An interesting day...

...in which I have what my manager terms a "genius moment".

As you will know if you've been following my exploits thus far, I am currently working away from home.  This usually involves getting up at 4:30 on a Monday morning (all together now: "aww").
This week, however, I phoned the taxi firm a bit late in the weekend so I had to make do with an earlier time slot.  Since I need a cup of coffee just to be semi-functional in the mornings I had to get up about 4:10AM.  

As usual I sat at the PC messing about on twitter and facebook for a bit while drinking my coffee and waiting for the taxi, but when I stood up to go and get my shoes on I managed to trip over the mouse cable, which had somehow coiled itself around my foot like a deadly snake poised to strike.  I went flying across the front room, but managed to prevent myself falling.

The taxi turned up and as I was doing my usual last-minute inventory I realised I didn't have my phone.  I'm sure you'll be familiar with that horrible sinking feeling you get when you realise that something you need is missing and you only have a short amount of time to find it...anyway, I remembered it had been in my shirt pocket so must have flown out in the trip wire incident.  I managed to find it under the sofa after a couple of minutes of frenzied searching.

Things went back to normal after that; I got to the station in plenty of time (30 minutes early, in fact), where I sat wishing I'd worn warmer clothes for a bit.

On the London train this week there were no charging sockets, and the train was a bit manky compared to the usual standard, but the journey continued as usual until I got off at Banbury for my first change.

The train was a little late getting in, so I only had a minute or 2 to make my connection. As I got off I heard the announcement saying the 7:55 was departing from platform 2. That's not the platform it usually goes from (it usually goes from the platform I get off at), but I assumed that the train I'd just got off was in the way so they'd sent it to a different platform.

I didn't hear the announcement when we stopped at the first station as I was in the vestibule at the end of the carriage and the speaker seemed to be broken.  However, when we got to the next station I saw the sign.
"Coventry". 

Hmm. You know the awful feeling you get when you've just done something incredibly, monumentally silly? The sort of thing you know people are going to laugh at you about for years, and eventually needs counselling to get over?

I'm sure you can see where this is going. It is rarely a good idea to get in a train that is going in the opposite direction to where you need to go, but that is what I had managed to do.

Fortunately the later version of the train that I should have got on at Banbury was at Coventry, so I managed a mad dash across the bridge and then a dive onto the "right" train with about 2 seconds to spare.  I was an hour late for work but they were all suitably amused by my stupidity.

At Reading (going in the right direction) the train stopped, as trains do at stations. A man got on, went to the loo and then got off again while the train was waiting. That seems like quite a risky strategy to me, but perhaps all the loos at the station were out of order.

My wife was very sympathetic when I told her about my day...once she stopped laughing (which took quite some time) she said "trouble comes in threes so something else had to go wrong yet".  Thanks for that, darling.  However, I hold that the tripping incident and the phone incident were separate, and that I am therefore now safe.

Anyway, running and stuff. Yesterday I went for a run with Nicky, of skinnyblog fame (see link on left, I can't do them on phone). We did 4.3 miles in about 50 minutes, including having to climb through a hedge to avoid an overflowing ford.  That's really pretty good, especially as that's the first time I've done that distance, but I do need to up the speed some to beat the 2 hour mark for the half marathon.

Right, apologies for all the spelling mistakes I've no doubt made and the lack of nice formatting. Phones are not an ideal medium on which to type blog posts, but needs must when you're faced with your own stupidity...

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.

Week the Second

In which our hero struggles a bit, and moans about it.

A boring title this week, because umm...I can't think of a better one.  And at least it's to the point.  If you'd rather not hear me moan about trains and software going wrong, skip the next 3 paragraphs and you'll be fine.

I thought about doing a day-by-day diary type thing for this week but decided not to because on some days nothing interesting enough happens to put in the blog, and that makes me look boring.  (Of course I am boring, but there's no need to advertise it to anybody that reads this).  I could list all the things I do at work, but "wrote a SQL case statement to flag bad email addresses" doesn't make good reading.

So this week.  It's been a bit of a struggle, to be honest.  Monday mornings are always a bit of a pain right now, since I have to get up at 4:30AM to catch a train, but I usually cope with it OK; and I did this week, but the journey was pretty horrendous.  Delayed by 45 minutes on one train by a broken level crossing, then on the next (which I shouldn't really have been on since it was a peak time train and I had an off peak ticket, but no guards checked - phew!) there was a problem with the points at Reading.  I felt a bit sorry for anybody that was actually going to change at Reading as they were just thrown off at Reading West and told "transport will be arranged to Reading", but that was as much info as they got before having to get off the train.

All in all, not a perfect start to the week; I got to work about an hour and a half after I usually do.  The day didn't really get much better either; a piece of software had gone wrong a little while before and it turned out it wasn't totally fixed, so I was still at work at 7pm fixing some of the consequences of that, but at least I'd made up the time I'd lost in the morning so I didn't have to go in super-early for the rest of the week.

Having checked in at the guesthouse I decided a bit of a run was in order; it was raining a bit, but not enough to stop me going out.  I decided to try the route that I'd tried a couple of times the previous week, but in reverse; it takes me down past the office where I work and then back to the guesthouse in a big circle.  I was really pleased to find that I could quite easily run (at a steady pace) to the office, but not so pleased when the sky decided that my new yellow running top was offensively bright and started to hurl rain at me.  I got soaked, but I felt good - I made it all the way around a circuit that I couldn't run 1/4 of the way around 2 weeks ago, and I only had to stop to clean my glasses so I could see where I was going (one of the lesser advertised perils of running in the rain - in the words of Blackadder, "so, some sort of hat is probably in order.").

On Tuesday I had another minor triumph - I went out for a 5.5k circuit after work with some folks from work, and shaved 3 or 4 minutes off the previous week's time (we weren't exactly keeping accurate time but it was a bit less and I only had to stop once to walk for a bit - 50% better than the previous week!).  I also bought some mouthwash that had the legend "avoid contact with any plastics" printed on the label, which was affixed to the bottle that the mouthwash came in.  Which was made of plastic.  Um.

Actually, on the subject of labels they've changed the sandwich supplier at work.  All of the Chicken/Beef/Ham sandwiches (which are labelled very clearly as beef/ham/chicken) now bear the legend "not suitable for vegetarians" on them.  You have to wonder what sort of vegetarian could buy a "Tandoori Chicken Sandwich" and think it was suitable for them.  (I know, I know, it's probably some sort of food rule thing, it just made me laugh).

Wednesday was a slightly odd day.  After work I made my usual call to my wife, who was having issues with printing something off the computer;  she's usually very patient (she works with kids so she has to be) but non-working computers turn her into a frothing lunatic with the patience of a rabid mongoose.  It didn't help that this was the week the kids went back to school, and therefore also the week that she went back to work; and I hate the helpless feeling I get when I'm hundreds of miles away and can't help (it was out of colour ink, in case you're wondering, but it wasn't easy to tell).  We didn't exactly have a row, but we were clearly getting on each other's nerves - just one of the hazards of working away from home I guess.

Anyway, after that I went for a run, but after about 1 and a half miles my legs started to protest, so I slowed to a walk.  At which point they started to ache really badly, until I ran again; they didn't hurt too much while I was running but they did feel really tired; so I would stop, and then they'd ache again.  I think this was their revenge for me making them do all that exercise when they've had 30 odd years of walking around perfectly happily without doing anything more strenuous than a brisk walk.

Since I was still a bit grumpy (and when I'm grumpy/upset/happy/sad I eat) from the aforementioned phone call I had chips from the chip shop for dinner.  But I did skip the full English breakfast at the guesthouse the next day, so that probably helped make up for it.

I skipped the running on Thursday; I'm going to try to do slightly longer distances but every other day next week (apparently you shouldn't increase it by more than about 10% a week), with maybe some low-impact stuff on one of the other nights (apparently Spinning is good).  I did wander into Basingstoke on the train, but I couldn't find any whizzy gadgets that I wanted to buy.  I was going to go to Nando's for dinner but it was heaving, so I ended up with my usual healthy stuf from Tesco (fruit, smoothie, low fat sandwich).  It's probably good for me, or something.  Actually it's not much of a penance since I really like fruit.

I think the less said about Friday's trip home the better.  On the Cross Country train from Basingstoke - Wolverhampton (part of the Bournemouth - Manchester route), I felt like they were trying to compress us into a neutron star or something.  Maybe Cross Country have some sort of game they play where they bet how many people they can actually fit onto a train?

The train is always bad seat-wise (and reservations are rarely forthcoming), but this week it was just appalling - I counted 15 people in the vestibule at the end of the carriage, and just as many in the adjoining one. It's not usually that bad, but I suspect it's because it was the first week people were back at work etc.

Anyway, I ran again today, felt a bit tired thanks to my trip home and having to stand still for 2 hours last night on the train so didn't do as well as I'd have liked; I think Saturdays are going to be a no-go for running just due to the tiredness.

And there we go - after saying I wouldn't I have ended up doing a day-by-day thing, and it probably was quite boring.  I shall try harder to think of funny stuff next week, honest.