strike!

I will be stuck in Szerencs next weekend. Like a bear caught in a trap, I am thinking I will gnaw off my own leg at the prospect of 36 hours in the middle of nowhere. I will be in this predicament because the train company will be strike. For the sixth time in six weeks.

MAV workers, of the Hungarian train company, are pissed off with something. I don't know what has got them riled up, and I don't care. Frankly I am pissed off with pissed off Hungarians. They all have bees in their bonnets all the time. There are so many bees in so many bonnets in this country I doubt you could find a bonnet anywhere that is bee-free. Or a bee that isn't residing in a bonnet.

Everything pisses them off - from 87 year old international treaties (see below) to Chinese people. The warm weather pisses them off, the cold weather pisses them off. Long-dead communists piss them off, as do long-dead Austrian kings and long-dead Turkish marauders. Even other Hungarians piss them off both alive and dead. People are vilified for having more money or less money or the same amount. I even piss them off. Well just the old ladies.

So they will be striking. From what information I can gather, they want more money and the Government doesn't want to give it to them. So they will keep shutting down the railways until their bees have been expelled from their bonnets. But I don't hold out much hope. They might get their money but inevitably they will find something else to be pissed off about. The colour of their uniforms, for instance, is hideous - they might want that sorting. Or they might want toilets on the trains that don't smell of gangrene.

They might find out the Romanians are earning more money than them, or that the Slovakians have nicer toilets and that will lead to more chest beating and indignant outrage. They might get wind of a wage rise for Mongolian railway workers, or a sniff of revolution on the part of the Taiwanese train drivers. The Ugandan Government might give their train companies an extra day off a year, or the Honduran train union might eek out a few more benefits for it's staff. Any of these things might upset the staff of MAV and might produce yet another strike.

So thanks to some huffing and puffing, I will not be whisked away to some nicer town. I still have a lot to see, but without the cheap and efficient MAV services I am stuck.

No TV and no bright lights means a weekend of sitting inside complaining about the complainers complaining about something else that they can complain about.....

.....ouch. My bee just bit me in my bonnet.