Trifter

Boarding a train in the tube might give you some wrong ideas. A train announced to be Circle Line in Charing Cross for example and running to Baker Street doesn’t necessarily mean you got the right train to get to Bayswater. All Circle Line trains go to Bayswater one way or another, but the one I boarded didn’t. Immediately after leaving the station, it changed colour from yellow to pink and suddenly became a Hammersmith train to Hammersmith. ‘Don’t take it out on the staff.’

Riding the District Line the other day, it even got better than that. Being on a westbound train, it decided to make the terminal stop at Whitechapel and return to Barking instead of running into the city. At the same time the eastbound service drew in on the other platform to make its terminal stop there as well and return to the city instead of running to Barking. I suppose this makes sense to somebody, probably the brainless tube employees, but it doesn’t make any sense to normal people.

The announcement on my platform following this rather abrupt end to the journey was: ‘Please board the train waiting on the eastbound platform.’ And judging the sudden surge in people on the eastbound platform, they received similar information for our platform. As there is a footbridge from one platform to the other designed for a trickle of people to pass over, the scenes than ensued were pure Charlie Chaplin movie. The outcome of it was that nobody reached the trains on the other platform before they left.

The result was inevitable: The surges turned back on themselves, and total bedlam reigned supreme as people tried to get back or forth. I was still standing on my platform and admiring the organizational skills of Underground management. And please remember: ‘Don’t take it out on the staff.’

On one of my prior articles mentioning lazy and overpaid staff at the tube, one of the members of staff (I presume) felt inclined to whine about us bad writers who harangue the poor overworked and underpaid jobbers. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I myself find people who don’t work on weekends and during nights because they are too lazy to do it, lazy. Considering that they cash in a whopping £50,000 a year, the word overpaid seems appropriate to me. Especially if I look at Switzerland, where they would earn just about half as much, including night work, and with shop prices at least 30 percent higher than in England, the word to use should not be ‘overpaid’ but ‘robbery’.

Now please add to this picture the last tube strike. It is an open secret that during the strike the strikers were not staging picket lines, but having a party paid for by the union. What a way to live, wish I could earn so much money just for pressing a button. Knowing all of which, it is hardly surprising that the tube has the longest waiting list of persons waiting to be employed.

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