Why is it that when the slightest things goes wrong with the signals or other lame excuse (usually at London Bridge) passengers (with the exception of me) and Bob Crows army run around like chickens with their head cut off having no clue what is happening.
Last week your truly bowls up to see a MASS of people staring skyward (no not at some apparition of the second coming) but at blank timetables and listening to garbled messages informing the masses that Gordon Brown is the second coming (no that’s not it I meant what we are supposed to do where we should go to catch a train).
Now I can be a little forthright (now you probably mean your arrogant, rude, impatient, irritable self we all know and love ed.) but I know where the train usually stops so in my true welsh rugby star way jinked through the crowds (as we should have done this weekend in Auckland) past the prop forward that was this immense lady jammed in the automatic gates to my train and jumped on. I must say there were a few ‘excuse ME’s’ and ‘how rudes’ on the way but sorry you have got to get on the bloody train. So there I was listening to the announcements: ‘the twain at platfoam one is the 17** to graveyard calling at ??????, ?????’. Crap am I on the right train? – now to cut a long story short I wasn’t – so off to platform three as it happens through the mass of humanity coming the other way – ask a guard on the way was this a train to East Croydon – no idea guv – (maybe if I’d asked what the fundamental theory of algebra was I might have had more success) – and jumped on with fifty or so other sweaty passengers on another train – yes the wrong one again – so we all piled off to the next platform for the right one.
Of course dear reader by the time I got to East Croydon I had missed two connections to sunny Lingfield and had to wait for a while for Southern to take me away from all this. Now why is it when a small engineering fault happens, no one knows what’s happening, the staff haven’t a clue, the commuters (me excepted) stand around like cattle with foot and mouth waiting to be chopped, no feedback or info available, and no prospect of the second coming to cap it off either (eh!! Ed.)
When are we going to get organised in this country!!