Find me a trained monkey, stat!

I am a calm, patient person. You know this, I know this. And after five years here, I've come to expect -- no, demand! -- incompetent service from the public authorities. But this morning was something special. I cycled round to the central tourist office at 9 to buy some tickets for museumnacht. I had tried to do this last night, but the ticket office in the Leidseplein had closed by the time I got there at 7.45 -- clearly, nobody needs to buy tickets in the evening. So, I'm up early, I head off to the tourist office at the station, and my heart sinks on seeing the long line of grim-faced tourists waiting for help. But wait! What's this? A separate queue for buying museumnacht tickets -- and there's only one couple at the counter? Perfect!

Except that the couple at the counter are trying to buy tickets for a boat tour. And they are the type of people who are ahead of you at airport check-in -- you know, the ones who stand there for 20 minutes discussing endless permutations of seat combinations and baggage allowances. (How? How can it take them so long to complete a simple 3-minute process?) And the woman helping them is clearly inept, and takes 15 minutes to explain the boat tour and sell them the tickets. And then she prints out the wrong tickets, ones for a tour of the Rijksmuseum. So back to the incredibly slow computer/ticket machine, reprint the correct tickets, explain again where the boat tour starts, and then mark up a map for them; when they ask if they can have the map, she says it will cost 2 euros, so they leave it -- just as I would have done. They leave. She disappears to tidy up the counter area behind a pillar; clearly, if she can't see me, I can't see her, and won't get at all frustrated at her sudden absence. She reappears, fails to make eye contact with me until I bark out my request for three tickets, and she nervously jumps to it. Only she prints out two tickets (drie does not sound like twee, even in my poor Dutch), so back to the computer to print out another ticket. I want to pay with PIN. Unsurprisingly (at this point), she doesn't have a PIN machine at her counter -- I mean why would she? She's only SELLING TICKETS, FOR GOD'S SAKE! NO EXCHANGE OF MONEY NEEDED THERE, RIGHT? I trot off to the other end of the tourist office to the seeminly only desk with a PIN machine. Another 3 minutes passes as Ms Incompetent tries to get the computer there to recognize the bar code on the tickets and process the payment. Finally, 25 minutes after I enter the office, I leave -- tickets clutched in my hot little hands. And don't even get me started on the fact that the tickets supposedly cost 14 euros, except that it's impossible to buy them for that amount as everywhere selling them adds on a service charge of at least 2 euros.

Bill -- Energetica had better be worth it!