A classic Portuguese experience

In which one tries to fix a metro card (64)

So we were headed about town and popped on the Metro. Our plans were foiled, though, when the bipper threw up an Invalid Card message. Erk?! exclaimed the Unfortunate One Of US (UOOU) while peering myopically at the hard-to-read display screen after nearly smacking into the closed entry gates.

After trying again with the same result (minus the nearly smacking into the closed entry gates), UOOU went through the hassle of backing up, apologizing to the folks behind UOOU that UOOU’d just inconvenienced, and took the dramatic step of actually removing the card from the wallet. Good to go. Phew.

UOOU’s cork card/money/coin purse handily comes with one blank side, making it easy to know which to slap down on the metro card reader. This seems to work better if the card is closest to Slapped Side.

Back on the scanner and … Invalid Card. By now, the other of us had gotten through the turnstile so we were on opposite sides of the entry gates. No turning back now. Since the Metro office was unoccupied, UOOU went off to buy another Viva Viagem card, and we missed the next train.

When we got to our destination there was a person in the Metro office (niftily built into the wall, behind dark glass), so we stopped to talk. Trotting out our minimal Portuguese, we manage to convey the situation. He scanned the Invalid Card, looked at the result and … told us it was Invalid.

Yes. Got that, we responded. We want to know why.

He looked at us funny. What’s your problem?

He scanned it again. He said, yep, it’s Invalid. Again, request to find out why, again funny look. Finally, comprehension! “Because the card is damaged,” he said, and dismissively slid it back to us under the glass partition.

We stood there, holding this pristine, unbent card, even more confused. Can you tell us where it’s damaged? we tried again, sliding it back. Or at least whether we can recover the 25€ UOOU had added to it a few days prior?

Back and forth we went. To the rear of the booth, a woman was taking a call. She suddenly lurched forward - phone still to her ear - and snatched the card out of his hand. (Bet they have a great working relationship!) She scanned it while he sat there. Frowned. This happened a few times.

She asked us what we wanted to do, and we said if we could just transfer the money on the damaged card to the our new card that would be awesome. Her fingers flew over his keyboard as he sat idly by. Muttering happened. Maybe Invalid Card did not want to yield the secret information of how much was on it?

Another phone rang. She answered. She was now on two phones at once. Double earring it, as it were. Princess Leia, with phones. He remained grumpily immobile, effectively boxed out of other options. While juggling two devices, she apparently directed him to make a call about our card. He did. Now three out of the four ears in the booth had a phone attached to them. We covered our own fearing they, too, would sprout handsets with long, curly cords.

Seriously, we turned around and shrugged at the people behind us, feeling really badly to be taking so much time.

That’s something we weren’t initially weren’t sure we’d learn to accept, actually. Portugal embraces the I-am-only-dealing-with-the-one-person-in-front-of-me concept. No matter how long the line is, they will spend what seems like forever handling everything the person at the head of the line needs. There are two potential responses to this practice. We can glare laser beams into the back of the head at the front of the line. Or, and we are finally coming around to this approach, we can calmly wait our turn, knowing they will take just as long with us and we will have all of our questions answered, too.

Eventually her calls seemed to wrap up, and she walked him through what he needed to do to move our nearly 25€ from the Invalid Card to … a second new card we had to buy. Meanwhile, the woman came out of the booth to help people behind us, which relieved a lot of our tension. And then, we were done.

Net net: UOOU began the trip with one Viva Viagem card and ended it with two after leaving the “damaged” Invalid object in the hands of the Metro employees. We spent a euro for the two new cards and lost about 30 minutes of our afternoon. And we have no idea why it happened in the first place so we can’t take steps to prevent a recurrence. Not a perfect resolution, but certainly better than it could have been.

And we encountered both ends of the “customer service spectrum” that we’ve seen here in Portugal. The first point of contact was actively unhelpful, repeatedly telling us information we already knew and offering no solutions. His overworked superior went above and beyond when it would have been easy for her to simply ignore the situation entirely. Both experiences were unusual in our US framework. Neither, we have found, is uncommon here.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Amy & Scott