Thoughts on Trains & Their 'Customers'

When, I wonder, did the rail passenger become a customer. I understand that the term 'passenger' is no longer used by the rail companies in favour of the more appropriate term of 'customer'. So when did this come about? Was it as a result of years of neglect? Did someone wake up one morning and realise that passengers were in fact paying for a service? We'll probably never know but I'd like to think there was a sea change in thinking and a long overdue reaction to genuine and growing public discontentment.

A keen Twitter user, I am fed a constant stream of updates from various railway operating companies all around the country. In all cases, they refer to customers rather than passengers. I could be argued that communication has improved considerably. Twitter now provides the means for direct and instant messaging between operators and 'customers'. Only today there were messages sent every few minutes regarding a power failure at Kings Cross which was affecting all trains in and out. On other days, I have read about problems with flooding caused by the freakish rain we've been having. These messages instill a degree of comfort. There's someone out there who knows what is happening, and more importantly, they care.
A lot of their knowledge comes from the passengers - sorry, 'customers' who now have a link to someone in control. From their mobile phones and Internet connected devices, they feed them information about packed trains, late trains and blocked toilets. In this case, the interaction between customer and supplier is instant. This has to be a good thing.

There is another type of message I see all too often on my Twitter feed. These are the messages apologising for cancelled services due to a person being hit by a train. I see these almost daily and it bewilders me to think that so many people are able to stray onto our railway network and in so many cases end up under a moving train. There can be no doubt that a great many of these are intentional suicide attempts, and every one causes pain, anguish and distress to all involved especially the driver, passengers and emergency services. It is sad, but Twitter allows me to know about everything that's going on.

As I type this, a tweet has popped up from Greater Anglia telling me that there is a 'generally good service' and to reply if they can be of any help. This is service, good service. But it is a level of service we seem to struggle to provide on a personal level. Maybe it's something about the culture of this country. Rather than being asked in person if we think the service is satisfactory, we prefer to do it electronically. Despite our shyness, it is still a valuable thing and a channel between the customer and the supplier.
Has customer service improved, or has Twitter simply made communication easier?

A Little Job & Olympic Worries

I've had a couple of small jobs come my way this week. A work colleague of my mum-in-law has a laptop with a faulty keyboard. It's a strange one this, as all the keys work except for J,K and L. I've taken the keyboard out and taken a closer look but unlike laptops of old, there is literally nothing that's serviceable. They keys do come off, but that's it apart from the contact sheet underneath. So I've recommended a replacement which to my surprise will cost just £25 to procure. Computer spares must be the only things that have actually decreased in price over the years. The same customer has a tower unit which 'blue screens' on starting which could frankly be a number of different things so I'll be taking a look at it once the laptop is repaired.
So that's all very good. I do love fixing things especially computers and if I can earn a little by doing it, then happy days.

Weather, oh weather. It has been nothing short of horrible for the last two weeks. It all came to a peak last night when we had very heavy rain and strong winds, which persisted well into today and have only really eased in the last hour or so. There are flood warnings almost everywhere at the moment and there are rivers where their banks have already burst, such as in York. Yet we are told we still have a drought. So why not try to collect some of this water, the same way I am in my garden, but on an industrial scale?

In the news we've had the Leveson Inquiry and the furore surrounding the Culture, Media and Sport Minister Jeremy Hunt. I've certainly been glued to the coverage surrounding this and I firmly believe that there remain many questions to be answered and I believe there are rough times ahead for the current government. I could spend an hour or more writing about my thoughts on this subject, but I won't. Suffice to say that I believe not one word of what we are told by our government or Mr Murdoch, regardless of how plausible their explanations and excuses may seem. They may think we were all born yesterday but I for one am not going to be taken in by it, not a single word of it.

Twitter. I've written on numerous occasions regarding the power of Twitter and its influence on our society is clear given the media coverage it has received lately. Admittedly, the coverage has been for the wrong reasons and unfortunately, it is all too often used as a weapon to offend or humiliate.
But I do see it very much as a tool for making comment and observation, and on many occasions over the last week, I have received replies and even had my tweets read out on radio. I already have over 100 followers, to my surprise and how many of these read my tweets, I do not know. But the fact that my tweets regarding electricity providers were picked up by Eon and NPower and my tweet regarding the mis-treatment of Christopher Tappin was read out on-air by LBC, it does make me feel good about using this relatively new medium. What started out just a couple of years ago as an Internet SMS service has grown into perhaps the most powerful tool of communication and opinion in the World today.

No week would be complete without a crisis and this time it was a flat tyre. I had spotted it just before my wife was due to leave for work. Of course it was all too much for her but we managed to get someone to come and collect her. I managed to get some air into the tyre and drove gingerly to the local garage. Within half an hour they had located the puncture and repaired it. Wonderful, and all for just £20. A huge relief given the fact I was expecting to pay £40 for a new tyre. So a major crisis was averted thank goodness.

There is concern at the moment regarding the ability of our immigration control services to cope come the Olympics and the predicted hundreds of thousands of extra visitors. This has arisen after complaints by entering passengers who had to queue for up to 3 hours at Heathrow. Mobile phone footage showed long queues of disgruntled passengers and I can't help but imagine the scene in three months from now when Olympic devotees begin descending on the capital.
We are being assured that the airports are prepared for the influx, buy haven't we heard all thins before? Do they really know how many people are expected? I doubt it. I fully expect to see huge queues at our airports, caused in part by delays in processing passports and in the inability of our transport system to transfer the masses to the Olympic site.
Somewhat amazingly, there is discussion at the moment regarding the siting of ground to air missiles and the surreal suggestion to place missile batteries on top of apartment blocks and other tall buildings. We are being assured a complete no fly zone will be enforced over London during the Games, but mistakes do happen and I could easily see a situation where a plane or other airborne object could stray and a missile be launched in response. The results of this would be catastrophic for anyone below.
And of course there's the hoaxer and the chaos that would ensue following any warning deemed credible.
Of course, there's every possibility the whole thing will pass without incident, and I hope it does. But I do have serious doubts as to whether the current infrastructure will cope under the additional strain and I seriously doubt our preparedness. Time will of course tell.

Pirates & A Titanic Week

Another week has passed and not a great deal has changed. My attempt last Tuesday to reap some kind of reward from my private pension pretty much failed, though the chap we went to see did comment that it was one of the largest he'd seen for someone of my age. Sounds good I know, but a fat lot of good it will do me at the moment. At 55 (in 16 years from now), I will have access to it but nothing can be done with it until then. It is possible, he told us, to transfer the fund to the bank but it couldn't be used as security against our house. So that's that. I'm sitting on a small fortune but can't do a thing with it.

On Monday of last week, my wife and I took our son to see the new Pirates film at the King's Lynn cinema. We were determined to treat him ourselves after his trip to London and found that tickets were being sold at half price - £3 instead of £6. So we booked them online, which turned out to be a good thing as when we got there, it was sold out and the queues were very long indeed. It had been some time since we had been to the cinema and it was the first time we had ever taken our son. The film was in 3D so we each had a pair of 3D specs and found seats down at the front. I'd never seen a 3D film before and had thought it was all a little over-hyped but I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it and found the whole effect quite wonderful. My son was quite enthralled and at several points during the film he raised his hand to touch whatever he thought had appeared in front of him. I have only one complaint and that is to do with the brightness and contrast of the film. I'm aware that they now use digital projectors over the traditional film and I did find the whole thing a little dim. But all in all it was a very nice experience and the film was pretty good too. I tell a lie, there is another little niggle and that's to do with the people we had to share the film with. The constant up and down of people to relieve themselves and the consuming of food really was quite irritating. A child behind us could be heard crunching its way through a boiled sweet and someone else a couple of rows away rustled a bag of some kind from beginning to end. You've probably guessed that I'm not a big fan of the cinema - I much prefer to recreate the experience in the comfort of my own home.

This week will be remembered for the 100 year anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Now I know there are some who are frankly a little sick of the numerous documentaries and general media coverage and I suppose there is a level of sympathy for this. I do though think it is important to mark the event and for those who have links to the lost, this anniversary has a special significance.

I've written of my fascination for Twitter and I have to say that I have certainly developed a keen fondness for it. I'm not quite at the stage of checking every two or three minutes but I do find myself updating my status at least once an hour. I do also really quite heavily on it for news and celebrity gossip. Breaking news does seem to appear on Twitter before it does anywhere else and where else could you discover what  your favourite celebrity had for breakfast or what their pet looks like? Trivial I know but for me it is another source of information. It's a constant stream of 140 character nuggets. Most of them are rubbish, but once in a while you do come across gold.

I am toying with the idea of keeping an audio journal. I think I've mentioned it before but this time I'm pretty determined to get it going. I really want to leave something in addition to the usual written thoughts and photographs. They won't be very long in length unless I have a lot on my mind. They will simply journal my life, as it is, day by day. I do already listen to a couple of audio journals, one from Richard Vobes and the other by Lloyd Bayley. They are both quite unique and in their own way very interesting.

I was going to complete a job application I had started a few days ago. It is for the role of IT Technician, again at a local (ish) school. I had pretty near completed it this afternoon when I discovered the position reported to an IT Manager. This immediately precludes me from the role as I have held senior positions previously so I didn't take the application ny further. It's a shame as it's the sort of role I'm looking for. The problem I have is the fact that I've held very senior positions and therefore applying for and being accepted for lesser roles is damn near impossible, such is my dilema.

As for my 'elephant in the room', I've been pretty much OK this last week, apart from the constant financial worries and fear of the post. I hate receiving post, particularly anything in a brown envelope or marked 'personal' or 'confidential'. I've written before that it's a constant struggle to stay above the water. Provided we managed to avoid a crisis, then I seem to cope. We're contributing a little toward the mortgage which is keeping the wolves from the door but it can't continue indefinitely. I know this. I'm made to feel worse this week as, because of our wonderful government's tax changes, my wife now has to work an additional day each week for us to continue to receive working tax credit. My wife had always wanted to reduce her hours to spend more time with our son, and hopefully care for a second child. This all seems further away than ever and I simply cannot see any remedy to the situation.

Budget Eve

Firstly, I've added my Twitter feed to my blog. It's constantly updating and provides snippets of my day to day activities and thought on the events of the day. It basically runs as a supplement to my blog.

Tomorrow is budget day here in the UK and we will discover just how much more difficult our caring government is going to make our lives. For some people, things can't get much worse. I heard earlier today on the radio how some are unable to eat properly having to restrict themselves to just two meals a day. Others are unable to travel finding the rising cost of fuel prohibitive. And at my regular Tuesday support group, I heard how life becomes more difficult by the day with benefits just barely covering the cost of basic necessities. So I'll be watching tomorrows budget statement with interest, as will I suspect many around the UK worried about how they will pay for the next week's food, the car repairs, the phone bill, their electricity charges and gifts for their child's birthday. A detrimental budget statement tomorrow will I fear provoke a public backlash as I really feel the majority of people will simply not be able to cope with any more hardship...

Thank you Mum!

It's Mothering Sunday here in the UK and we celebrate today our mums and everything motherhood. We did the visits early today depositing cards and gifts. My son had made his own card at school and I bought for him some chocolates and a cupcake, much of it he managed to eat himself.

My son has just one more week at school and then it's the Easter break for two weeks. I can't believe how quickly Easter has come round again, but saying that the chocolate eggs have been in the shops for months.

I'm still enjoying Tween and I'm tweeting more often. In fact one of my tweets was re-tweeted this morning. It was to do with my purchase of some more records at a charity shop yesterday. It was picked up by a charity group and re-tweeted. I don't mind at all, in fact I was quite chuffed that someone was paying notice to my occasional tweets.

My son won't stop growing. We took him to have his feet measured yesterday afternoon and it transpired his feet have grown a whole size in just a few months. He is now a 1G, forcing us to buy him a new pair of school shoes. It's a shame they can't make shoes that can be extended... it would save a fortune.

OK, short update today. I have to be in a writing mood, and I'm not, but more perhaps tomorrow when my head will hopefully be clearer. I'm definitely coming down with something, I woke up feeling like crap this morning. I'm sure I'll feel better tomorrow...

Wednesday Round-Up

I've never been a prolific tweeter. I have a Twitter account but I've never really seen the fascination in tweeting my every thought and action. Recently though, I have begun to tweet a lot more. I was never very comfortable with Tweetdeck, a Twitter client for the PC. It was far more chunky than it really needed to be and often overloaded the processor preventing other programs from running. So I set about trying to find a bit of software that did the same thing but at a fraction of the size. Eventually, I found it. It's called Tween and I think it's quite popular in Japan where it was created. Anyway, I've installed it and I'm mighty impressed. It does all I need it to do without placing any strain on my PC. It does remind me somewhat of the old IRC clients of old. It is basic, fast and simple. Perfect.

Really shocking news today regarding a coach crash in Switzerland claiming the lives of 28, 22 of which are children just 11-12 years of age. It is shocking to comprehend the enormous loss of young life and the level of grief and despair amongst the parents and families of all those involved. As a parent, I can only imagine the pain and agony of losing a child and I know it is something I could never recover from. God rest their souls.

In a blow for justice and common sense, I see today that the MOD have again failed to recognise that illnesses in nuclear test veterans are in any way linked to the hideous explosions they were forced to witness in the 1950's. I find it ridiculous that the MOD can absolve themselves of any responsibility for the health of these ex-servicemen and I hope that they continue their fight at the European Courts. They deserve better.

We are told we're running out of water. Of course it's not the first time. I remember water shortages in the 70's and having to get water from a tank at the end of the road. But that was a long time ago and we're being told that unless we get at least a month of constant heavy rain, the situation will become critical. I'm fortunate enough to have a water butt in the garden which collects rain from the roof guttering. In one heavy shower, the butt can fill, and that's an awful lot of water. It really does show how much is wasted and I wish I had another, but they're not cheap. The next couple of months will decide how severe the restrictions will be. I hear that the first large scale desalination plant is coming online to supply parts of London and it does lead me to question why, given the fact we're surrounded by water, this isn't already done by the country's water suppliers...