I almost forgot I still had one entry left to write. Here it is, the last one, I don’t think there will be anymore after this one. Thanks to everyone who stuck around. There will be some polls in the post after this one.
Entry 10: Paid self-sabotage for the lazy
Entry 10: Paid self-sabotage for the lazy
“Are you lazy? Do you like to willingly sabotage yourself? Do you like to be in constant stress over whether you’ll be on time or not? Would you like to pay for all of that? Hi, I’m Dave from TFL, I’m here to tell you that you can be in this position! Just hop onto one of our trains and buses and you’ll be on your way to insanity in no time, and all for a nice price! TFL, always here to fuck you over when you least need it!”
I feel like this should be TFL’s marketing campaign, it’d certainly be very accurate. You pay them for a service and then said service doesn’t work and you end up losing. You do it not because you need the transport, but because you’re lazy. You’re too lazy to walk a mile, so you take the bus (I used to do this), you’re too lazy to learn to drive a car, so you take the train (I’m definitely guilty of that one). You take public transport, it goes wrong, you complain and then you come back for seconds, like some sick and twisted masochist.
Every morning you hear of signal failures on some line, every day there’s a multitude of delays of varying magnitude on various lines. The issue is so big that TFL feel the need to tell you that there’s a good service everywhere by making the AI voice chime in. Of course, it’s all bullshit, there’s NEVER a good service everywhere, there’s just delays that they can get away with not announcing. It’s even funnier when the announcement is meant to come on at every station, but I’ve never made it past the 3 stations mark before it stops, because something has gone wrong somewhere for the umpteenth time in X minutes.
I kid you not when I say this, from my experience, to TFL a MINOR delay is AT LEAST 20 mins. Any less than that and it’s not a delay to them. To put that into context, in Japan, 2 minutes is verging on being a crime. To them about 1.5 mins is considered a minor delay, and if there is a delay, they give you a special note to explain to your manager or teacher why you were late. If they had to pay a pound to every passenger on a delayed line for every minute that there was a delay due to signal failure, they’re fix those signals real quick. Tube workers are known for going on strike over pay and other things, but I think that passengers should do a mass boycott where nobody uses and public transport for a month straight.
I don’t know what’s worse, the trains, or the buses. I now refuse to take the bus unless I absolutely have to, and then I regret it immediately. When I absolutely have to, it’s usually because the trains have screwed me over so badly that I’ll be late no matter what I do, and I’d rather be at the place late, but not drenched in sweat and heaving like an asthmatic. As I’ve come to find out, I tend to walk the mile faster than a bus can drive it if you factor in waiting for the bus and then having it stop on every single stop. I go to extreme lengths to not take the bus, doesn’t matter what condition I’m in, doesn’t matter if I’m carrying stuff, doesn’t matter what the weather is like. I will not get on one of those things. They’re slow, crowded, noisy, built like shit, driven by imbeciles, they cost money and I can’t sit down in most of them, which is annoying because in some cases I can’t even stand up properly in them either.
If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d have a license and a car by now, but no, instead I chose to pay to get fucked over. Let me tell you a couple of stories. The first isn’t much of a story, but it’s worth mentioning, earlier this year, temperatures in the afternoon got to 25oC (77oF for the spanners) and 5 lines had to be completely shut down. Any sort of weather fluctuation and the entire country goes into panic mode. It’s no better on a chilly morning when most of the lines have delays.
Now, on to an actual story. I was heading in to uni one morning, everything seems fine, up until I got to the platform where they announced minor delays on my line. This must’ve happened on my way to the station as it was fine when I checked before I left. Already, I was kind of annoyed knowing what ‘minor’ really meant. At no point did I expect the shit storm that would go down. I must’ve been on the platform for a good 15 mins when the prat for the control room came on the PA system to say that for some reason our train (going to the outskirts of London) will be docking on the other platform (the crowded ones for the trains going into central). So, a packed platform for my train moves over to an even more packed platform for trains going into London, then the idiot comes on again to tell us that the train will be there in 2 mins.
We wait the minutes and then we see out train come and stop at the platform…that we were originally on! We all missed our train, because of the retard in the control room. He then had the guts to come back on the radio to say that the next train for Uxbridge will definitely be coming on the platform for the ones going into London. At that point, I thought to myself “Fuck this shit!” So, I moved to the regular platform (it was only me and about three other people who moved back), and sure enough, the train came on the correct platform again, and all the clowns listening to the prat on the PA got burned again. I get on the train, it sets off and then it stops between the station it just left and the next station…for 20 fucking minutes. I ended up being a hour late that day and my friend said that there were still delays when he travelled the same route, 2 hours later.
Then there was the time when I was getting back from uni, I was at my change-over station waiting for the train to come in, but it seemed to be stuck outside the station, I waited maybe 10 mins before I got fed up, went to my dad’s work place (the client’s house wasn’t too far from a station which serves a line that was passing through the station I was waiting in), had some Chinese, waited for him to finish and then we went home.
My most recent encounter with a signal failure was a week or so ago when I was heading into London to meet with a friend. My journey should have been 2 lines, instead I had to take a stupid route and change between 5 lines. I only just managed to get there in time.
TFL can fucking burn in hell, though we’re the lazy clowns who keep using their shit service and never do anything about it. It’s either self-sabotage for the lazy or the paradise of a masochist.
