08/10/25 Switzerland Struggles With Scanning

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I found the flaw in Switzerland's reputation for fabulous efficiency.

Switzerland struggles to operate photocopier/scanning machines.

Town Library?  "Too hard for us, go to the University Library".

The university precinct had rubbish boxes designed specifically for pizza boxes.

University Library?  The stupid machine chewed up my precious medical reports which I need to scan.  I recruited the lovely lady at the desk to help me, on the premise that she could a) understand the German that the machine spoke and b) she actually worked at the library so would be familiar with the silly machine.

Nope.

Lovely lady sent me to a Copy shop to attempt scans, except the copy shop had moved.  Not to an address mind you, just a notice in the window with a phone number.

Google sent me to another copy shop, thankfully not too far away but I had to hurry before it closed for lunch.

The man in the copy shop completed scanning, not without diffculty managing multiple-page scans but credit to him, he was patient and worked through it. Nineteen francs and many hours of frustration later, I had scans safely on USB ready to be sent off on the endless paperwork treadmill, but we're not talking about that any more are we?

If you think I'm getting grumpy and fed up with spinning my wheels in Lucerne this morning, you'd be right. Particularly when scanners are so uncooperative.  At least I wasn't missing out on a beautiful day, which brought me to the next point...

Swiss weather prediction suffered from the same alarming disconnect as was experienced throughout the rest of the world.

Then there I was, lolling and relaxing (aka grumbling about Swiss scanners) in my hotel room when the alarm went off and a disembodied voice informed us that the fire alarm was activated (no kidding!), the fire brigade was on their way, and we must evacuate post haste. Righty ho then, but not before I had grabbed my precious USB because after this morning's frustrations not even the fires of hell could separate me from my scanned medical documents.

Down the stairs we went, me carrying Steve and Roger taking extra care, cheered on by the cleaning ladies who have become quite invested in Roger's progress. The stairwell was awash with the smell of burnt steak, leading me to believe that the fire alarm was the result of some careless cooking in the ground level cafe.

Fickle sunshine. Dont be fooled by the blue sky.

The sun had popped out to pretend complicity with the weather forecast, but it wasn't fooling anyone. We wandered down to the train station where I navigated multiple levels of Swiss beauracracy to hire a bike for tomorrow, and then home we went via Coop for dinner specials.


The hotel was still standing so I still had somewhere to sleep for the night, which was a plus.



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