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| drawing by Suzanne Dunaway |
Stay with me on this one, it’s worth the trouble – all
you need to know about Italy in a single story.
ENPAM (Ente Nazionale di Previdenza ed Assistenza
dei Medici), the physicians’ pension fund, allows its members to pay in
retroactively to cover the time they spent at university. This riscatto della laurea, “redeeming your
degree,” lengthens your pensionable working life by six years and yields a healthy
boost to your pension.
In one of those mysteries of Italian bureaucracy,
ENPAM assured me early on that they would let me redeem all six years of
Italian medical school, even though
I’d only actually been enrolled for 11 months (taking courses not required for
my American MD). I could never quite afford the riscatto, though – the cost crept up year by year slightly faster,
in proportion, than my income.
In 2004 an office-mate tipped me off that
there was a half-price
sale on the riscatto della laurea. I
leapt at the chance, and headed off for ENPAM central, a vast labyrinth. A
receptionist pointed me toward the riscatto
office, and after hiking up one corridor and down another for ten minutes,
asking directions repeatedly along the way, I reached a corner room with the
right number pasted outside. There a kindly official sat me down, patiently
explained the riscatto, confirmed
that the cost was temporarily 50% of normal, calculated my reduced monthly
payment, handed over the sheet of paper with his scribbled calculations, and helped
me fill out the application. After I had signed, he kept it.
Three months later my first bill arrived, for
exactly double the figure he’d written down, and more than I had in the bank.
I phoned ENPAM the next day. The employee who
fielded my irate call said the higher bill I’d received in the mail was
correct. Half-price sale? What half-price sale? There had never been, nor could
there ever be, such a “sale.” Who on earth had told me otherwise? I described
the location of his office and the position of his desk. Long pause. Then, “Aaa, allora si capisce,” oh, that
explains it. The helpful gentleman in question, she volunteered, had been off
on prolonged sick leave and since returning to work was not quite right in the
head…
In other words: an employee known to be incompetent
had been allowed back on the job. Italian compassion. Once back, he was
permitted to hand out major-league misinformation. Classic pressappochismo (literally more-or-less-ness, or sloppiness). And
his colleague, gifted with Italian courtesy, had no compunction about telling a
stranger all about it over the phone. A bad joke, with a worse punch line: the
application I’d been misled into filing and then had to cancel counted as my
once-in-a-lifetime chance at the riscatto.
I was doomed to a pension without benefit of those six extra years.
*****
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