The EU's new digital border system was supposed to "bring travel into the 21st century." Instead, for now it's producing long queues at the border crossings - and a story that looks more like a comedy episode than a high-tech future: the system can't tell identical twins apart.

The Entry/Exit System, known as EES, was rolled out on 10 April after four years of delays. Instead of a stamp in your passport, it stores biometric data - a face scan and fingerprints. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, admitted this month that the system still has "technical problems" and that "a lot of work still needs to be done."

The most bizarre case so far: a British woman was stopped by Romanian border police and accused of having stayed illegally in the Schengen zone. The reason? The system had confused her with her identical twin sister, who really had travelled there. The two have the same surname, the same date of birth and the same nationality - but different fingerprints and different passports. Even so, the machine saw the same facial features and concluded they were the same person.

According to experts, officers are not allowed to identify a traveller solely on the basis of a facial image; they also have to check fingerprints or passport data. In this case, that wasn't done. In other words - the technology didn't fail on its own; what failed was the training of the people using it.

And now the point that hits us directly. That same EES is the system Macedonians pass through every time they enter Greece or any Schengen country. If the technology at Cluj airport creates this kind of chaos, what awaits us at Bogorodica and Evzoni at the peak of the summer season, in a column of thousands of vehicles? The technology promises a future. For now, the only thing it reliably delivers is a longer wait - and at least one passport mixed up with another.