As it was the first time my commute to London had been affected by cold weather I was mildly surprised by the train company’s attitude: “It’s snowing, we’re not running any trains.  kthxbye!”.  Not a hint of “We’d like to apologise for any inconvenience this will cause” or anything similar, just a stark “no trains today” announcement.  Now, I can usually work from home if need be, but I’m guessing I’m still in the minority there.  Approximately 143,000 people commute into London on Southeasern Railways trains every day (it says here), and every one of those people was inconvenienced in one way or another on Monday and Tuesday.

Obviously, those of us who pay in advance for our train tickets don’t get any recompense for paying for something that didn’t actually exist – there’s some customer charter somewhere that says that because I pay *cough* pounds a month for my ticket I have fewer rights than someone who only travels occasionally.  I’ve never quite understood that…

I don’t think they could or should have done anything different, it’s just the way they act as if we should think ourselves lucky if they actually provide the service we pay through the nose for. Just one little sentence with the word ‘apologise’ or ’sorry’ in it would have gone a long way for this particular commuter.

With thanks to neilalderney123 at Flickr for the photo – I was far too warm and cosy at home to venture out with the camera!

The downsides are plenty though, and I’m not even counting the obvious ones about being away from home, missing the family, etc etc. Let’s start with the biggest problem every commuter encounters: other commuters. I think there’s enough raw material here for a few posts, so for this one I’m just going to concentrate on one small subsection of my fellow commuters: the Phone People.

The Phone People are those people who spend every spare penny of their wage on a top rate mobile phone contract, and feel obliged to use every one of their 4,500¹ ‘free’ minutes every month. They’re the ones who board the train with the phone pinned to their ear, and are still there, spouting nothing into it 90 minutes later when I get off. They speak about nothing, to everybody in their phonebook. There’s a girl who gets on my train in the evenings who starts planning what she’s going to wear at the weekend on Tuesday. And when she’s finished telling friend 1 that it’s going to be the sparkly gold top with the big wide belt, we have to listen as she tells friend 2 that it’s going to be the sparkly gold top with the big wide belt. And then friend 3. And then friends 4, 5 and 6. And then her (obviously) long-suffering boyfriend. She probably continues, but by this point in the journey I, along with most of the rest of the carriage, have given up trying to sleep or read and have donned headphones in an attempt to block out her inanity. I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes on to inform the emergency services of her intended wardrobe for the weekend so that they can stock up on the right kind of replacement heels…

I’ve digressed slightly and got a little bit personal. If you recognise yourself from that description, then please, for the love of everything that is good and right, shut up when you’re on the train… Thanks.

Back to the point, the Phone People are just pure irritation. I think the train companies should introduce something like ‘Annoyance Free’ carriages, where carrying a non-silent phone would be grounds for some serious tutting, and speaking into it would get you turfed out at the next station. I really do think that on a 12-carriage train, they’d need about 11 ‘Annoyance Free’ carriages.

Obviously, for this to work, you need someone to judge what is annoying and what isn’t. I’d gladly give up some of my train time to make the world a better, quieter place…

¹ 4,500 minutes. Strangely enough, 4,500 minutes is about the amount of time I spend travelling home from London in one month. I reckon most Phone People must have contracts that mean that they have to spend at least that long on the phone. I mean, they must also use the phone when I’m not within earshot, right?

We had the ‘ring lady’ round to see us the other night. Our one real extravagance in this whole wedding thing is having hand made rings with luvvy-duvvy ‘metal exchange’, which basically means that because both our rings are being made at the same time out of the same stuff, our lady can take an iddy-biddy bit of my ring and put it into Mary’s, and vice versa. Now I know and you know that it’s all coming out of the same lump of metal, so who cares… But we like the idea, so ner

This week I had another visitor in the form of an accident investigator from one of the insurance companies involved in that crash in August. He took a statement from me, and then completely astounded me by saying that the person who’s fault the crash was is trying to blame the other driver. Apparently, nowadays, if you’re driving along in an altogether safe manner, under the speed limit, in a straight line, in the inside lane of a dual carriageway and someone hits you from behind, it’s your fault. Astounding.

More?

Consult-a-shirts, consult-a-suits, consult-a-cufflinks, consult-a-hair.

I have decided that my home-grown blogging stuff was a little too limiting and adding functionality to it doesn’t seem worth the hassle when you can head over to moveabletype.org and grab this nice little system, and have it set up and running in about 10 minutes. I have some work to do to it to make it fit into the rest of my site, but then I am thinking that this could, very easily become my site. Maybe the gallery will stay as it is, though.

Anyway – proper blog-type stuff… erm… Oh yes, for anyone else who I’ve forgotten to tell, I am off to sunny(ish) France next week. All is set, I think – I have a sleeping bag (which I can just about fit in), a travel adaptor for my laptop, and travel insurance. It will be nice to get away from the stress of work for a little while, but I am really going to miss someone in particular. You get so used to them being a click or a phonecall away…

Oh – interviews. They’re great, aren’t they? At the beginning of them, everyone in the room wants the candidate to get the job, and it sort of gets to the end and they’ve managed to talk themselves out of it. Or maybe I start at the wrong end of the scale – maybe I should start by not wanting to give them the job, and let them talk me into it… Either way, they are time consuming, and it boils down to a bit of a lottery. It always helps if they bloody turn up, though…

Discussion aplenty here about timings, triggers, error checking and general stuff for our friends in the low countries. Why am I not surprised things seem to be getting more complex by the minute?

Oh and my new ADSL Modem/Router/Wii-fi Access Point should be arriving today, so I expect some period of downtime for this site tonight… Hopefully not too long