Honestly

I’m not so sure about this one.

It was a busy train this morning so, as is my wont, as soon as the announcement was made for Kew Bridge I got up and started making my way down the aisle to make sure I got out as quickly as possible. One woman managed to move herself so I could get past, but the second, who was standing by the seats nearest the exit, just wouldn’t budge.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Plenty of people get off at the next stop.’

Well. It was the patronising tone she used that got me, as though I were some sort of bewildered tourist benefitting from her vast experience. I was unwisely provoked into telling truth. ‘I know that, I just don’t want to be the last one to do so.’ So then she picks up her bag, tosses her hair and said ‘Oh, for goodness sake’ before flouncing – in so far as it is possible to flounce in a crowded train – out of my way and sitting down in a seat that someone else had just vacated.

Note that well. She wasn’t about to get off herself, she just didn’t want to move out of my way to let me out until – well, when was she planning on moving exactly? When the train had stopped? When everyone else had got up and started moving, making it harder for her to move? Once more passengers had started piling onto the train? I found myself arguing crossly with her all the way over Kew Bridge, which would have been more effective had she actually been present at the time. I pointed out that she might not have go that free seat had I not provoked her to move when I did. I explained that I was late, having missed the earlier train. I even threw myself on her mercy and excused myself on the grounds that I was used to travelling on Silverlink where it’s never entirely certain that you will get off if the train is packed and the guard is in a hurry. But it was all to no avail. I still wonder whether I was in the wrong: wrong to be so impatient in the mornings, or at least wrong to openly admit it. I don’t want to be the last off the train. I have a gentler, politer colleague who was on the same carriage as me and he got into work a good five minutes later because he doesn’t elbow women and children aside in his haste to get away.

So does that make me a bad person? I worried about it all day, and then I remembered. She flounced. Nothing excuses flouncing. Right? Right?

Rising to the Occasion

It had to happen. Somebody somewhere discovered that there was a vertical surface at Vauxhall that wasn’t yet covered in advertising. Can’t have that, so now the risers of the stairs up to the platform have been pressed into service to sell me something – I couldn’t tell you what, because a) they haven’t paid me and b) I’m watching where I put my feet these days after an embarrassing encounter with a gang of paving stones on the Embankment over the weekend (one of them tripped me up and then its friends hit me in the hands and kicked me in the knees). What next? No smoking signs sponsored by Nicotinell? Actually, thinking about it, I have a horrible feeling that may have been done already …

No Cause for Alarm

After a longish delay just on the edge of Putney station this morning, the guard came on the tannoy wearily to remind passengers not to pull the emergency alarm. This was after he’d had to trek through the carriages looking for the culprit and reset the alarm to release the brake so we could travel the 50-odd yards that was needed to get the train onto the platform so the doors could be opened.

The problem, it seems, wasn’t impatience to sample the delights of Putney or an emergency or even school children, but crowding – leaning up beside the doors at the wrong angle can apparently activate the alarm if you’re not careful. I wasn’t in the same carriage so wasn’t able to indulge in any finger pointing, tutting or baleful stares, but having had a look at the alarm in our carriage it does seem to be very badly sited – right at shoulder height, where a backpack could easily catch under it and trigger the alarm. Oh well. Better than having it out of reach of anyone but the really tall, and certainly better than the time when three drunks having a party on a Chingford train (a word of advice: if you can, always avoid the Chingford train. Even if you live in Chingford) missed their stop, realised as the train was pulling out, yanked the alarm down and the doors open and then rolled out of the still moving train leaving nothing behind them but a sour smell and a very annoyed driver.

God Bless the TPS

It was a call like this that made me finally crack:

Disgruntled Commuter: Hello?
Gas Company That Should Know Better: Can you hear me?*
DC: yes
GCTSKB: Is that …er .. Deskroontled GimpEater?
DC: Sort of
GCTSKB: This is Valerie from the Gas company that should know better…
DC: I’m not interested, thank you.
GCTSKB: Why not?
DC (knowing she shouldn’t get drawn into this but doing so anyway): Because I don’t buy things from telephone sales calls
GCTSKB: But we’re not a telephone company, Ms GimpEater
DC: I know that, but I’m not interested
GCTSKB: Not even if it saves you money?
DC: No, goodbye.
GCTSKB: But I just want you to know, we’re not a telephone company we’re the gas company that should know better …
DC: Yes, thank you, I know that, goodbye.
GKTSKB: Just so you know…
DC: (after putting phone down, screaming furiously) But you already SUPPLY my frigging gas!!!

This was the third call in as many weeks from the same company. The problem is I find it very hard to be rude to anyone who works in a call centre because I’m sure it’s soul destroying enough to be doing it anyway without having people screaming down the phone at them. So I end up arguing with them. What’s really pathetic is how bad they are at selling things, or indeed even at making phone calls. I’m pretty sure that ‘hello can you hear me?’ is not part of the official telesales script, nor is arguing back, nor indeed is ringing up your existing customers and pissing them off to the point where I seriously considered changing my gas company just to get them back. Preferably when they were in the middle of cooking supper or having a bath.

But fortunately I had a much more powerful weapon to hand: the Telephone Preference Service. I’ve known about this for roughly a decade but it took me until yesterday to actually sign up. In 27 days I shall be free of Valerie and her useless colleagues. And it was dead easy to do. You don’t even need to provide any proof that the telephone number you were signing up for was your own. It was so easy I even considered going on and signing up all of my friends as well, just as a sort of early Christmas present.

* I should point out, before anyone gets the wrong idea, that either Valerie was English or they’ve massively improved their sloppily enunciated Estuary English dialect classes in Bangalore.

In the Nile

The problem with SouthWest Trains is that whatever their talents in the transport area, they’re just not very good at the information side of things. For the past few days at least, one of the information monitors at Vauxhall has been displaying ‘please press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to log on’*. On platform four today the information board was sporting an attractive pattern of diagonal lines while the platform three monitor had taken another tack and was simply refusing to accept any unpalatable truths about late or cancelled trains until it absolutely had to. Thus at 7:41 I was tempted out of the warm waiting room by the information that my train was due at 7:42. Five minutes later, no amount of hard stares would persuade either the train to arrive or the information board to update its prediction. Only when the next train was almost on us did it admit that the 7:42 was late – first ten minutes, then (having persisted with this obvious falsehood like a child caught red handed with the cookie-jar) finally turning it seamlessly into the 7:56 Weybridge train.

I wouldn’t have minded the fifteen minutes delay so much, it was enduring it minute by minute in the freezing cold that bothered me. Had they just fessed up and cancelled the train right away I could have waited inside. Still, apparently Silverlink are still doing worse – cancelling a couple of trains and using ‘adverse weather’ as the excuse. OK so it’s cold, but it is also November. That’s what it’s supposed to be like in winter, guys. This had my colleague so annoyed he would have preferred SWT’s stealth approach to cancelling trains – there is such a thing as too much information…

* This is marginally better than the St. Petersburg Airport departure monitor which every five minutes reverted to its Windows screensaver. Obviously the person whose job it was to wave the mouse around periodically had gone off on an extended tea break that day.

Spread a little Happiness. Or something

What would you do if you noticed that every time the guy sitting opposite you on the train took a sip of coffee, it was dripping onto his front? He had one of those takeaway sippy-cup lids that are notorious for this; the seal between the cup and the lid is just not good enough to handle the cup being tipped so by the time you get more than a third of the way through it’s leaking like a bastard. Anyway, I’ve blogged about this kind of dilemma before and this time I decided not to be the cold hearted English type who simply lets people go into work looking as though they still need to eat wearing a Tommy Tippee bib. Perhaps it’s because I’ve recently been in France, where even the waiters helpfully correct your grammar, but I leaned forward and tapped him on the knee and let him know his cup was leaking. Which was fine. Except then we had to sit facing each other for the rest of the journey – him knowing I knew he had poured coffee down his front, me knowing he knew I knew, etc. etc. in an agony of embarrassment until he got off (or fled) at Putney. Fortunately we were both able to hide our faces in our respective papers and nothing more was said.

Smile you are on CCTV Camera

I got to the station nice and early this morning giving plenty of time for me to:
Try and get a monthly season ticket on my oyster
Argue with the ticket lady over whether my oyster card was registered or not (apparently filling in the ‘register your oyster card’ form and handing it in and waiting about two months and checking that your oyster card account is there on line is not enough, if the oyster card itself doesn’t think it’s registered…)
Get a weekly season ticket instead
Buy my paper
Stand on the platform idly looking at the fog and musing how I had to cycle in with my lights on this morning
Sprint back down the stairs, out the station, and retrieve my lights from my bike
sprint back up the stairs, scattering little old ladies and faffers as I went
Catch my train.

Of course from the point of view of any alert passers by or the CCTV camera in the Vauxhall underpass, what they would have seen was someone running in, pinching a set of bike lights from a bike and then legging it. Did anyone challenge me? I think you can answer that question yourself…

My Paris commuting adventures were a little curtailed by the fact that the French transport unions panicked at my arrival and went on strike for about half of the trip. However we did manage to do loads of touristy things like putting the wrong ticket into the ticket gate and then holding up the barrier for ages while the ticket staff minutely examined the ticket, asking long complicated questions in halting French and then receiving equally long and involved answers in near perfect English*, and piling with three other adults and two kids onto a perfectly blameless bus and holding it up for about a week by attempting to pay for six tickets in 20 Euro cent coins. Oh, and the Eiffel tower, and the Louvre and those sorts of things as well but they weren’t nearly as satisfying.

And French RER trains (local suburban trains equivalent to Silverlink or SWT local services) come in double-decker forms. I’m sorry but double-decker trains just are the coolest thing in urban transport that I have seen in a while. Buses don’t even come close. No doubt someone somewhere in the French equivalent of TfL is plotting to replace them with new bendy trains that spontaneously combust and everyone loathes. Paris, I should add, is full of open topped double-decker buses that have been converted to be used for tours. You certainly won’t get that with the bendy buses…

* don’t try this at home…

Up the Junction

Of all the things that keep SouthWest Trains controllers awake at night worrying, I imagine that the one that has them sweating the most, the one that wakes them up screaming in the small hours, is the prospect of something serious going wrong at Clapham Junction. I don’t know whether some by law was passed in the 1860s making it compulsory for trains to pass through this station or what but it is pretty much the beating heart of the SWT network, and when I got into Vauxhall this morning and found the sign saying there had been a fire at Clapham Junction I nearly just turned around and went home again then and there. After all, if a single broken door could sometimes make the entire North London Line unusable for several hours, what unimaginable misery would this cause?

The answer was, er, not much… The handwritten sign in the ticket office window announcing ‘no trains’ which had been hastily crossed out and replaced with ’severe delays’ did not bode well, and the trains were running very late – by 7:30 (when I arrived) the train information terminals were showing so many late and cancelled trains that there was no room for anything scheduled after 7am. But the trains that were running were so late that they had simply become their later equivalents so that while the train I was on was about half an hour behind schedule, as far as I was concerned I was only a mere 8 minutes late – the sort of delay that Silverlink wouldn’t even bother to apologise about.

So not a bad end to the week after all and tomorrow we’re off to Paris by Eurostar for a spot of looting, sorry, shopping. Back on Wednesday with tales of how rude Parisian commuters are to poor hapless tourists who try and buy tickets in a language they don’t understand, block the ticket gates, get on the wrong train and try and get off again when the doors are closing, walk slowly laden with backpacks … in short I’m looking forward to being my own worst nightmare.

ps. News just in: before SWT gets too pleased with itself, one of the other half’s colleagues apparently spent 6 hours getting in to work this morning … such persistence, and on a Friday too.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

Mental note to self: you can’t get into the office with your oyster card. You can’t get onto the train with your staff pass. And you can’t get into the house with either of them…

Something else to note: you can’t buy a return ticket to Kew Bridge anything like as fast as you can renew a season ticket on your oyster. I hate to say this, but for a change the advertising is true. Once you have used the quick ticket machines to top up your oyster, it’s very hard to go back to buying a ticket any other way. The quick ticket machines take about four seconds, of which three are me trying to get my switch card into the slot the wrong way, and one me remembering to touch my oyster to the pad at the end of the transaction. It doesn’t even beep – it’s a stealth ticket machine.

This morning, unfortunately, I had to get an ordinary ticket because we’re going away for a few days next week and it wasn’t worth getting a seven-day travelcard. As the ticket machines at the SWT half of Vauxhall station are firmly 20th Century technology, (cash only, no button for Kew Bridge – one day I will get my revenge on everybody by buying a return to Weymouth from it using the contents of my penny jar) that meant queuing up behind a gaggle of French tourists who were planning a complicated transaction that involved phoning a friend and no doubt would have also included ask the audience and fifty/fifty were it not for the fact that a low growling sound alerted them to their imminent danger of having their arms ripped off and the soggy ends stuffed into their purple rucksacks and they very kindly let me go in front of them. Even so, it was agonising to watch the slow process of getting a ticket issued the old fashioned way. Some bits of new technology actually are worth upgrading to.

So, the sooner the train companies join the Oyster bandwagon, the happier I will be, but I don’t suppose it will be any time soon. By which time it probably will get me into my office & my own front door to boot …

Strapped for Cash

I was in town for a meeting today so I got to travel on the tube like a real commuter. It was a District line train, one of the old ones, and as I’d forgotten to buy a newspaper on the way in I spent some of the journey idly watching the little blob things on springs (I believe that is the technical term) that people can hang on to when they’re standing. And it suddenly struck me that the new tube trains don’t have them, they just have those colour-coordinated pole-dancing poles and bars along the aisles for the tall people to hold on to. I assume at some point in the past, when pea-soupers regularly engulfed London and Routemasters roamed the earth, there were tube trains with actual straps, as in ’strap hanging’, but as far back as I can remember tubes have always had blobs on springs and I feel a little aggrieved that they have started to disappear without anyone (= me) noticing.

The thing about the spring-blob-things (somebody help me out here, there must be a name for them) is that when the train lurches forward or jolts, it’s the spring that absorbs the momentum instead of, say, the passenger’s shoulder joint. But on the other hand, they are strictly one person handles and they are spaced out in a way that suggests a more generous age, when a rush hour train meant five or six gents standing chivalrously in the aisles while the ladies took their weight off their feet and did a little knitting on the way home, instead of the extended game of sardines we all have to play now. So the blobs must go the way of straps and we shall have to hold ourselves up by means of jamming ourselves into the gaps between people and hope that in the event of a sudden stop, we don’t all fall over like dominoes and end up in a tangled heap at the end of the carriage.