Everyday friction

Last week, because of a combination of bad planning (my bad) and endless delays (Deutsche Bahn’s bad), I arrive very late in a hotel in Berlin. I had to ring the doorbell. The guy at the reception started giggling the moment I came in, which irritated me at first (did my hair look so funny, after all these hours on the train?). But he quickly reassured me that it wasn’t about me. It was about the fact that he had pressed the button for the daily closing of the system about ten seconds before I rang the door bell (it was just after 3am). It meant that the computer was busy for a while and it would take a few minutes before he could check me in. He apologizes profusely – and we started chatting. First, the obligatory complaints about the notorious lateness of German trains, then he told me about his job as stand-in nightporter, in which he often had to travel but travel time got counted as work time. He told me about his aunt in a village in Brandenburg and how the local train problems…