Spent a frustrating day in the datacentre and headed back across the city to St Pancras to catch my train. The Underground, and the DLR, never cease to amaze me. The efficiency of the whole system is absolutely excellent – if only Sheffield’s transport operators would take a leaf out of TFL’s book.
Take the Oyster card system for example – you register an ‘Oyster’ card and top it up with some credit, in much the same way as a PAYG mobile phone. Then, when you want to make a trip, you just place the card (still inside your wallet/purse) over the RFID reader, and it registers your trip – and the bargaining token to taking up such a scheme is that you always get charged the lowest possible fare for that journey, automatically. No tickets, no faffing around for change, no queues. It really works very well indeed.
Of course, I don’t have an Oyster card – primarily because I wouldn’t use the system frequently enough for it be worth my while, but also because I travel down to London for my employers, and I’m not sure how I’d reclaim travel expenses with the card! 
So, I use the ticket machines – and this is another example of the efficiency. Now, how many times in the past have you gone to use a vending machine, say for a can of Coke, or a packet of fags, and you duly pop your shiny pound coin in….aaaaand the machine spits it back out at you? Dozens? Hundreds of times? I know it has me. Perhaps I’m just lucky as I use the system infrequently, but the ticketing machines on the Underground never, ever seem to reject a coin.
Perhaps I’m easily impressed. Mebbe.
I have a wee wait until my train, so I stop in at the Baby Betjeman and have a lovely pint of Sharp’s fantastically named ‘Doom Bar’ ale. It’s a cracking pint – and not one I’ve seen up north before. I’ll have to take a closer look in the supermarkets to see if it might lie with the other pale ales I usually ignore on the shelves.
The train is quite unusually busy. Even in First it’s packed. I end up next to two drunk guys in sharp suits. I hope that they’ll be leaving at Luton, or one of the commuter towns, but I overhear them saying they’re getting off at Derby. I can’t deal with these dribbling idiots for that long so I make an excuse and move to a single seat across the aisle. Much better.
The train appears to be full of these people. Some eavesdropping reveals that they’re some RailTrack delegates on some kind of jolly. The biscuit is well and truly taken though by two other charming men who decide to start “chatting up” a blind lady sitting across the aisle from them.
It’s obvious from her responses and her body language that she’s not interested, but she’s too polite to them, and after a few minutes you could tell that she was actually warming to these guys. The downer was that these guys were doing this as a kind of joke. Egging each other on when she went to the loo, and making gestures to each other that she obviously couldn’t see.
It became clear that after a while, she was enjoying the attention and was completely oblivious to their game. I thought long and hard about intervening, and telling these cunts exactly what I thought of them, but I felt it’d do no-one any good, other than a pyhrric victory in my mind.
It’d make this poor woman feel awful to know the truth, and would only serve to enhance and publicise her embarrassment. It might make me feel good to take these guys down a peg or two, but I can only think it’d be counter-productive in every other way. Saying nothing meant that the blind lady went home with a smile on her face, thinking she’d caught the eye of two city-boys. Sometimes, I guess, the lie can be more comforting than the truth.
Related posts:
- George Agdgdgwngo For those of you not familiar with the title, it's...
- New York, New York I find myself with flights booked to New York, next...
- New York, Part 4 I'm finally here, typing this up in my hotel room...
- Home Sweet Home So, on Tuesday evening all the paperwork was formalized and...
- Identifying fake SanDisk Ultra SD cards A while ago, I picked up a 'cheap' 2GB SanDisk...