Turn that Racket Off!

Trains. A place where people of all shapes and sizes are flung together in a carriage. They travel together day in and day out. Nobody speaks to anyone they don’t know. Everyone (well, most people) is the model of decorum and politeness.

One day, on the journey home, two teenage girls got on the train. The train pulled off and chugged along merrily for a while. We then got near to a station and stopped and everything went quiet. You know how it is when the engines stop all their whirring and crunching. You just get silence, aside from quiet ticks and squeaks from the train as it waits patiently on the track. All is quiet in carriage number 3.

And then the teenage girls turn on some music on their mobile phone. On loudspeaker. The entire carriage is subjected to a tinny version of P.Diddy blaring out into the quiet carriage. People start getting a bit fidgety about this. Yet, nobody says anything. The woman next to me is clearly very irritated by this noise and starts turning around to give the girls ‘commuter evils’ (*this is when you dislike what someone else is doing, yet do not want to break the Commuter Code by actually talking to them. Neither do you want to glare at them so much as to encourage a response from them.)

She then starts muttering under her breath, ‘good god’, ‘for god’s sake’ and the like. As I am sitting next to her, I feel like I need to acknowledge her mutterings. Yet the carriage is so deathly quiet that I don’t want to. I smile bleakly at her. She carries on her mutterings to me. But there is nothing I can do! I am starting to feel uncomfortable now.

And then the train comes back to life with a whir and a groan, and the P.Diddy is partially blocked from our eardrums.

Thank goodness.

The Train: My Second Home

Sometimes I sleep very deeply on the train.

I get involved in dreams that seem to last for eternity, only to wake up with a jolt and realise I am on the train and it is daytime. Sometimes, I twitch and drop my book that I have been holding on the floor. I twitched a lot last night. Normally, I tend to twitch in my train-sleep when I have an aisle seat. My reasoning for this is because I have nothing to lean on, and am therefore engaging in a careful balancing act in my sleep. It’s a bit like sleeping while standing up I imagine (although I am not sure I could manage that), where you have to balance your body. Sometimes, I fall asleep with the seat free next to me. When I wake up I find that there is someone sitting next to me, and I hope to God that I have not been talking in my sleep again or pulling silly faces.

Yesterday, I was so deeply asleep that when my train reached its terminus (fortunately, this is my stop), a lady had to gently, but firmly poke me on the arm to awake me.

Poke poke. ‘urgh?’ said I. ‘Sorry, I thought I ought to wake you there,’ said she.

I don’t think I fancy a night on the train, or a return trip to London, so I am thankful she did wake me.

I also think I need to pay attention to the way I am sleeping. Neck bent to the side, head lolling about, slumped down in my seat. I do notice that I frequently have a sore neck. Is this doing long-term damage I wonder? Will I one day be visiting the chiropractor and blaming my bad back on ‘those commuting days on the trains’?

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…..

The Mystery of the Cheap Ticket

Why are singles cheaper than a return?

I have just booked a train to Hull for a meeting. When initially searching for a Return Ticket the price was about £130. I thought this was pretty expensive to be honest, even though Hull is absolutely miles away. Then I noticed a little link saying ‘singles might be cheaper’, click on this, filled in my details and have managed to get a return journey (using singles) for less than half the price. Very strange! Long distance journeys often seem to have the situation where 2 singles is cheaper than one return, yet local services charge almost the same price for a single as for a return!

Well, it confuses me. I am just pleased that I had the sense to trail through all the forms to find the cheapest combination of tickets. Although, saying that, work were paying for the ticket, so it doesn’t really matter to me personally. But still, I like to feel like I have nabbed a bargain!

The South West Trains Key to the Door

I experienced another predicament with the internal beeping doors this morning. These doors are giving me hassle this week! (see post) Those little green buttons are completely ineffective. The door slid shut as I approached it. Sensibly, I pressed the green button for it to open. It rudely ignored me. I pushed the button again, except this time a little harder. Still no response from the elusive door. I pressed it a couple more times with my thumb. No reply.

With a bemused expression on my face (at least, I hope it was bemusement rather than irritation) I looked around at my fellow passengers who were standing behind me, patiently waiting while I battled to get the door open. One man stepped forward to help. I am sure I saw a little ‘roll-of-the-eyes’ as I was clearly very incompetent, couldn’t open a blimming train door and here he was to step in. He pressed the button. I was quite relieved to see that the door did not open for him either (Hurrah, it’s not all about the strength of the button pushing, man!)

I was about to turn around and go into the carriage on the other side, when along came a South West Trains employee. One push of the button from her blessed finger and the door slid open obediently, straightaway. So, are they putting internal door codes into the fingertips of South West Trains workers in order to outfox the common, paying, passenger?

I think this is the case.

Spring in my Step

The days are getting longer. The mornings are brighter and lighter. The birds are singing. The flowers are blooming. Etc. etc. before I launch into a badly worded, clichéd poem, you get the message. I am feeling the Spring effect. We all know it, ‘The Spring Effect’, where you feel inexplicably happy, relieved and jubilant at the prospect that those long winter nights are almost over.

It has been a particularly long winter for me. My first winter of commuting (not in London) and rarely seeing daylight. Now at least there is hope of going for a nice summer evening-pint outside when I get back from work. Or enjoying a cool jog by the sea and watching the sunset. Or going for an evening game of tennis. Or a BBQ on the beach before sunset.

Ah, all those romantic notions of summertime. They are nearly upon us.

Isn’t it amazing how great it makes you feel? I sat on my train this morning watching the countryside speed by, marvelling at the crisp blue sky, the green-ness of the trees, the sparkling of the water.

Lovely.

Talking of the crisp blue sky, I got very close to booking a sky-dive today. A bit of a ‘tick the box to say I’ve done this’ life-time ambition. I was going to press the submit button, and then read the ‘Terms and Conditions’ and got rather freaked out by how many times the word ‘death’ was included in the clauses.

I know it’s pretty safe (especially if doing a tandem), but my sensibility got the better of me, and I will wait for another day when I am feeling a bit braver.

Stop the train, I want to get off!!

South West Trains take sticking to the timetable a little too earnestly. It’s as if station staff have been told, ‘at all costs you must stick to the timetable, do not send your train chugging off into the distance a minute late, it MUST leave the station at the designated time.’

This is assuming the train gets to the station on time in the first place, but that is another, well documented, story.

The other day, the train I was on pulled into my station on time. This isn’t news in itself, to be honest, this happens quite frequently really, so I shouldn’t grumble about that too much.

Does anyone else get rather irritated by those silly internal doors that can’t recognise when there is a person passing through, and attempt to close with a sly little beep-beep-beep, thereby trapping the person in-between them? That has happened to me quite a lot. I dislike that little lit-up green button that you have to press as the doors are closing in order to get it to stay open. Someone with less manual dexterity than myself may struggle with pushing a moving button. Sometimes I struggle when I am half asleep in the morning.

However, when my train pulled into my station, I waited until everyone had queued up in the aisle and traipsed off the train as normal before leaping up and following them, bringing up the rear, as they say.

I got to these pesky internal doors and they began to close as I approached them. I dived forward to press the green button to get them to open. They didn’t. They paused for a second while my finger was on the button, so I tried again. They didn’t open. So I got a little bit frantic and pressed the button rapidly. Eventually, after about 5 pushes, they opened again. In the meantime however, passengers getting ON to the train had almost finished embarking. I realised that the outside doors were beeping and about to close (despite there being about three people outside still queuing to get on). I dashed to the door and squeezed through as it was closing, rudely (I’m sorry) pushing past the three people trying to get on. One of them shouted ‘hang on’ to the station whistle blower, who ignored him and blew the whistle and waved the round-headed stick thing. The waiting passengers did a frantic squeeze through the doors to get on to the train, and the last one got stuck. Fortunately it was a fairly big chap who just prised the doors open so that he could through. I am sure if I was in that situation I would just stutter meekly, ‘argh, what do I do?’ and get carried off with the train.

So, despite the train whistle blower being aware of three people waiting to get on the train (not to mention me trying to get off!) they signalled that the train was safe to close its doors and move on. I understand the need to keep to timetable targets, but at the detriment to paying passengers being able to GET ON (and off!) the train they have paid for?!