Monday 12 March 2007

To all those anonymous commenters

Last week, my blogging experimentation took on a new significance. I realised that some people were in fact reading my musings and taking some points rather earnestly! See some of the comments (some of them a little bit nasty, I do think. By all means comment if you do not agree with me, but try to avoid resorting to nasty insults!) left on this post to see what I mean.

Internal doors. I never knew what trouble they would get me in. Yes, they are there for fire safety reasons and I am sure they will do a stirling job in the (fortunately) unlikely event of a fire. However, day-to-day, they are irritating when they close just as you are walking through them.

Anyway, that is another issue that has already been given quite enough time here.

Something I have learnt is that there are some people who take their job very seriously. This is actually rather cheering. I am not a train person. Well, I take them everyday, but I give no thought to the complexities of running a large train network. However, there are some people who think about it a lot, and indeed, it appears to be quite a passion for them. I am pleased about this and I can understand how people feel. When people have a misconception about my line of work, I will strive to change their attitude, and sometimes I will take it quite personally. I think, ‘hey this person is insulting my industry, they must be insulting me too.’

So. My presumption from all of this is that South West Trains must be a pretty good employer for all of these people to defend them so energetically. This is in itself a success. I suppose happy employees build successful companies.

Now then, those internal doors…..

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everyone gets defensive about their jobs from time to time, but some of those comments were pretty ridiculous.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were reading you from SWT head office - I know from my stat package that SWT staff have hunted specifically for my blog because their IP addresses are logged and I know the search terms used. I also know that the Rail Users Committee have access my blog as well - more specifically the post about their breaking the law.

Sod their put downs, you are entitled to gripe about whatever you like. Whoever posted "How fucking stupid can someone be. I swear to god" is clearly a fuckwit themselves. What a pointless remark, which only shows up how they are unable to construct an argument past name calling...

Anonymous said...

A career in the rail industry has been part of my family heritage for over 100 years and I am proud to continue that tradition, even in the last 13 years I have seen enormous changes in the industry but it still remains something I am passionate about to such a degree that I take great pride in what I do and of course take umbrage at complaints. I have no problem whatsoever in dealing with complaints from the public when they are justified (and the horrendous mismanagement of the signal work in your area is a perfect example of such a situation), but it can be quite soul destroying to be committed to your job and then have somebody having a go at you over what can often be a very trivial matter simply because they want to have a go at someone. Fortunately you don't fall into that latter category, but it appears some of my colleagues have stereotyped you into it. Glad you enjoyed that free tea and coffee at your station, scant reward however for those of us in the yellow jackets standing in the cold for eight hours day after day this winter!!