The European Commission today announced that sixty trainees have gone missing en route to Strasbourg.
Every year the Commission employs 1200 young graduates (stagiaires) on six month contracts to experience life in the slow lanes of power. One of the perks is a trip to Strasbourg, where they can contemplate suicide at the European Court of Human Rights and the French seat of the European Parliament.
Stagiaires are well known in Brussels for their ill-fitting suits, inflated sense of self-importance and hovel-like abodes. They can often be found in the corners of cheap bars sipping shared Coca-Colas through straws.
On Friday morning sixty trainees met at Brussels South train station. The train left at 10.43 and arrived at Strasbourg a couple of hours later. Not one stagiaire was on board.
Despite a manhunt that spread several hundred square metres and lasted many minutes, police have found no trace and are urging those with information to phone the Commission’s service line between the hours of 10.30 and 11.15 Tuesdays and Thursdays.
One Commission spokesman said “it’s no great loss”. He added that on a monthly salary of 900 euros “they probably haven’t got very far, and will be back when they get hungry.”
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