it again!!

I was discouraged and apologized saying I didn't know the Russian system. She answered, “well this is the system we have here in Russia”. I knew we weren’t getting anywhere and asked her if she would do it out for me. She was not amused sternly telling me that the “sender must write it out themselves…that’s the rule”. I told if I wrote it out, we’d be there all day.

Unsurprisingly this attitude is nothing new, one that can be traced back to well before the Soviet Union to Tsarist times when such writers as Nikolai Gogol’ or Chekhov wrote about just this type of pettiness and the bureaucratic ways of the nation. So in a way you could simply say she was a “victim of the system” and couldn’t help herself.

Finally, finally we finished everything and just as I was ready to whip out my credit card to pay she asked for my passport. Wait. What?! A passport?? WTF? She said in order to complete the transaction she needed my passport. This would be no simple matter since my passport was back at the hotel and she went on lunch break in five minutes.

At this point I had no other choice, the books were wrapped up and ready to go. So I quickly ran back to my hotel grabbed my passport and came back with it in hand. She made about three pages worth of copies, had me sign and date each page in English and Russian. Not only that but I had to write out the city I was sending it from on all my passport copies. Finally the drama really was over! I couldn’t believe it!!! What I thought would only be a quick twenty-minute transaction turned into an all day ordeal. You would truly think that by now I would learn that nothing and I do mean nothing comes easily in Russia!!!

After a long, torturous day at the hands of DHL, I was extremely hungry for dinner! I’d passed by an Italian pizza joint on my way to DHL and decided this would be a great place to refuel! As I walked in the door, Russian guys dressed as Italian jokers and clowns greeted me. Rather fitting after a long day of shenanigans that I’d end my day with clowns and jokers!!!