Shut Up, Just Shut Up, Shut Up!

With an hour's travel every morning, and another on the way home each evening, I tend to get a lot of reading done while on the move. I also listen to podcasts and documentaries (partly work-related). All this means that when I'm on the tube and the train driver or platform staff make an announcement, I have to unplug my earphones to make sure it's not something important. And when it isn't, my frustration levels begin to rise.

It might not sound much to people who live outside of London and have to wait for trains for up to half an hour at a time, but London's a busy, angry city. The tube trains should run at regular intervals of a minute or two apart, or else the platforms become dangerously congested. It's a situation that isn't helped by stupid people with no spacial awareness, who stop dead in the middle of a platform and then glare at anyone who tries to pass them to stand further up the platform where there's room and where they won't be blocking the entrance. Or people with prams. At rush hour.

See - congestion makes people intolerant. Anyone who stops you getting to somewhere where there's enough room for you to be more than six inches away from someone else's armpit is preferable. People don't talk on the tube, unless they have mental health issues, are drunk or are annoying. We're an anti-social breed in London, and we like it that way. So, when we've got a book so we can avoid eye contact, and earphones so we can block out needless communications, or the screech of the train as it speeds along the tunnels, the last thing we really want is to hear announcements, because they invariably mean our uncomfortable journey is likely to take a) twice as long as it should and b) about three times as long as we can bare. Speak to a Londoner after they've had a long journey on the tube and count the facial ticks.

Which is why I greeted this piece from BBC News with dismay. Any announcement that isn't essential to the decisions I make while travelling are a needless distraction. It's audio spam - noise for the sake of trying to convince me they're doing a better job than I'm willing to accept. If they're doing a good job, I'll know. If they're doing a bad job, I'll know - and the only things I might want to hear are explanations, apologies and alternative routes.

I don't want some platitude from Gandhi!

Trains and Trains and Trains

I have this theory that if you're travelling to work and look up every day at the same point to see which stop you're at, only to find you're still two stops away from your next interchange, then you're probably working too far away from home.

It's not a theory I'm going to bother testing exhaustively, or submit to peer review, but most days when I get on the Jubilee Line at London Bridge, I tend to look up to see if I've reached my destination only to find myself at Westminster. I've no massive desire to work in Westminster, but it's a damn sight closer than working at the wrong end of the Central Line.

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have quite so many changes either; whichever route I take it'll mean three trains or two trains and a bus.

Lucky that, after a few years of increasing frustration and desperation over work, I'm now loving my job and the people I work with. And last Friday I learned that I'll be staying with this job until September. For various political reasons, it has to end there for the time being, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to come back to it early next year (and I'll still be working for the same employer in the meantime, just on a different project).

So, while I don't like having to get three trains there and the same amount back, while I'm there I'm enjoying myself, which is a bit of a result.