It’s the first day of work of the new year. Or at least that’s what the schedule was until I woke up this morning. I’d already gotten an e-mail that the heating didn’t work at school, but administration said the temperature inside would be good enough to still teach. Doubtful, but I don’t make the rules. I got up early to make sure I’d have time to get to work in the snowy weather that we have. Normally I cycle to work, but in snow and icy weather I take the train and bus. I’d rather cycle because it’s much more relaxing and convenient, but last year I took a pretty nasty tumble which did a lot of damage to my previous bike. I was mostly fine myself, but it definitely got me a little bit hesitant to cycle in more icy weather since I really don’t want to do any damage to my new bike. So it’s good to have an alternative with public transport.
Not long after I woke up, my schedule started turning red. Cancelled classes are marked in red and the first two hours were already cancelled due to the aforementioned heating problem. It wouldn’t be much longer until the entire day was scrapped. Turns out teaching in a building with no heating while it’s snowing outside is probably not the best idea. So I got an extra day of winter break which I can spend doing some prep work for the rest of the week and then going back to relaxing. Not a bad deal.
When the classes weren’t yet cancelled, I already read in our online software that several parents had called in to say their kids wouldn’t come to school due to the weather. It got me thinking back to my youth. I would always take my bike to school back then as well, although it wasn’t a fancy e-bike that does all the hard work for you. It was good old fashioned pedaling through the bad weather. We didn’t really have the money to take public transport regularly, despite the fact that the train stopped within eyesight of my school. But on particularly bad days I would get a ticket to ride, so to speak. I wonder if that couldn’t be an option for these kids, but some of them might live far from a station, we have some smaller towns where the public transport is not ideal, but should still be doable. Then again, just stay home, I shouldn’t say this as a teacher but school isn’t that important after all.
As a teenager I figured out a great solution to the train problem. Just don’t pay for it. Alright, I suppose it’s not a great solution, but it is a solution. Nowadays we have fancy cards that you scan to open those little gates that let you get onto the station in the first place. Our station is too small and irrelevant to have those gates, but I wouldn’t be able to leave the station where my secondary school was with those gates. They were being introduced towards the end of my time there, but since enough people would use old-fashioned tickets, you could just walk past the gates back then. They had two kinds of paper tickets though. They had the ones you would buy when you went to the station on the day you took the train. You would type in your info, pay for the ticket and it would spit out a ticket for the day for the route you would take. Back then you’d have to buy separate tickets for bus, train and tram as well, now that’s all one system and the card just registers which company the money should go to.
But the secondary option they had was the one I ended up abusing as a kid. If you traveled a lot by train, but not enough to get a proper subscription, you could buy a stack of unlabeled cards for your route. Then on the day you traveled, you would go to the station, stamp your card with the date, and it would be usable. The train conductor would then stamp it again if they came by your seat. If they came by your seat. A train can be quite full and my train ride to school was only about 10 minutes or so, so the conductor would not have the time to check even half the train, and often way less. What we would do as teenagers was look at where the conductor got off the train to check things and then blow the whistle for departure, and enter the train as far away from the conductor as possible. Then if we did get caught, we would pretend that we simply forgot to stamp our ticket with the date in the morning. That way we could keep using the ticket repeatedly until we got caught. There was a fine for not paying your ticket, but most conductors would just see a bunch of kids and not bother with the fine. I must have saved well over a hundred euros – which back then was quite a lot – throughout my last few years in secondary school. No regrets
Nowadays I have to pay full price for my public transport and it’s quite an expensive expenditure. Even traveling to work and back is easily around 7 euros, and I don’t even live that far from work. Public transport in the Netherlands has always been less than perfect with a price that seems far too high, but perhaps that’s just showing my poor upbringing. On a day like today, with snow covering the streets fully for the first time in what feels like years, it’s nice to reminisce to those old days, although I don’t miss the rainy and snowy days where I did end up taking my bike to school. I remember being beyond miserable and then spending all day with soaked socks and shoes, just hating life. That’s why one of the first things I did when I started taking a bike to work again was buy a really good raincoat and pants. They even have little covers for your shoes which is easily one of my top 10 favorite inventions of all time. Not having wet feet all day at work really changes the way you look at life. I’m going to finish up my prep work for the week and then relax, I hope you enjoy this little bonus post, and look forward to tomorrow’s review of an anime that has to do with punching. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 