Haircuts and Sunsets...

In which I have a haircut.  And do some running, possibly.

After my last post I'm sure you're all wondering how I got on with my journey home this week (I promise this will be quick and then I'll stop whining about trains, at least until next week).

To experience my journey home in full 3D-smell-and-touch-o-rama (tm), here's what to do:  Take a room (not air conditioned) about 6' by 4' and try to get 11-12 people (and some luggage) in.  Now start it moving at between 60 - 70 miles per hour and bump it quite hard occasionally.  Every 15 - 20 minutes or so, stop it, take 2 people out and put 3 - 4 in.

Make sure there's a door marked "toilet" with an out of order sign on it somewhere in the room, and have people occasionally attempt to get through the press of bodies to use it.  Stand in the room yourself for 2.5 hours with nothing but your mobile phone  (or a book) for entertainment.  There you go, you have successfully created a simulation of the Basingstoke - Wolverhampton stage of my journey home (the rest of it's not too bad, thankfully).

If you want to specifically recreate this week's journey, at least one of the people should have an embarrassing personal complaint that leads to a smell of incontinent sheep and another should play music (on headphones) so loudly that everybody else in the carriage can hear it clearly.

Anyway, let's file that one under "done to death" before the blog becomes monotonous.  The stated purpose for the moment is supposed to be for me to let you know how I'm doing with training for the half-marathon that I have to run in March next year.  The trouble is "I ran and went this far in this many minutes" doesn't take long to write and it might be a bit dull to read, and I have no intention of admitting to my current weight, but anyway - I went for a run on Tuesday with some folks from work, we ran 5.5k and I didn't have to stop to walk (except to cross roads, but that doesn't count).  Huzzah!  

On Thursday I was stood up by my dinner date (he had to go and get a present for his girlfriend, and the other mitigating circumstance was that he had an operation scheduled on his knee the next day.  I suppose I can let him off this time...), so I went out for a run by myself.  I'm not sure exactly how far I ran but when I got back to the guest house I was a rather interesting red colour and there wasn't much difference between how wet I was going into the shower and how wet I was when I got out.  That's pretty much it for exercise this week, but there are definite signs of progress.

This week I also went for a haircut.  I walk past the barber shop every day, and it appears to be the only barber in the village (b'dum tish!).  It's quite a big barber for such a small village (especially as it's connected to the huge hairdressers/beauty salon thing next door) but I suppose there are a lot of contractors around most of the time.  Or maybe the ladies (and gents) in the village just like a good waxing.  

I was somewhat startled to discover that the price of a haircut in Hampshire is twice what I usually pay for it, especially as I hadn't actually looked at the prices before asking for a cut.  It's a nice haircut (according to my wife), and I shall treasure it for the 2 weeks it takes my hair to return to its usual state of Medusa-like total unmanageability.

Also on Wednesday: 

This was the view from the railway bridge.  The world is really a pretty stunning place sometimes.


Not much else happened this week; my next contract has been confirmed (yay) and it's even further away (boo), but it is real, genuine, proper software development based.  Which is a Very Good Thing, and will also hopefully eventually lead to me being able to laze abo...I mean work from home most of the time


Football season has started again so I now have very little spare time at weekends either - Mad Middle Child and Teen In Training both have training on a Saturday and matches on a Sunday, so lots of time is spent standing in muddy fields.  Still, Mad Middle Child scored a goal last week, which is apparently a good thing...


I think that's me done for this week.  Over and out... 


Addendum (I forgot!).  I managed to cut my ear while attempting to remove a fleck of shaving gel.  With a razor.  It now bleeds profusely every time I manage to knock the scab off, which is approximately once per day.  If you ever have a spec of shaving gel on your ear, I recommend not attempting to remove it with whatever sharp implement you happen to have in your hand at the time.  Important safety tip there!

How not to use twitter as a public relations tool

In which I whinge a bit in that reserved English way.

(I'm posting this from my phone so don't expect fancy formatting and please excuse any spelling mistakes).

As you may have guessed this is going to be a bit of a moan, so if your plans for the day don't include reading complaints about train companies now would be the perfect time to stop reading.

In my last post I briefly mentioned that the cross country train that I was on on Friday was somewhat overcrowded.  Actually that's a massive understatement, it was like being forced to play sardines with a bunch of strangers. I mean it was literally so bad that you couldn't get to the toilet (but that didn't matter much since the loo was out of order anyway, as usual).

So I decided to look up cross country trains on twitter. (If you're not familiar with twitter, it basically lets you write short messages a bit like facebook status updates but limited to 140 characters, and it's surprisingly addictive).

I managed to find them at @crosscountryuk, and sent the following 2 messages:

"@crosscountryuk who does the seat provisioning on your bournemouth-manchester service? 7 weeks, 1 seay, tonight 15 people between carriages"

"@crosscountryuk I've only been able to reserve a seat once and apparently you're completely unaware that this week most schools went back."

(The @crosscountryuk bit is a bit like an email address but more public - other people can see the message too, but it's specifically aimed at them).

Ok, a bit whiney I'll admit but bear in mind at this point I'd been standing up for about 1.5 hours and was apparently breathing other peoples' sweat.

This was their response:

"Hi Chris. Always best to reserve a seat as our trains are very popular. We're working to make our reservation systems more reliable"
--http://www.twitter.com/crosscountryuk/status/24272199910

Well I assume it was a response to me - there's no @ name so it could be to some other Chris, but let's make the assumption for now and examine the content, ("let's unpack that", as the fairy godmother in Shrek 2 might say) shall we?

My gripe was 1) I can't get a seat on this train,ever and 2) I can't reserve a seat on this train, ever.  Their response was, basically, "try reserving a seat". Er, what? 

All I really wanted was an apology and maybe an indication that they'd look into why some of their trains are basically giant sardine cans at certain times. What I emphatically did not want or need was a response that said "try to do the thing that you've just told us you can't do".

I do understand that judging the right number if seats must be tricky (unless, perhaps you had data that told you how many people travelled each day and stuff, but where would you find a machine that could let you store and query so much data? Such a thing is beyond the ken of mortal men!), and there are technical issues like the length of platforms etc. to take into consideration. And that's fine, but if those are issues then tell me so, don't just try to suggest that the solution is to do something which has so far proved impossible.

To be frank if I hadn't seen the twitter response I probably wouldn't be posting this - the moral of the story being don't bother to respond to complaints if you're not going to read them properly anyway.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the service they provide I have no choice but to carry on using them. If any other service provider treated me like this I'd be off like a shot, but all I can do is moan about them; since I have to keep giving then my money anyway I doubt they care much.

So there we are. Such is my complaint, and having bleated it out I shall bid you goodnight.

I shall finish, however, on a positive note. On one of the journeys on the very train about which I am complaining, we were delayed slightly at birmingham new street. The guard declared over the tannoy, "we apologise for this slight delay. This was caused by incompetence." Nice to know there are some honest people working for them, at any rate.