Walk if you have to, rather than take a DB train: it will be faster, and even if you only have one leg, it will be more reliable.
This is a stub for a blog entry, explaining just how atrocious their "service" is. If they meet my requirements for fixing their failure to provide an alternative to a booked passage, cancelled with just five days' notice, this statement will be withdrawn. This introduction explains why this spavined and disgusting wreck of a once proud service has chosen the wrong person to annoy.
For now, I will not detail the nature of their failure here, because I have explained it to them. This is about their complete inability to understand and manage their own organisation, a matter I have raised with them a number of times over the past month. Deutsche Bahn AG should have listened. In the process of privatisation, they have lost their way.
In the early 1960s, I worked in Papua with a team of locals. I picked up a new language, learned to respect their ways, and also knocked around with anthropologists. From them, I learned how to gather useful information about new cultures. Then I went off to University, an entirely different culture.
By the early 1970s, I had my first degree, I knew the culture of taxonomy, and had my first taste of office politics. As a trained debater, I always won. I had become nationally famous as a quiz star, disliked the popular culture that worshipped such people, resigned my army commission, grew a beard, and moved on.
By the early 1980s, I was dealing with my first case of fraud, which involved understanding how frauds worked. I then set up the first IT and systems unit in my department that combined professional and clerical/admin staff. That required new cultural insights.
In 1985, we faced a major catastrophe, one not of our making, but because we worked as a unit, we solved the problem, completely. As result, I became my Minister's favourite head-kicker. Only once did he reject my advice (on the ground of "unwarranted ferocity", but when I showed him the dirt I had on the target, he withdrew his objection).
A little later, I worked for The Australian newspaper for a year, taking the Dirty Digger's dollar and helping people. That meant working in a dog-eat-dog culture, but I flourished.
Can you see where this is leading? Even before I became a management consultant, dealing with fraud and IT systems, I had an instinctive insight into broken cultures and how to mend them.
So when I say DB's systems are broken, I mean it. They do not work.
A link to this statement goes to selected board members and mangers at DB. Now if anybody knows of any left-leaning German press organisations who would like chapter and verse on DB's failings and malfeasances, they have only to ask.
In less than four days, we have no train from Göteborg to Hamburg, and DB have sent me a link to fix this, a link that does not work. We have been through this before, and in the end, they will repay me, but I am fed up.
So now, unless they work some very magical PR in a serious hurry, it's going to be
No more Mr Nice Guy!
In short, DB, Armageddon is coming...all your failings will be set out, in brief for the prosecution.
It will be a pleasure, and in the right hands, the information I have should sink you. You see, I kept all the emails.
No comments:
Post a Comment