Dear SNCF, it is fashionable to make fun of you, it is a safe effect, without risk. Yet I will not give in to this facility. So let’s start with what I like about you. When everything works, you are unsurpassable. Your TGV goes to 300 kilometers-hour, you make me cross France without stress, allow me to read a book and watch the landscapes. Sometimes you offer me a few surprises: a clean train, a silent wagon, an arrival right on time. These days, I tell myself that you are an engineering marvel that neither the car nor the plane can match. This is not to mention your future TGV with a bar on two floors! Proof that you don’t let yourself go. But now, it would be too simple if you were perfect. Because you also have this incredible gift to make me lose patience.
It all starts at the portico. The QR code of my ticket? My phone decides that it’s time to display my credit card. I’m trying, trying, nothing helps. Your controller, imperturbable, repeats his age -old verse to me: “Put the brightness as much as possible.” Obviously, my iPhone is already in stadium projector mode, but the portico does not care. So, with the air of the one who holds a well-kept tip, your SNCF agent mumbles: “Turn your phone very quickly and plate it against the terminal.” Gestures as mysterious as it is alternated. Once on the train, I spot an ideal place, isolated without an immediate neighbor. But that is without counting on the instinct of railway property. A passenger arrives, demands his seat, piles next to mine, while the car is almost empty. Its seat is its seat, point. My neighbor lives his best life with Claude François in his ears. Finally, in my ears too, because with each tunnel, its headphones decide to generously share their content with the entire car.
The wagon snorer (there is always one) ends up being silent, just when a badly raised young girl begins a telephone conversation with the assurance of the one who believes herself at home. But all of this is not your fact. What, on the other hand, belongs to you is your sound volume which is like the luminosity of my laptop: as much as possible, and which makes me jump every time you tell me something. Ah, let’s talk about your ads… they are endless! Because one day a customer had an accident between the train and the border of the quay, do you feel forced to repeat us with each trip to pay attention to it? Wouldn’t you fall into absurd precautionism, illustrating the drift of the principle of responsibility of the philosopher Hans Jonas in precautionary ideology? Rather than letting individuals be responsible for themselves, you have drunk them under an avalanche of unnecessary recommendations.
A concentrate of the symptoms of our time
There is also your imprecision: you remain unclear and mysterious when you advertise, for a delay, that “we will keep you informed”. Who controls fears controls souls, said Machiavelli. And you seem to have made this maxim. Here we are suspended from your good will, oscillating between hope and resignation. Should I evoke your humorist controllers, these new troops of rail which chain the jokes to the point of transforming themselves into room agents? You fall with feet joined in the festivocracy of which the essayist Philippe Muray spoke: this contemporary trend to seek the festive everywhere. At this stage, I can no longer work. But anyway, your Wi-Fi is out of service. It’s your Heideggerian side, defying technique. Finally, the arrival approaches. And there you feel obliged to play the matrons and to infantilize me: “Have you thought of taking all your things?” Exhausted, I leave you. You call me one last time, because after all that you made me undergo, you want to catch up. So you flatter me by moralizing me: “You have chosen the most ecological mode of transport.” No, I had no choice, that’s all!
You may gather the symptoms of our time: precautionism, infantilization, moralization, festivocracy … I always come back to you. Because, I admit, when you want to work, you are unbeatable. So here I am again on your quay, with hope – a little naive – that this time, everything will be better.
* Julia de Funès is a doctor of philosophy.
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