Breakfast All Day

We’ve all done it (I know I have) – woken up too late to eat a proper breakfast or found that there was no food in the house and ended up getting something to eat on the train. But I did think that the woman on my train this morning was taking things a little too far. Not for her a blueberry muffin, or even an egg and bacon sandwich. No, she had sat down in one of the ‘airline style’ seats and pulled her little tray table down and was tucking into a plate full of pancakes. With a knife and fork and everything, and a cup of coffee on the side.

It’s the person sitting next to her that I felt sorry for. Even from a few seats away, the smell of maple syrup was overpowering and by the time I got into work I was absolutely ravenous.

Now That’s what I call Customer Service

Sadly I walked in to the middle of this conversation so I didn’t get the whole story but the bit I heard went like this:

Customer (having obviously been thwarted in some transaction or other): So what am I supposed to do now?
Ticket guy: Well if you like you can come round this side and have a cup of tea.

The only problem is the ticket guy was Silverlink not SouthWest Trains so I can’t nominate him for excessive cheerfulness in the face of a stroppy customer. I was at Kew Gardens waiting for a District Line train and suffering a blast of nostalgia as the North Woolwich train came in complete with ‘Defective Door’ sticker and passenger with inappropriate dog. Ah happy days.

Free Money

It’s starting to get on my nerves. For about a week now I’ve been noticing on my way to work that there is five pence in pennies just lying there on the pavement in Kew. OK so they’re a bit camouflaged being dull brown coppers sitting on top of a dull brown manhole cover, and they’re only pennies, but what kind of ridiculously salubrious area has money lying around for a whole week with nobody picking it up?

The really scary part is they’re lying there just outside a primary school – exactly the sort of age of person who considers 5p to be actual real money. But the kids that go to this school are the kind that get chauffeured there in SUVs wearing the sort of ridiculous uniforms that would get them beaten up in any self-respecting inner-London neighbourhood. The little moppet aged all of seven who was climbing out of Mummy’s All-Terrain Global Warmer (or whatever it was called) this morning was clutching not just a straw boater but a takeaway from Starbucks proving that you’re never too young for a double decaf skinny latte to go. Five pence is clearly beneath her notice.

Obviously I’d pick them up myself but I’m worried they’ve been superglued down and I’d show myself up in front of my work colleagues as the kind of cheapskate who picks up pennies in the street. I’ve tried the odd discreet kicking manouevre but they’re wedged into the grooves of the manhole cover so I can’t see if they’re stuck down or not. So they shall continue to bug me until somebody else breaks down and picks them up.

If anyone’s feeling particularly hard up they can be found on Kew Green and they were still there this morning. You’d be doing me a favour. And don’t spend it all at once.

The Honeymoon Period is Over

That didn’t take long, did it? Southwest trains decided today that Monday morning during rush hour would be a good time to not have any ticket windows open in Vauxhall station, because that’s only the busiest time of the whole week. After all, why only inconvenience a few customers when you can inconvenience almost all of them in one go?

The guy who lets people in and out of the disabled gate told me that as I didn’t have any cash I’d have to go to the tube station and buy a ticket there (this is pretty much the default answer to any enquiry to Vauxhall station staff). I thought I’d be clever and got some cash out, and went back only to be told to use my tenner to buy a ticket in the machine, even though the machine won’t sell me a ticket to Kew Bridge because it doesn’t have enough buttons for all the stations. I asked if he could sell me a ticket instead but he refused saying (I didn’t follow the logic of this at all) that he couldn’t because there was a long queue at the assistance window (inside the barrier) already, and another long queue in front of the guy who was standing in the concourse (also inside the barrier) selling tickets from his handheld machine. Eventually I managed to persuade him to at least let me in through the barrier so I too could join one or other of these long queues as by now I only had a few minutes to catch my train.

Having got through, fuming, and after waiting in a non-moving line for a minute or two, I finally had the bright idea of not buying a ticket and getting on the train anyway. Now, before you write in and complain, I knew this is technically wrong and passengers should buy tickets if it is humanly possible. But when you only have a train every fifteen minutes and when you’ve left enough time to buy a ticket, does humanly possible include actually missing the train? Morally, I reckon I was justified (and I did buy a ticket on the way back). Fortunately I didn’t have to argue the legal position with a ticket inspector bent on giving me a �20 penalty fare. And besides, I actually had a ticket, I’d just lost it – which makes the whole episode doubly galling.

Next week, by the way, is Customer Service Week. SouthWest Trains are making a big thing of it, asking for nominations for exceptionally good service from their staff. Strangely, I couldn’t find the form to fill in for nominations for exceptionally bad service … They’ve still got until the end of the week to be really nice to me to get the nomination. I won’t be holding my breath

North South Divide

Twice I’ve done this now – going home on the tube, I see the words ‘northbound’ and head for that platform instinctively. That’s just the direction home is in to me. It will take ages for the years of conditioning to wear off.

On the other hand, I’ve worked out what the bell is that I’ve been hearing when the windows are open at night. It’s only Big bloody Ben chiming the hours (and half hours, and quarter hours). Zone one or what?

TGIF

If I had made a list of all the things I didn’t want in my carriage on the way home this evening after a hard week, fairly near the top of that list – after some of the more unlikely options like rampaging starving Bengal tigers (but oh what a blog that would be) – would come the presence of a couple of dozen secondary schoolkids. Sadly, the schoolkids were what I got, and a noisy bunch they were too. Please tell me I wasn’t that annoying when I was fifteen. I’m pretty sure I didn’t misspend my youth talking for hours about how to configure your GMail setup or using the phrase ‘Oh My God’ every second sentence. And I know that I never got off a train with the back half of a jelly snake sticking out of my left ear, and the front half of the jelly snake sticking out of my right ear.

Actually, now I come to think of it, the jelly snake stunt was quite amusing. But by then I was too far gone in grown-up crossness at the noise (all those squeaky voices!) to even crack a smile. Getting old…

Pedestrian Cross

There are two big junctions I have to cross on my way to work – outside Vauxhall Station and outside Kew Bridge – and both of them are of the annoying kind that are arranged so that it’s impossible for a pedestrian to get across them in a single phase of the lights. Instead we have to stand crammed on a tiny traffic island breathing in the foul soup of pollution from the cars sweeping past us wondering how many cigarette equivalent’s worth of carbon monoxide we’ve just ingested. There are never any junctions where the cars have to cross in two stages and the pedestrians just sail through. In reality the one at Kew Bridge isn’t really a pedestrian crossing at all. It’s just a great big traffic junction that sometimes, when the cars have to stop anyway to let the other cars through, it is possible for people to also cross and they’ve dressed this up with a little green man light and an entirely pointless button for us to press to pass the time while we’re waiting.

The one at Vauxhall is worse though. It’s willfully badly designed. I noticed this evening that one half of the crossing is a proper pedestrian controlled light where the cars are stopping simply for people, whereas the other half is part of a junction. So do the two bits join up so I can cross in one go? Do they bugger. Unless I’m prepared to take my life in my hands and run across three lanes of traffic I have to wait for a full cycle of the lights to cross both halves of the road. This is just perversely poor design on the part of the planners. It suggests they either didn’t think about what pedestrians might want – which is scary – or didn’t care, which is worse.

Why should pedestrians be treated with such contempt? Why should we be the ones that wait in the freezing rain* while car drivers – who are after all, sitting comfortably in their little worlds, music on, dry and cosy – whizz past? OK so it would cause gridlock if every junction had to halt completely to allow pedestrians to cross at their leisure – but what’s a little gridlock between friends? Maybe a few hours spent fuming in a traffic jam would persuade these people to get out of their tin boxes and join the rest of us in the real world for a change. After all, we pedestrians were here first.

South West trains clocked up a few minutes’ delay today but nothing as yet painful enough for me to start keeping track of it. But they should be warned.

And if my broadband isn’t sorted out by tomorrow, I’m naming names.

* OK so it wasn’t actually raining today but that’s not the point

Makes a House a Home

Broadband, that is. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t felt quite settled in the new place and I’ve realised part of the problem is that I can’t spend the evenings curled up with a warm laptop browsing the internet. The dial up connection here is situated in the basement and anyway it just isn’t the same as having hot and cold running broadband wireless in every room of the house. Our old broadband provider had proved reasonably competent up till the point we moved and we’d heard horror stories about some of the bigger names so we decided to stick with the devil we knew, cancelled our old account and ordered a new one at the new address.

Big mistake.

The first problem was the cancellation. You would think, wouldn’t you that if a company specialised in providing a high-tech service like broadband that they’d keep their website up to date, particularly the part where they kept the forms you need to fill in to cancel your service and get a new one. Little things like changing the phone number so that when your other half faxes them the cancellation notice it wouldn’t disappear into a black hole but would actually get dealt with so that you and your other half don’t have to keep paying direct debit payments on an account they no longer can use because they no longer live in the flat. You would be wrong.

But that wasn’t the only problem

While I was struggling back from work just after moving in the other half got a call from the Previously Competent Internet Provider* that went like this:
PCIP: We have a problem with your account. BT says the phone number you’ve given us isn’t live
OH: which number?
PCIP: (reads out phone number)
OH: you mean the number you just rang to speak to me on now?
PCIP: er, yes.

The other half then rang BT who denied everything. The PCIP then said we would have broadband on the 20th. We waited. We tried again yesterday. Nothing. We rang the PCIP (‘calls charged at up to 10p a minute’) and were told to try again today. Today we got nothing except a stroppy letter complaining they hadn’t received our direct debit mandate yet, despite us having sent it already. We rang again (‘please choose from our menu of music while you wait for your call to be answered’). Ah. BT had cancelled the installation. Are we sure we hadn’t accidentally cancelled the wrong account by mistake? We were quite sure. Could they activate it anyway? No, but they would look into it tomorrow, and get it sorted out. Who am I speaking to? ‘Tom’

Hmmm… why do I not feel a sudden rush of confidence that they will deal with this matter with the same despatch with which they complained when our direct debit forms were a couple of days late in arriving? Answers on a postcard please. Meanwhile I’ve added a whole new category of disgruntlement to my blog so I can rant about these and other things at will. Enjoy.

* names disguised (for now) to spare blushes

Honey I Shrunk the Paper

Having been away last week when the new mini Guardian was launched I’ve only just had a chance to try it out on the train. It’s certainly an improvement on the old one in that you no longer have to take over your neighbour’s airspace in order to turn the pages and preliminary consumer tests indicate that it doesn’t have the same tendency to cover your hands, face (I’m really not very good at folding newspapers) and fellow passengers with a dusting of black ink. And I promised I wouldn’t whinge when they changed the format so I won’t. I’m sure I’ll get used to the way it looks like one of those free advertising supplements extolling the joys of the Saudi Arabian Tourist industry or Estonia’s banking sector. And I’m sure their picture desk will calm down after the novelty wears off and stop introducing a little colour picture (look! colour on every page!) to illustrate every single article whether relevant or not. But if you will permit me one small murmur of discontent – what is the point of shrinking the paper and making a big song and dance about how it would be easier to read in a crowded train and then producing a full cross-page centre spread in the middle so you have to open it right out over your neighbour’s lap to get the full effect? Joined up thinking, please. And out of habit I keep picking it up and folding it in half the way I am used to doing and then finding I’m walking down the street with a ridiculously tiny folded up newspaper square under my arm. But these are minor quibbles. The real test will be combining the new look Grud, a white top and a rainy day. If I don’t end up with a detailed mirror-print analysis of the Liberal Democrat’s latest health initiative smeared across my shirt, I will be happy. For a bit, anyway.

I’d hoped to be doing this via broadband again by now but alas it wasn’t to be. There’s a whole blog entry right there … watch this space

The Information Age Stops Here

All change please.

I have an oyster card which I have been using as a pay as you go (or occasionally as a pay as you hang around and don’t go) card for the odd trips into town, and very nice it is too except that I can never remember how much it has on it so I’m always topping it up and it doesn’t like being put in your back pocket and sat on which is ridiculous. I mean where else is your season ticket supposed to go? Anyway, now that I’m using Southwest Trains I’ve found that they don’t do a pure Vauxhall to Kew Bridge ticket just one that goes to ‘London terminals’ i.e. zone one, i.e. costing approximately as much as a small Ferrari. Which means I have to instead get a zone two & three season ticket which means I can put it on my oyster card, and I too can be one of the real commuters who gets through the gates with a stylish slap of the wallet on top of the reader (usually followed by a comic collision with the non-opening gates when it’s not working due to the card having been sat on too hard) instead of having to feed an increasingly limp paper ticket into the slot.

Hooray. But to do this I have to register my Oyster card (in itself a bit worrying as it means not only does Ken Livingston know where your kids go to school but he also knows everywhere you have been, including any sneaking off early from work, side trips down Oxford street, etc. etc. – the possibilities for blackmail are endless). The first time I got an oyster card I believed all the propaganda and left it to the last minute to top it up – how hard could it be, I thought, I’ll just do it on the internet the night before. How wrong I was. When I got to the relevant page I read the following words: ‘By now you will have registered your card at your local station seven days previously.’ What? Wrong. Waiting seven days and going down to your local station is not what the internet is about. Waiting seven seconds in these days of broadband is considered an unacceptable delay. Seven days is interminable. It’s almost a week*, for crying out loud. Whole universes have been constructed in less time.

So anyway, realising that I was going to be away for almost exactly seven days I decided to fill in the form and drop it off for registration on my way to the airport so my card would be all nice and registered when I came back. Trotting up to Lambeth North early on the Saturday with my little wheely suitcase and my filled in form I woke up the guy behind the counter with a cheery good morning and announced I’d like to register my oyster card. ‘Wha’?’ he said, rubbing his eyes and prodding the computer dubiously. ‘I don’t know how to do that – we’ve got a new system and I haven’t been trained.’ I tried again at Heathrow thinking they’d be a bit more up to the mark but the queue for the ticket office was immense and slow as all the jetlagged tourists tried to understand what was going on, work out what our funny money was about and remember where their hotel was simultaneously. The ‘change and information’ desk was staffed by a woman who was enjoying the scope her job gave her to be gratuitously rude to foreigners while giving out no change and only a single piece of information – ‘you’ll need to go to the ticket office to that’ – regardless of what she was asked (including the question ‘can I register my oyster card here?’). So I have only just managed to register the wretched thing thanks to the helpful chap at Kennington – and even he couldn’t believe that a paper form was involved and kept trying to get the computer to do it. Anyway he printed out a long docket of what looks like all my journeys to date and attached it to the form and no doubt even as we speak some drone at head office is going through it looking for any possible dissident tendencies it might reveal before opening a large paper file on my travels and stamping it ‘confidential’. Or perhaps I have been in Russia too long.

*I know.