Why Trains aren’t reliable in the UK

Further to recent UK press correspondence on the reliability of train services I would like to add the experiences of someone who has just left a major train operating company.   By the way, I’m glad to be out.

The main reason why trains are sometimes unreliable, late, cancelled or non-existent is mainly due to the people who use the stations. If train operating companies did not have to cope with passengers, the trains would be much more reliable.

I’ve spent four years watching how you, the great unwashed, use trains. The day I started with my previous employer I was given a staff handbook. It is widely accepted in the train industry, that the passengers should be given a user guide.

All of the above problems are caused by a combination of the following. Firstly there are commuters who all insist on travelling at about the same time. Try and be flexible. Then there are the commuters who hold the doors open for each other. This is likely to damage the doors and can easily lose 30 seconds at every station. Then there are other commuters who insist on travelling with bikes during the rush-hour, even though stations clearly mark the times during which bikes may not be carried on trains. Also there are people who treat trains like a flop house, soiling the seats with their feet, and leaving rubbish on the trains. Trains which are not fit for service are often held back, leading to cancellations.

Then there are the mothers with buggies, who stand at one door ready to get on the train, then change their minds and rush halfway along the platform to another door, before boarding at the last minute. Then there are the schoolchildren who insist on jumping on and off about five times at each station. The guard clearly can’t close train doors while this is happening leading to more delays. Enough delays can often lead to the cancellation of a later service.

Then there are the parents who don’t know where their little darlings are in the evening. Well they’re out vandalising the trains, vandalising the stations, graffitiing the trains, assaulting staff and being obnoxious in many other ways. Oh, and I mustn’t forget fare dodgers who delay trains because the police are called.  We used to call you passengers who didn’t want to become customers.  Finally there are those of you who get so drunk in the evening that you can’t get home without urinating or vomiting on the train.

If there are any members of the travelling public not covered by the above then train staff will be pleased to accept your custom.

Web site whinges

Not only do I extensively use the internet, I work in the information technology industry. The internet is a prime source of FESTERING ANGER for me, and I will return to this subject many times in the future.

I am constantly amazed at how incompetent some website designers actually are. I went to the website of Wickes, a well-known UK DIY and building supplies outlet. At the top of the page there is a place prefixed Product Search. I typed in, correctly spelled, “toilet seat”. Very quickly the website responded with the following:

Sorry, we were unable to find any results for ‘toilet seat’.

You may want to try:

* Ensuring your spelling is correct.
* Using fewer keywords.

Now I know for a fact that they sell toilet seats, as I wish to make a complaint about one which I recently bought from them. How do the rest of you cope when greeted with this sort of situation?

It’s bad enough that the website doesn’t work as you’d expect it to, but I can really do without the patronising “You may want to” hideous Americanism.  How do the rest of you keep calm when confronted with this level of incompetence?

Are TV adverts too loud? Do we care?

Daytime radio (BBC London, 94.9 FM) is currently discussing the fact that advert volume on TV is louder than the actual program.  I feel my Festering Anger rising.

Is there anyone these days still watching a TV that doesn’t have a remote control handset with a mute button?

We use it at the beginning and end of each set of adverts.  It’s quite reliable, and it means we save a fortune by not being aware of products we really don’t need.!!

If anyone wants a training session on how to use a remote, let me know.

Am I a politically incorrect racist?

An open and tongue-in-cheek letter to a friend who suggested I made a politically incorrect or possibly racist statement.

Your comments on political correctness and racism made me think. While I would never call a black man a nigger in anger, or use the word spastic to a disabled person, I am a hundred percent sure that this so-called political correctness has gone too far. It harks back to the Victorian days when covers were put on a chair legs in the name of modesty.

One thing that really annoys me about this so-called political correctness is the frequency with which what we’re allowed to say changes. My girlfriend’s father suffers from extreme multiple sclerosis, and considers himself disabled. There are those in society who would call him differently abled. He has no time for such stupidity. When I was a child some children were described as slow learners. Then someone decided that such children should be called children with learning difficulties. Then someone decided they should be called children with special needs. Then somebody decided they should be called children with different needs. These days education in England has got so bad that nobody bothers any more.

30 years ago there was a popular UK television programme, “Love Thy Neighbour”. It was a very funny and harmless programme about a black couple, or is that Afro-American couple, or couple of colour? They lived next door to a white racist bigot and his long-suffering wife. Political correctionists would be shocked if this programme was ever re-transmitted, but 30 years ago it was very funny. All four actors went on to find later greater success.

Another television programme, still often repeated in England, focuses on a bedraggled bunch of elderly military reservists, and their misguided attempts at keeping German spies out of England during the Second World War. One of its greatest fans was a German colleague who thought the programme was hilarious. Let’s hope that political correctness never restricts it from our air waves.

These same correctionists have made a total mockery of the way in which we are obliged to use the English language (can I even say that any more?!). When the semantic purists started renaming manhole covers as inspection grilles, and changing chairman or chairwoman to chair, or the even worse chairperson, which sounds like a cleaning woman, sorry un-sexed cleaning operative, I decided it was too late to try and keep up.

I’m sure you will appreciate that all of what I have written is very much tongue-in-cheek. I think political correctionists would do well to spend their time deciding whether people mean offence, rather than taking offence whenever it is possibly on offer. Our next-door neighbours are from Peru, and I have nothing against them. I met him just once, and they have made no attempt to be remotely sociable. His wife is a singing teacher, and is taken to wailing opera at loud volume several times a day. It has done nothing to alienate me against Peruvians.

Several years ago the block next door, where they now live, was a corner shop run by an elderly (oh dear there I go again!) Asian couple. 30 years ago such a shop, usually an ethnic grocers and multi-product stockists was called a Paki shop, as they were invariably run by Pakistani families. These days we have to call them ethnic grocers and multi-products stockists. The word Paki is now considered a racist term, although the IBM dictation software I’m using to dictate this, recognises it as a word. Personally I hate being called a Brit, nearly as much as I dislike the staff in Indian restaurants calling me ‘Boss’, which I clearly am not.

I really do think that this political correctness and quasi-racism is going too far, as if you hadn’t already realised that from my earlier writing. I can see the day when football matches may only take place in a sterile atmosphere of polite applause, free from the cheering and light-hearted banter which create such atmosphere, not that I ever attend football matches.

There are interfering goody-goodies who try to ensure that all activities at school are non-competitive. This might make life a little bit simpler for somebody’s little darlings, but it is hardly preparing them adequately for real life. I was never an excellent student, nor a particularly gifted sportsman, except in one field, pun intended, but I certainly tried as hard as I could in all activities even though I invariably knew that I was doomed to failure

I think people should be able to speak freely, as long as they do not deliberately aim to cause offence. Isn’t there something like that in your (US) constitution? Thinking back, one of the worst examples of racism I have ever encountered came up when I was training an Asian man several years ago. He had spent some considerable time being assisted by telephone by an Afro-Caribbean colleague born in England. I arranged for the two to meet, to facilitate a better working atmosphere. After the brief introduction the Asian man said to me that he was surprised that an Afro-Caribbean man could have been so knowledgeable and helpful. That was 10 to 15 years ago and it still amazes me today.

35 years ago I was just too young to vote in a UK referendum to decide whether we should join what was then called the Common Market, or European Economic Community. Year-on-year it gets closer to being a United States of Europe. We are becoming increasingly governed by the lawmakers in Brussels. On Thursday we have the opportunity to vote for members of the European Parliament. UKIP, the 15-year-old United Kingdom Independence Party expects to secure enough votes to win second place. They are pledged to getting us out of Europe.

A final thought, when we were in Boston three years ago, I bought a Confederate army cap from a Boston Museum. I wore it one evening and a Yankee, a very good friend of ten years thought I was putting my life on the line, probably the Mason-Dixon one.

Interfering Grandparents

A journalist here wants grandparents to have legal access to their grandchildren.

I have never heard anything so ludicrous.  Will she be suggesting some form of proportional representation next, allowing countless interfering, busy-body great aunts and the people up the road access to children next?

Attitudes like that make me glad that we don’t have children, and that I dumped my parents 25 years ago.  Life’s hard enough without being caught in the so-called friendly cross-fire.

Internet Service Providers and Call Centres

Why is it that every time I have to deal with an Internet Service Provider, steam starts coming out of my head and I’m left with a feeling of wanting to kick something small and fluffy?

I’ll start at the beginning, and hopefully this will help me vent some of my Festering Anger. I have a very small website, relating to a business venture which didn’t succeed. I still maintain that website just in case I need to give it another try one day. It costs me a couple of pounds a month. Some months ago my bank card expired, and they sent me a new one. Many, many weeks later the website host sent me an e-mail, threatening me with bailiff action if I didn’t update my online record with a new valid card number. That seems simple enough, however I couldn’t remember my password and because I received so much e-mail spam I’d killed off that particular e-mail address that I needed to log onto the site and update my details.

I sent an e-mail back to the billing department telling them that I thought their bailiff threats were a bit over the top and secondly that I couldn’t remember my password. They offered to e-mail me instructions on resetting the password. Of course I then had to explain to them that because I got so much spam I no longer used that e-mail address.

Correspondence by e-mail was taking too long as I’d send an e-mail one day and not get a reply until later in the week . I tried phoning them. They asked me for my customer number, but as I was calling from work I didn’t have that so I gave them my name, my post code and the domain name. They then assured me that I wasn’t one of their customers! I then had to go back to communicating with them by e-mail, but they only seem to send e-mail out on Saturdays so this dragged on for another two or three weeks. I explained in detail what the problem was and I think the billing staff only read the first sentence of e-mails so they suggested that I apply for a resetting of my password. I then replied that I had already tried this and would they please read all of the email. Well, to cut a long story short I decided to transfer the domain name to my Internet Service Provider, sort of keeping all my eggs in one basket.

Today I phoned the customer care department of my Internet Service Provider. I was given the usual half-dozen options, I was given an update on technical problems which I am not currently experiencing, and I was then invited to hold until an operator became available. Of course they were experiencing exceptionally heavy loading at present. I ended up talking to someone whose grasp of English was limited and this was made worse by his strong foreign accent and this was made worse by a two-second delay on the telephone line making me realise that I was talking to somebody in an overseas call centre. He didn’t seem familiar with the company’s products and I was really getting overheated. He then told me that I looked at his website all this information would be presented to me. It’s just fortunate that I was actually able to access the website. Finally I asked him if he was based in Sheffield, where my Internet Service Provider is based. No he replied I’m in South Africa.

Through gritted teeth I thanked him for his time and hung up.

Blogs and other non-words

I really don’t know where this is going to take me. It’s going to be an outlet for thoughts to which I do not want to put my name at present.

My first outburst of Festering Anger is going to be about the B word. Quite why we need the B word I just do not understand. This is possibly an online record, perhaps an electronic journal, maybe even a digital diary, but I will not use the B word.  I greatly love the English language, and I love the tortuous and idiosyncratic path it follows as it evolves .

“Blogged” sounds like somebody with a heavy cold describing a lavatory U-bend left stuffed with used toilet paper by a previous occupant. Having got that issue off my chest already, I almost feel as if I do not have enough Festering Anger left to continue.