Minding the Manners in Manors

The Newcastle Metro is nearly 30 years old, so I wasn’t expecting the most high-tech of ticket buying experiences when I walked the short distance from my hotel to Manors station yesterday evening.

I was pretty certain that the machines wouldn’t take cards, after all my local station which is in the top 25% of most used stations in the country has only been accepting cards in the ticket machines for the last three years.

However, given that the cost of a day ticket is £3.90, and you can buy even more expensive tickets, I did kind of expect that the machine would take my five pound note.

I was proved to be very wrong. The only thing the machines take is coins, and at Manors station there are no change machines, no ticket offices, no staff.

I did feel like omitting an expletive, given that there are also no shops any where nearby to get change from.

Though if I had done I would probably have gotten in trouble as there was a very large poster next to the machine stating that the metro operator would not tolerate abuse or foul language in its stations.

Perhaps one cause of this might be forcing all their customers to carry around a couple of kilos of small change.

Jobs I wouldn’t want to do

I work in a situation where I have to deal with angry customers, and occasionally have to give them the answer they don’t want, so I know how angry people can get.

However, the poor station staff at Kings Cross this morning were getting far worse than I have ever experienced and they were trying to only give out good information.

Trains had been severely delayed due to “Overhead wire damage in the Doncaster area”, and by the time I arrived at Kings Cross at 10:30 arrivals due at 08:00 had still not arrived, in fact there were no trains in the station at all.

Over the course of the next 60 minutes a number of trains did arrive and eventually start departing.

It was quite obvious that what had happened was beyond the control of the staff at Kings Cross station, who along with trying to let passengers know what was happening, were also trying to keep an increasingly dangerously full station safe.

Some people though, were still hurling abuse at the poor station staff and accusing them of deliberately delaying their journey (despite the fact there were no trains for them to be travelling on.)

This included one particularly unpleasant person who had been queuing up near platform 2 for over an hour only for his train to then leave from platform 7 (despite all the announcements telling everyone to remain on the concourse as platforms would be subject to change), shouting at a member of staff that it was his personal fault that the train had arrived on a different platform.

I did wonder how he would have reacted if the member of staff had said it had done it on purpose just to spite him, though I think he would have been detailed with cleaning up the bloody remains of a self-exploding passenger.

Grumpy Status, an Update

I was starting to weaken, my inbuilt rage was starting to overcome my inbuilt Britishness, I had given him another two minutes to stop opening and closing the door before I would have to say something.

Thankfully, before I did the un-British think and complained the man wandered into the toilet to continue his conversation.

Obviously this leads to the one statement – Urghhh

Application for Grumpy Status

I don’t know at which point you officially become a “Grumpy Old Man”, I doubt very much it’s in your early thirties, but I could be wrong.

Unfortunately, I’ve just realised that is exactly what I have become.

I’m currently sitting on the train heading towards Exeter. The next carriage is the Quiet car, and quite correctly a man has wandered out of that carriage to take his phone call in the vestibule.

This is good; this is the correct thing to do.

However, he keeps wandering around the vestibule making the door between my carriage and the vestibule open and closes all the time, bringing the noise and wind into the carriage.

I’m finding myself slowly getting more and more annoyed by this, but because of my inbuilt “Britishness setting” I’m not going to complain or tell him off.

I’m just going to carry on sitting here getting more wound up, and grumpy.