This is not it, but yesterday, went to the track, my entry card didn’t work. This was the second time in a row that happened, and the clerk/guard at the desk who I’m friendly with frowned and asked if I was sure I had paid my monthly 16 euro fee. I said yes, I paid more than a week ago, and I was sure.

She said my payment wasn’t showing up in the system, and this was all in Portuguese which I only half-understood, so she brings a guy security guard over who speaks English and he says there’s nothing they can do, maybe I should bring a receipt?

And so I showed them my bank statement (compromising my privacy, but I did not give a fuck), showed the 16 euros taken out, and the dude said there’s no indication of the payee.

So I launch into an expletive-laden tirade mostly in bad Portuguese, some English (the expletives) how Portugal is a beautiful country, but the bureacracy in every smallest detail is destroying it totally.

Like I’m going to carry around a fucking printed-out receipt for my 16 euro track re-up, which I’ve been doing for three years? How many fucking receipts (the paper for which is toxic, BTW) should a person walk around with just in case some bureaucrat needs to check some box. And for what? To use the shittier of the two outdoor tracks at the college which usually no one besides me is even there?

The guard I’m friends with apologizes, says it’s not her fault, but in a bureaucracy two things are always true: (1) No one in particular is at fault; and (2) It immiserates and destroys the spirit of everyone.

So I’m like fuck this, start heading back home, but I just took a metro to get here and walked half a mile, so after about 100 meters, I turn back around and say fuck it, I’ll just pay the one-time fee of three euros for this time and quit forever when I’m done. Even though I already fucking paid, and last month I had to pay 47 euros for “segurança” (health insurance) even though I fucking have regular health insurance, the track wants it too.

But when I get back in, they’re like, “sorry, you can’t even pay piecemeal anymore." Maybe that’s when I really launched into the rant, I can’t remember.

Anyway, at some point she just says go in this last time, but I have to get it fixed half a mile away across campus at the shitty office where you have to wait like 20 minutes for an administrator to see you to get your sorted in the system.

So I run my four miles, my hamstring is sore anyway, and I’m thinking maybe I gotta fucking start doing yoga now instead, but I’m pissed because I bought these $130 running shoes that are great when I was in Colorado last month, but maybe it’s time to go easier on the impact anyway. And I fucking hate running, and the track is depressing. And by now all those mRNA compliant yoga pussies probably have sweat out whatever spike protein they’re going to shed already, and I can go back in finally. Can’t even imagine the cesspool of fucking spike say mid 2022 people were bathing in.

So I finish the run, am heading out past security again, and my friend, the woman, stops me, shows me her phone translated into English that she called the office, determined I had paid, but it never went into the part of the system that activates my card because of the blackout last week.

Basically she took some initiative, went the extra mile and got the entire problem sorted without me having to waste an hour of my life going across campus to the admin office. In my mind I had already quit for good too.

So I apologized for excoriating her entire country, thanked her for her good work and she seemed genuinely pleased as she should be.