My trip is still going to happen -- just a few days later.
As I try to get myself in the right mood for a slog fom one train station to the next, or more likely, bus station, I was just reading today again how public services are closing en masse in the countryside. This is a serious trend. About one-tenth of Estonia's initial number of some 500 post offices closed in 2006, this year about another one-fifth will shut down. Today the yellow press wrote about a settlement in the NE that was picked as "village as the year" in 2006 that now lacks a kindergarten and general store and is set to lose its post office this summer.
Something similar happened to small towns in America in the 1970s -- except there's no four-lane commercial strips with chains, at least not outside of smaller Estonian towns. Where do the people go? Are they driving 50 km to a Selver supermarket? Have they moved to the city?
Quality of life is quite good in Estonia, but the streets are getting empty and the highways aren't getting filled, either.
Of course, like the 1970s, there's also back-to-the-landism, or at least a professed interest in old folkways. It's not like things (manor houses and buildings( are necessarily falling apart, but from what you read in the press, it sure sounds like ordinary middle-class life in the countryside is less viable.
**
I like to eat at the old radio building's canteen. Our own office building has a cafe, too, but the radio building's next door is better. The canteen doesn't advertise on the outside but people from the outside are allowed in, if they say the password -- "palun kohvikusse" (to the cafe, please). If you think this is an easy security workaround, then you haven't considered the other half of the story. You have to rely on the mercy of the security guard to get out.**
One of the three rotating security guards at the Raadiomaja seems to resent me. I'm not sure why. Maybe she generally dislikes "outside people" who eat at the canteen, or is tired of hitting the button to let people out and thinks the rules should be changed but doesn't have the power to change them.
She wasn't at her desk when I tried to leave the building today. No one was around. One of my pet peeves is being locked inside rooms and buildings. How strange; I know. But there you have it.
Since there were two switches on the wall next to the door I tried to operate them, as if this were your average apartment building entrance hall. Nothing happened, but just as I expected, it was then, as I was slightly mistreating one of the switches, that the security person returned, and gave me grief, telling me in a very nasty tone that the switches were not to be touched under any circumstance, as if they would cut the live feed from the studio upstairs or something.
When I inquired as to the possible avenues for leaving, especially if there was an emergency and no one was at her desk, she told me in a nasty voice that she didn't think she had to tell me that.
Something about the wording struck me, perhaps the way this withheld info from me while making her seem like a bit of a tool at the same time.
I decided to confide in her. I told her a funny thing that had happened several months ago after one of the first times I ate at the Raadiomaja. I made a wrong turn coming out of the canteen, and spying another exit, found myself trapped in the courtyard, a vast triangular area with some parked cars and no one around. The doors were electronic.
This being a radio station, I guess a lot of areas are soundproof. In any case, I pounded on the doors, but no one came, I signalled to passing cars on Gonsiori, and finally had to climb over an eight-foot metal fence at the vehicle entrance.
"Imagine if it had been someone really impatient," I said, shaking my head slowly, knowing well that no one gets more impatient than me in such a situation and that on that occasion I was that close to throwing a chunk of limestone through a window. "They could have done some real damage to the compound, yes, indeed."
She was nonplussed and wanted to know why I had gone into the courtyard and trapped myself there behind the electronic doors, as if this had been my cunning plan all along.
"Maybe you shouldn't eat at our cafe," she went on. "Maybe people shouldn't eat at our cafe."
Now she had gone too far. "Are you thinking of changing the policy?" I asked. "What would the cafe think? I think they have a lot of outside customers."
She admitted that she was not the one to make policy, which, feeling a bit nasty myself, is what I wanted to hear her say.
"Aha, OK, you should have told me that earlier. I'm sorry to have wasted our time, then," I said, walking out.
I don't like ending exchanges on such a superior note, but I like being trapped even less.
** There is some precedent for this in local culture -- a decade ago, cinema doors during screenings used to be...I don't want to say "locked", as that would sound criminally irresponsible on the part of the cinema. Let's just say they were "inoperable from the inside". If a movie was a total bomb, you couldn't indicate your displeasure by storming out. You had to get the attention of the attendant who would unlock the doors. It's fortunate nothing disastrous ever happened, like a fire.
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9 comments:
Reminds me of the night I locked myself INTO my apartment. :)
http://asehr.blogspot.com/2006/03/friday-night-fun.html
"One of the three rotating security guards at the Raadiomaja seems to resent me. I'm not sure why."
If it's any consolation - she resents me too :) The woman obviously has issues.
It is quite unusual that people from outside can enter some radio building as easy as in Tallinn. One should rather be grateful than anything else;)
that sounds way farmiliar. Being too old to actually remember the soviet times, I have heard stories. You know, about security guards and janitors who pretty much bossed everyone around. And some of them still try to, as you just described. And having actually also worked as a security guard (whee, 12-hour night shifts), I gotta say that it is a little annoying if there are people in the building that are not really supposed to be there. But that's for when it's night, which makes more sense.
too young, I mean. I'd have to be dead to be too old to remember the Soviet times...
I think you're on the money, Doris, about the tie-in with the role of the doorman during Soviet times.
OK, I am a little grateful, Meelis. For example, that I don't have to sign in or flash ID. And I respect the security system -- I know that anyone were to inflitrate any deeper into the building they might find themselves stuck in a sector where no one ever goes.
Hmm, Estonia is a small world; even though I don't mention any names, I'm wondering if I might have provided too much detail.
AndresS, funny story. What's the chance of that, indeed. I have to say you're more philosophical than I am, though.
Are you sure about the cinema doors? All the ones I've seen have had latches on the inside that you could open.
Now, what could have happened is that the *entrance* doors were closed, to prevent kids from sneaking out and going to a different movie. Since in older cinemas you exit them through different doors, that makes a certain perverted kind of sense.
One of the three rotating security guards at the Raadiomaja seems to resent me. I'm not sure why.
Because it's in her nature as a security guard to suspect and resent.
One theory has it that all security guards world-wide are bred from a common pool incorporating genes from unfrocked OMON and Volkspolizei members, neocon Republicans, and especially nasty school janitors.
Another theory (North American) maintains that applicants rejected by fire departments become cops, those rejected by the police become prison guards, and those rejected by the correctional service in turn become rent-a-cops, ie, security guards.
I haven't attempted to verify either theory, of course.
But I do know that the psychic twin sister of 'your' security guard is in charge of one of the controlled parking areas at Brock University here in Niagara. Last year my wife participated as a volunteer subject in a medical study, which required periodic attendance at one of the university labs, and I went along as her getaway driver. Although we had a large stamped and signed laissez-passer to save us parking fees, both entry and exit to the 'twin's' personal parking domain was fraught with manifold complications each and every time, necessitating phone calls to the university department involved, much peering at driver and passenger, etc., everything short of body cavity searches. Yes, she also managed at times to absent herself from her booth, which on one occasion led me to use old-fashioned main force to push up the automated barrier to effect an escape (heh! just as she returned from her donut or pee break, causing her no end of angst).
For a couple of decades, I worked on a military base in Canada with secure entry and exit monitored at the guardhouse by means of photo ID as well as a prominently displayed windshield sticker. All non-DND personnel were supposedly vetted, usually by a phone call to the unit and person they had were to see - 'by appointment only' sort of thing.
There was a simple way to bypass all this BS drill, though: one simply had to tell the guard that one was going to the McDonald's franchise on the base, and all barriers were instantly removed: the power of free enterprise! (No joke.)
One can but wonder whether the 'Big Mac' password would work for, say, a truckload of turbaned, bearded, Kalashnikov-toting tourists.
Some of that old 'lock-up' culture was still intact in Estonia when my wife first taught Esto teachers in Pärnu in the summer of 1995. The Canadian volunteers were housed in the dormitory of a secondary school. They quickly discovered that they were locked in at night, and that the custodial staff went home. This practice, after energetic protest, was altered. In 1998, my wife and I were winding up a project at Riigikaitse (now Sisekaitse) Akadeemia. It was a chilly, wet jaanipäev and the place was deserted. We worked well into the afternoon and found ourselves locked in - in a remote wing of the building, with all interior connecting doors locked, and on an upper storey. The orderly cadets (korrapidaja) at the guardhouse had changed shift,and had neglected to advise his replacement that we were there. Further, the antique analog phone in our particular office was dead. Fortunately, the very diligent young cadet on duty decided to do a walkabout (not all did) and saw a light on in our corner of the building and rode to our rescue. So...no sweat.
But at the beginning of our assignment (duration 1995-98), it was the practice in our wing at ERA to keep the staff toilet locked. The large key, with its appended large wooden ball, hung on a hook on a board in a High Offical's office. Fetching it involved knocking, excusing oneself for sometimes interrupting an interview in said Official's office, returning it, etc. From day one, I undertook a subtle guerilla campaign to liberate the toilet, at first simply by repeated references to the "key to the treasury" [kullakambri võti], evincing wide-eyed puzzlement at the security arrangments, explaining to all and sundry that I never, ever in my whole life removed anything from the toilet, but, on the contrary, always left something substantial behind.
Net result: lockdown policy for the ähkla (bogus Aaviksim) was shortly abandoned, and entire staff in our wing enjoyed a newly liberated Schlüssel-frei europeldik.
Are you sure about the cinema doors? All the ones I've seen have had latches on the inside that you could open
Well, you're not dealing with the world's greatest mechanical mind, here. :)
And I didn't make a full circle around the perimeter. But yes, you are probably right.
Yet I did at the time file a mental note as in "hey, I'm pretty sure this isn't quite right", and I wasn't drunk or disoriented.
Speaking of drunk, one time in the post-renovation Sõprus, I couldn't get out once either -- a bum was passed out outside the door. It took two or three filmgoers to force open the door.
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