Herb Prooy thinks the NS should have known that technique too is subject to Sod’s law: what can go wrong will go wrong, especially when there’s a dusting of snow on the tracks.

Did NS and ProRail fail? Judging from the angry reactions from passengers backed up by a generalised public grumble, the answers should probably be yes. How hard can it be to keep a railway system running in a bit of snow?
Transport minister Melanie Schultz van Hagen-Maas Gesteranus thinks the NS should ask their railway colleagues in Switzerland: ‘They get lots of snow and it’s not stopping them!’
Or is what the NS are saying true and has the company really been the innocent victim of the combination of extreme cold, wind and snow that caused the dramatic seize up of our busy railway network.
Failure
Last Friday Schiphol airport, buried under the same amount of snow as the tracks, ground to a halt too but nobody seemed to take much notice. Was that because Zurich’s Kloten airport also closes down at the least flurry of snow? Or is air travel deemed riskier than train travel in these circumstances? Or is it that we depend much more on the train than on the plane? The answer is that we are unwilling to accept failure when it’s a service we can’t do without.
Over the last few decades society has come to depend on technology more and more but has failed to keep up with the nuts and bolts of it. Not too long ago we tinkered with our motor cycles and soldered together the bits and pieces of a radio. Now we handle the most complicated equipment without so much as manual. It’s called ‘the consumerization of technology’.
Infallibility
Young people spend hours playing computer games but have no idea how the apparatus actually works nor do they have any interest in programming a single software code. That is why public indignation knows no bounds when the computer/electricity network/ov transport card conks out. Or when the trains stand still. So be it.
The only thing that is truly annoying is that the NS itself is a staunch believer in the infallibility of its technology and so is completely unprepared when something goes wrong, as it invariably must. That is the legitimate criticism that can be levelled at the NS bosses.
Herb Prooy is an entrepreneur in the field of ‘software as a service’