Where I should be is at work.
Where I am is at home.
Why?
Because thugs in the Public Transport Association attacked vehicles providing the emergency bus service.
Just to make things clear, the Government has the ADT - the Malta Transport Authority - and they have a contract employing bus drivers (who are part of the ATP - the Public Transport Association) to provide public transport for people in Malta. The ATP is on strike over the liberalisation of hearses, and the ADT is doing what it can to help people left stranded without public transport. So the ADT, a Government entity, was providing an emergency bus service as from today.
Last night I printed off the list of emergency bus routes that were going to be provided, and intended to use them to get to work, which for me involves one bus ride to Marsa, and then making a connection with another bus route.
This morning I left the house half-an-hour earlier than usual, at 6:45am, to allow for possible inefficiencies in the emergency routes.
After I had been waiting on the bus stop for a few minutes, an older gentleman stopped his car to offer lifts. Another person accepted the offer and got in the passenger seat, and I felt safe enough to accept too and got in the back. He dropped me off in Marsa as requested, and I think he is a fantastic example of one human being helping another.
At the Marsa bus stop, just after 7am, I phoned the Malta Transport Authority freephone helpline (which actually wasn't free) to check whether the emergency service was in fact running. A very nice lady spoke to me and said that yes, the service was running, and the buses departed Valletta every half-an-hour.
Shortly after speaking to her, I saw one of the emergency buses drive past, it had just been through Cottonera and was heading back to Valletta. There was a sign in the windscreen listing the villages it passed through, there was someone with a walkie-talkie in the front passenger seat, and the back was full of people.
So, reassured that the service was indeed running and that I now knew what to look out for, I waited.
And waited.
And waited and waited and waited.
In the next forty-five minutes, I didn't see any other emergency buses heading back to Valletta, nor did I see the bus I was waiting for. I decided to talk to the nice lady at the Malta Transport Authority again to ask if I was in the right place, but all I got was an 'engaged' signal, which I thought was odd since before I was put on hold by an automatic system before my call was answered.
I thought that maybe I was standing on the wrong bus-stop, so I walked to another part of the intersection where my bus would certainly have to pass though, and waited there.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited and waited and waited.
Eventually the freephone line went back to the automatic system instead of the engaged signal, but I wasn't put through to an operator and was sent to an answering machine instead. I wanted to know if the service was still running, but given that in an hour and a half of standing in Marsa I had only seen one bus, it was pretty obvious that the service had been disrupted.
Incidentally, in that hour-and-a-half in Marsa, not one person stopped to offer a lift. I can understand that many people would not feel safe offering lifts to strangers, and I doubt that any of them would have been of much use to me, but in all that time I was the only person on the bus stops and it would have been nice to have seen a little solidarity.
As time wore on, I phoned work, first to tell them that I was stranded, and then to tell them that I wasn't coming in at all. I phoned my Dad to ask if he could check the news to see if there was anything about the emergency service, but there was nothing. I tried using WAP on my mobile to get the latest news, but there wasn't anything newer than yesterday evening.
Eventually, at 8:45am, two hours after leaving home, I gave up and headed back.
On foot.
In the mid-morning sun.
In July.
With no shade.
Uphill.
If you have any imagination at all, you should have a pretty good idea of how I feel about that.
It takes around an hour to walk home from Marsa, so I stopped off on the way to cool down a bit, which is where I heard on the radio that the emergency bus service had been suspended because some thugs had attacked the vehicles.
This is so unfair, why shouldn't I be allowed to go to work? I am already furious that the bus drivers have suspended the unreliable service that I rely on in order to get to and from work, but how dare the ATP attack the emergency bus service? How would they feel if someone else did the same thing to them?
As things currently stand, the Public Transport Association owes me
- A day of vacation leave (which I had to take today since I couldn't get to work)
- Half a litre of water for dehydration
- Seven centimetres of elastoplast for my four new blisters received while walking home
- About 500 Euro compensation for emotional trauma and mild heatstroke
- An apology
Since I am unlikely to get any of those things (the one I really, really want is the first one) I hope that the Government sticks up for me, the little guy, and really sticks it to the ATP where it hurts - in their pockets.
Austin Gatt, you are my hero because of the 60,000 Euro. I'm counting on you to do the right thing.
