The Swiss do things well. They do things really well. And, sometimes, they do things a bit too well.
A few months ago I was on a bus in Zurich, struggling to purchase a ticket at the machine. My coin was either damaged or no longer legal tender. The error, of course, had to be mine as Swiss ticket machines are notoriously well-maintained and efficiently managed. Any possible excuse I might have up my sleeve, including an inability to understand what was being said to me, would fail at the first hurdle: Swiss ticket inspectors, I learned many years ago, speak English.
As I persisted with my five franc piece, I became aware of raised voices at the back of the bus. An inspector and a passenger were in dispute. The woman did not have a valid ticket and the uniformed official was refusing to hear her reasons for failing to purchase one. She, in turn, declined to give him her name and address. Eventually, she stood up and, at the next stop, she got off the bus. He got off too and, as the doors closed behind them, I could hear the woman shouting angrily at the man, warning him not to follow her home. Swiss ticket inspectors, it seems, are authorised to pursue fare evaders to their very doorsteps. Possibly beyond. I got off the bus at the next stop and walked the rest of the way.
A few weeks after this incident, I read an interview with the British journalist, Jon Snow. He was asked whether he had ever experienced any “close brushes with the law”. He said that he had once been arrested in a Swiss hotel in the middle of the night. A decade earlier, he had failed to pay a 30Sfr. fine for running a red light. “The police burst into my room at four in the morning, dragged me naked from my bed and carted me to a police station in a blanket, where I lingered for some seven hours in a cell”.
I forwarded the Snow story to my friend John, more as a joke than anything else. He was neither shocked, nor surprised. Last year, he told me, his cousin had been arrested at the Swiss border. Apparently, the manager of a shop in Bern had reported him for trying to make a purchase using a counterfeit note. He had no idea it wasn’t genuine. He just thought it was an old note that had been withdrawn from circulation. No big deal. He paid with a card.
John’s cousin spent several hours at a police station while his wife sat in their car at the border. He is now under caution. Should he re-offend in Switzerland in the next three years, he faces a jail sentence.
The deeper you dig, the more outlandish the stories. In 2020 an eight year-old Swiss boy was arrested for asking the shopkeeper in his village whether he could use a fake note he had found on the street during Basel carnival. Heavily decorated with Chinese characters, it would have been obvious to anyone that the boy was playing a practical joke. The shopkeeper, however, called the police and the eight year-old was taken down to the station. An officer subsequently visited his home where he and his parents were questioned for three hours. The house was searched and the boy was given a police record which will remain in place until 2032. The story made it into The New York Times.
If, therefore, you’re planning a holiday in Switzerland this winter, I encourage you to check the validity of your bank notes, make sure you obey the rules of the road and never, ever assume that you can evade the long arm of Swiss law enforcement.