The Wheels on the Bus...

Good ol' public transport...It's easy to have a stab at bemoaning it. "They're always late, never on time, overcrowded, smelly, poorly maintained..." etc. etc. etc.

Let's cut to the fucking chase. I can deal with a train or bus being a few minutes lit...You know, I could even deal with major delays, of upwards of an hour. I don't mind that the vehicles themselves are often terribly maintained, as long as I can sit down of whatever squalid seat is available, and I really do not care if someone is playing music quite loud in front of me, as long as it doesn't sound like James Blunt.

What I hate about public transport, is the people. Not all of them. Some people are perfectly happy to sit and enjoy their journey in quiet comfort, ably chatting to their friends without raising their voices to decibel levels somewhat akin to those of a rock concert.

Does people using their mobile phones get on my nerves?....No...Does people using their mobile phones when they think that the level of volume in their voice is relative to the distance away the person they are talking to is? Yes! The whole purpose of a mobile is to allow portable communication wherever you are (as long as there's a signal but that's a different blog altogether) no matter what the distance...i.e. someone in Birmingham, Alabama can hear you just as well from your location as someone in Birmingham, UK. Therefore it is entirely unnecessary to project your voice down the phone in the manner of Brian fucking Blessed.

Worse than that though, are the people who think the opposite. The people to who, the closer the person with whom they wish to speak, the louder they believe they should be chatting. I must admit, this is predominantly aimed at teenage females, whose laughter cuts through me like a knife and whose purpose in life is somewhat debatable. All they seem to do, and I use these examples not in any sexist ironic way, but as examples I have truthfully overheard, all they seem to do, is discuss hair and nails....Seriously...Same girls on my train all they time, all they ever talk about. They occasionally discuss their hideous sexual conquests but that itself is usually tied into the "Oh yeah he fucked me coz he really liked my hair" thing...
I wish I was joking, I'm sadly not.

Now, I don't mean to be construed as anti-social. I am not, if I was sat with my friends I would chat quietly too them. But quietly is the optimum word here! It's school classroom syndrome. If you all chat quietly, no one really minds and you can get on with it. If one lot of you talks loudly, everyone else has to raise their voice and the volume creeps up until you get asked to work in silence. Unfortunately, remove the teacher from the equation and you get a diesel powered tin box with enough noise pollution and hot air to move the Earth from it's orbit.

But there are people worse than that still. And these people take what I do to the extreme. You see, these blogs are, as mentioned in the first post, about the trivial little things that piss me/us off. We like a good moan, and what better to moan about than the trivial, after all, everything is relative, and here in the west are lives are relatively much better than those of most people elsewhere in the world. By jovially complaining about the little things it actually reminds me that it could be much worse...
...There are some people however, who do not believe that is the case. You know the ones. Their problems are always much worse than yours, and if you've got a problem similar, theirs will always be worse anyway. I used to work in insurance and have a few textbook examples. The company I worked for specifically dealt with more mature clients (over 50s), in itself that meant there was some relatively friendly chat, but it also happens that most of the biggest, baddest bastards are in this category. I had a man telephone me, wanting to know why his renewal premium was so high on his motor insurance. I pointed out the fault claim (fault claim means that the costs could not be claimed from the other side, either because it was the motorists fault, or because the offending motorist was uninsured) he discussed this claim with me and said that it was because of a squirrel. Now, and here's the good bit, this person. Keep in mind this person has been allowed onto the roads, in a vehicle capable of causing death and destruction. This person claimed that the squirrel had hit him!

Not that he was travelling at an unnatural speed for his species, and as such should take responsibility for the destruction of nature occurring as a result...No, apparently squirrels, SUICIDE SQUIRRELS AT THAT! Are throwing themselves into the roads, in order to to deliberately put motorists insurance premiums up....Presumably these are all al quaeda trained suicide squirrels, whose efforts have led to the current economic collapse, since people are bankrupting themselves with their car insurance. That's the only reason I can think of for an animal, a shy, skittish and generally quite cautious animal, to jump into a moving car.

I had another example. The renewal process for a policy begins a month (i.e. 28 days) before the renewal date of that policy. If someone wishes to renew their car insurance 30 days prior, they'll have to wait two days, it's all automated, the customer service bods on the end of the phone can do nothing about it. But I had someone phone me once, cursing me, calling me all the names under the sun, because I could not renew his policy...Why was it so desperate?
Well it turns out the insurance on his FUCKING PORSCHE needing renewing immediately because they were GOING AWAY ON A SIX MONTH FUCKING HOLIDAY IN THE FUCKING CARIBBEAN!
There was me, sat in an office, clucking away insurance bullshit hour after hour after hour, I didn't have a holiday booked...I wasn't going away anywhere, and if I was it would be nowhere near six months long, and the location would more than likely be Beirut rather than the Caribbean, I was being paid peanuts to do a job that a computer could be programmed to do, and should be to put these poor call centre bastards out of their misery but I was the one who was being unreasonable...Oh was I really?...Not doing something I literally can't do in the first place, that you only need done because you're swanning off to one the sunniest, warmest, nicest, most beautiful locations in the world to enjoy half a year of sun, sea, sand and geriatric sex and I'm the bastard...I do sincerely hope that on that trip, that gentleman contracted some exotic parasitic pathogen. He probably wouldn't have though, because he fucking is one, and they all stick together.

This brings me back to the point of this blog. You see, there are bastards among all of us. I am myself a bit of a bastard, I can be rude and unpleasant, sometimes with reason, sometimes without. But I do remember that, relatively speaking, we have it quite comfortably. And so, when an announcement comes over the PA telling me we've been delayed on my train, I look up, shake my head a bit, and get back to reading my book. When I'm told there is a rail replacement service (a British phenomenon whereby, during emergency or planned engineering works on train lines, rail services are replaced with bus or coach services to your destinations) I climb aboard whatever rickety bone yard piece of crap they've dug up, slip myself into the uncomfortable seat and remember that some people in other countries have to travel like this daily...Which is why I get slightly pissed off when some grotesque fat-fuck of a lady is stood in front of my in the ticket line to complain about such things..."I've just come back from Barbados..." see above for my discussion on ungrateful shits who don't realise how lucky they are with their Caribbean holidays..."and we had better treatment there...You call that a rail replacement? I'm disabled, I've got a bad thigh" No, love, you've got two bad thighs, with fat fucking ankles and a face like a lobster being anally violated on a bed of broken glass, besides which if it was that bad you shouldn't have been flying, and you seem to be able to march about stomping your feet perfectly fine when you've got something to bitch about. "I don't call that customer service..." Well what do you call it? It's not customer disservice because they've tried to do something to help you...I mean, maybe, they could just put a personal train service on just for you, and send you hurtling down the tracks, which are being repaired for a reason, and that would make you happy...Or maybe, they should always have a chauffeur driven limousine on standby in case YOU happen to be fucking travelling that day...

These are the people that ruin public transport. They are never working class, or upper class. Working class people accept the shitness of public transport as an inevitability, and as such have contingency plans in place to combat it, or just deal with it. Upper class people are too stiff upper-lipped, they'll have a bitch and a moan and maybe eek some complimentary drinks and snacks out of people, but they'll never hold up a queue just to moan to someone who has no power over the situation about it. The middle classes too are usually accepting. They don't enjoy it, but they understand the necessity for caution in travel. After all a half hour delay, and finally arriving at your destination in a metal box is far better than arriving early in a wooden one. No, it is the upper middle classes who like to complain. Not the rich, not the comfortable and not the poor, but the reasonably well off. And it's always due to regression to the mean (i.e. the natural law that states that everything should be roughly around where it always is such as population densities of animals or, sales of cars at a car lot...There will be ups and downs but over time it will all regress towards the mean) Therefore, when these people have just come back from a holiday, they're going to have their straw hats and rose tinted sunglasses on and come from relative comfort and crashing back down to reality. Regression to the mean, if you have a good time, a shit one will follow and even if it's not that shit it will seem worse because you've just had a good time.
These are the people who make transport rubbish. Because these are usually the people in charge of it...They're the ones in charge of it, they're the ones who moan about it, they're the ones who want to make the trains run on time and in doing so take over network rail and neglect line maintenance, leading to derailing, crashes and deaths. Unfortunately they never travel at those times and it is usually always the happy-to-accept-it public who are the unfortunate victims of upper-middle-class stupidity.

So next time you're on a delayed bus, train, plane...or even stuck in traffic. Remember these things. 1) It could be much worse, some people live in conditions far more abominable than you and 2) If you see some can't-get-over-themselves wannabe snob bitching and moaning, punch them...hard and with conviction....really whack them like you mean it. If you don't they'll get ideas above their station and people will die.