All Change

Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I ended up with a new house. I seem to have altogether too many trees in my back garden for it to be truly urban and it says zone 6 in the train station. I reckon that's suburbia.

So the blog I never, really write has moved with me...

Meet the Ticket Machine

Transport connections in south London are tenuous. Asking for help at the local station is a mistake you only make the once. The man behind the counter has banged his head and woken up in what appears to him to be an alternate reality. His London has a jumbled geography. Brixton abuts Hendon, Paddington slides up next to Croydon. The Queen lives in a council block in Sutton. He’s surprised and fearful to hear your questions and realise that what he believed was the correct geography of our great metropolis has been rendered a fiction. Plus, he will have noticed that you have two eyes and be speaking the language of devils. It’s a dark, fearful universe he’s woken up in. You can’t expect much help there.

This is page 1 of 20.

Transport for London is aware of this. They provide machines to subtract the dreadful consequences of interaction with the man behind the counter. ‘Fast Ticket’ it says on them. They are not. The screens are thump sensitive and they cogitate like a proto-Babbage engine filled with jam. Two other things to note: firstly, they switch off if a train is approaching the station; secondly, TfL staff have put considerable effort into locating the ticket machine so the sun reflects off the screen, ensuring all ticket selections you make are effectively random. This is why there are people in Croydon. All bemused pressers of the wrong button.

If you are fortunate enough to have awoken the machine and be able to see the screen without the sun’s reflection scouring off your retina, you are in luck. Further squinting and poking will uncover tickets to your intended destination. About fifty different tickets to the same place, all apparently near identical other than price. Off-peak, Really Off-Peak, Standard, that bit between 11-12 on Wednesday when the train is full of bathshy alcoholics, via London, not via London (but I want to go to London!). The pricing isn’t random, though you may reasonably assume that at certain times of the day train travel is restricted to Russian oligarchs. Of course that’s the time you want to travel and you are not a Russian oligarch. You’re probably not even Russian. You are out of pocket.

You can try clicking the ‘info’ button next to each ticket to try and make an informed selection. Upon thumping this option, the machine will – for once promptly – declaim all knowledge of that ticket and direct you to The Man Behind the Counter. You glance over there. He’s probably still trying to figure out why Ealing is now in east London and what happened to everyone’s faces. Oh god, the EYES! You have to go back and ask him, painful though it will be for the both of you. Faced by this again (the EYES!) he’ll scuttle into the back office and you’ll see him wedging himself into the space behind a filing cabinet. You’re left there standing, the unwitting head of a growing conga of anxious passengers. Eventually, you realise he’s not coming back. Ever. This reality has overwhelmed him. Eyes clamped shut, in the tight dusty space behind the cabinet, he can pretend that none of this ever happened. You still, however, need to purchase a ticket. You can’t go back to the machine. It will know. But you can feel the anger growing behind you, like heat on the back of your neck. It grows and grows until it burns like a poorly cooled nuclear reactor. You don’t want to look back. Trains are pulling in and out of the station. The trains the people lined up behind you wanted. But the conga line must be down the High Street, surely. It feels like you have stood there for years watching what appears to be a sobbing metal filing cabinet. You take a quick glance over your shoulder to find yourself locking eyes with a man whose genetic heritage involved close proximity to that poorly maintained nuclear reactor. By the time you have wrenched your eyes free to face forward, the blind is being yanked down. CLOSED, it says, with grim finality. You are left to try an explain to the man behind you who’s just missed the kick-off at Millwall why he should you put you down the right way up.

So, back to the machine, and the imponderable ticket selection. Close your eyes, reach out, and guess. No one on the network is going to know better than your wandering fingertip. It’s all a game of bluff. The ticket gates work on the same logic. You’ve seen Star Wars, you know that the Imperial Storm Troopers are all clones. You also know they had a little guy in R2D2. Ticket barriers: they have small, spitting Bob Crow homunculi secreted inside, cloned from a glass he left in the TfL HQ during pre-strike negotiations some years back. They’ll let you through or stop you. Really, it’s a fifty thing. Don’t think that whether they open or close has any relationship to the ticket you feed it. It’s dark in there and Bob can’t read. There’s only really one approach to the ticket gate, and that’s the Full Charge of the Light Brigade (if you can find a horse, all the better).

There are only three outcomes.

There are three possible outcomes of an encounter with a ticket barrier. First, a glorious success, the gates swing open. You have been judged and found to be on the VIP list. St Bob of the Barrier has granted you access to the chosen land beyond. Second, the barrier remains closed and immoveable. You crumple, as do the six people behind, as you concertina into the same small area of space. You’re now close enough to your fellow commuters that if a survey was taken there and then, you’d have to classify them as sex partners. Third, you get halfway through, the joy bubbling up inside, as the gate then suddenly chomps shut like the jaws of a hungry crocodile. You have just sacrificed your leg for the man with the expired travelcard in front. No worries though, the gates are staffed by an helpful TfL operative. After the statutory period of abuse, he’ll make you buy a replacement ticket so expensive that you’ll hear your bank manager scream, and he’s in Liverpool. This will involve standing in line to be publicly humiliated, like you’ve been scripted into an Alabaman chain gang, and you’re just waiting for the uniform to be delivered. Any attempt to protest the unreasonableness of this will result in a call being issued to the station announcer to request the presence of the British Transport Police, though fortunately all station announcements are made in slurred Klingon so they’ll be none the wiser). Whilst waiting for the paperwork to be completed (the same amount of time that it took humanity to discover language and invent writing), you can busy yourself by counting the hundred and six ticketless teenagers shimmying through the gates opposite under the watchful eye of the helpful TfL operative.

This presumes that you want a popular destination. Less popular destinations involve a game of Fast Ticket Whack-A-Keyboard. Generally, you’ll be presented with an alphabetical keyboard, thus having to unlearn an entire lifetime of typing. This involves standing bereft in front of the keyboard as though you’ve just staggered out of the woods after being brought up by a family of wolves. The machine will make unhelpful guesses based on characters you never intended to select. Christopher Columbus made the same mistake, letting the machine decide. You may be less lucky then him and find yourself marooned in Thamesmead at 2am without the benefits of massive and superior firepower.

Those savvy sailors of the Capital’s transportation canals will have a suitable nautical Oyster Card. Simply tap it on the gate and St Bob of the Barrier will grant you one of the three outcomes described above. You’ll be billed an entirely random fee for your trouble. You can question this fee, but be warned, the people than man the telephones are professionals. Tangle with them at your peril. Those of you with siblings will remember the fruitless game of repetition. They ask a question, you repeat it. These people have elevated this childish pastime into a weapon of war. They will repeat and repeat and repeat until your soul flees your body and you slam down the phone. These people have driven their own families into madness and suicide just rehearsing for calls like yours.

And finally. The cryptic geography. It’s worse than the man behind the ticket counter feared when he woke up here. The ticket machine may have suggested you could save money by taking a topologically unfeasible not-via-London option on a variety of destinations. This often entails a willingness to run several hundred metres and climb several dozen platforms steps. There’s little in life so filled with delight as a gentle jog down a closed-up and graffitied High Street as you follow your suggested change between Nowhere West and East Nowhere. The theme from Chariots of Fire plays through the your head while track-suited locals offer to help you keep the pace. In the more helpful suburbs they will offer to carry your valuables so you can sprint unencumbered to your inevitably cancelled connection.

No Carrier

I'd really like to blame the lack of updates on the fact that I angered the ISP Gods with my previous postings. That I was dragged off to some covert re-education camp in Wolverhampton, held there until the words "Talk Talk" filled my head with shiny thoughts.

That didn't happen. Otherwhere happened. But someone other than me reads this, so I came back.

Apologies for that.

Surviving Customer Services (Part 3)

Pipex were prompt. I can’t fault them on that. Email had turned out to be much the same option as Southend pier. They can’t accept queries by email (along with semaphore and deliveries by donkey) and could I log a case via their web page? There was a definite rumbling in the grumble magma, like someone had given Vesuvius indigestion, but this is the internet age, so I do just that, copying and pasting my previous email into their web-form, answering those sixteen pointless questions that are the online equivalent of whatever booby traps that Indiana Jones must face to retrieve the fabulous golden turds of the Aztec hyena, and provide every detail about myself short of my inside leg measurements and a psychological profile. The following day I am rewarded by a response. Can I provide my details so they can locate my account and prove it’s me and not someone else trying to correct my terms of service (if so, where can I find this generous individual and thank them)? Well, of course I can I re-input the information, it’s the same information I had to provide in order to submit the case the day before. They’re making it easy for me, I can copy and paste. I’m a child of the Internet age. I see light at the end of the tunnel, I shall soon be untied and freed from my download limit bondage.

Not yet though, the next message from Pipex says "sorry, you’ll need to contact TalkTalk customer support to discuss this, it’s such privileged information that we’d be executed and our families shipped to Siberia if we so much as even gleaned even the slightest knowledge of your predicament. Please don’t say another word, think of our families!”. Can they forward it, I mean I am a Pipex customer after all? No. That would be tantamount to knowledge that the problem exists and the death squads would be upon them, crashing through the skylights and tasering their first born. Could I stand the guilt of that? Well, if you do ask, I could. OK, OK, rather than build a giant death tractor and drive it through the front doors of their HQ and embarking on an orgy of farm machinery related destruction not bettered since the Tobe Hooper-directed remake of Animal Farm (“piggy’s gonna squeal”), I’ll try once more with the more reasonable route.

The drill is familiar. I copy and paste the complaint into TalkTalk’s web-form, answer the sixteen challenges of doom, add my psychological assessment and click submit. The next day, my inbox pings (it does literally), and “can I provide…" Of course I can, I gibber, feeling the magma start to kick like a volcanic baby. I am the copy-and-paste ninja! So that verify that I am in fact me. And that I’m not a TalkTalk customer. The rumbling grows ominous now. I so want my death tractor.

No worries though, it didn’t really matter as they can’t deal with the query anyway. See, I’m with the wrong kind of customer service, I need the other kind of customer service.  Why don’t I instead call their ‘Customer Retention’ line? I can have them sort out there own problem and I can pay them to do so. See that: their problem, my money, it’s genius. Well, it’s a bargain, I’m sure sex lines and casinos in Monaco are far more expensive ways to amuse yourself.

Except I’ve already written a single paragraph that perfectly and precisely states the issue. It’s a small package of neatly wrapped explanatory perfection. It’s lean, mean and to the point. It would not benefit from being yelled down the phone at some distant village idiot. It’s not debatable or arguable, and I feel no great urge to discuss it (beyond the 2,000 words or so I’ve already written on the subject). So, TalkTalk, rather than me waste more of my time by forcing me to invent a time machine and zap myself back to the beginning, why don’t you just unblock the damn process and pass along my query to your Retentions Team? I mean, you are a telecommunications provider, after all. Telecommunicate!

This cannot be done. TalkTalk have taken the game of outsourcing to an entire new level by locating their customer services team outside the realm of normal time and space. They are apparently tucked away into a cul-de-sac of space-time where normal communications simply cannot work. They have taken the underlying brane of the universe and tightly wrapped their customers services team like an impregnable christmas present designed to delight and then drive the recipient to despair, as they lose their fingernails and are generally reduced to screaming like they’ve found themselves starring in Saw XVIII. From within their fold in the fabric of the universe they can’t email or phone, or otherwise contact the retention team. Even if I attached giant plasmas drives to the death tractor, it couldn’t get inside.

The BT Subscriber's Complaint Resolves Itself

It’s not all bad though. We’re not in a one-sided, abusive relationship here. They’re willing to give a little back. For instance, I get access to thousands of X-Factor tickets. On hearing this, I was stuck with the grim knowledge that all those years ago I may have pressed the wrong button and ordered an unlimited broadband service when, all the time, I had intended to order the tickets to an experience I would anticipate is akin to gouging out my own eyeballs with a rusty ice cream scoop while being fucked in each ear by two horny donkeys on Viagra. We all make mistakes online, and some can’t be undone by deleting your browser cache and immersing your computer in undiluted bleach.

Of course, the aim is to survive. To not be beaten by the system. It’s easy to let the grumble magma erupt, fling fury into the sky. But in land without ready access to a surfeit of firearms, what’s the point. Death tractors probably require expensive modifications. You can’t just tint the windows and hope no one notices. Take a breath, let the magma cool. All is not done.

No, there’s an opportunity here to volley this case back and forth in a childish game of “please pass this on,” “I can’t”, “well, I’m not”, “but we don’t…” and just see how long it takes. It’s day three now. They’ve done the impossible though. I sudden have a rosy recollection of many happy days talking to BT Customer Services. I can’t remember what went wrong between us.

Surviving Customer Services (Part 2)

Now modern customer services has taught us urban survivors a thing or two about self-sufficiency. Place any modern day survivor in the control room of a nuclear reactor steaming towards meltdown with nothing other than the wrong type of spanner and phone labelled ‘customer services’ you know we’ll be down in the reactor core vigorously hammering away at the containment shell like we're auditioning to join the Muppets as Animal's replacement. Really, just anything other than call that number. By dialling, not only are launching yourself onto the cruel seas of misunderstanding, you are also admitting defeat. Now it’t not so bad to reach out for help if it’s you’re standing next to a nuclear reactor that’s boiling like a kettle filled with minestrone soup and is about to turn western Europe’s entire sheep population into an all-conquering army of irradiated Leo Sayers. Less good if you’re missing a screw for your Sukva table and chair set.

Reaching out to customer services is not like asking a grown-up, it’s like asking a grown-up who eats half-gnawed hunks of saliva-sauced KFC out of the bins behind the bus shelter and washes it down with Chateau White Lightening to help your solve quadratic equations.

It has to happen though. Sometimes we’re tossed powerlessly about like a seasick landlubber by events and circumstance. Take the other day as an example. Now, I am connected to the Internets via a tautened length of Victorian-era string, and have my broadband delivered by a company called Pipex. The grand corporate machinations of acquisitions-and-mergers have been turning in the meantime and now Pipex is TalkTalk. Which, I’m sure is utterly super and may the managers of TalkTalk be blessed for their successful acquisition with a magic dog that shits gold bullion, but I just wish they would stop telling me about it, and how absolutely wonderful it be for me. I’m really not as excited about it as they are, babbling away like teenage lovers. Little do they know their relationship won’t stay like that. There’s disillusion, gradual contempt, hate, and thrown crockery somewhere in their future, they just don’t know it yet. And divorce battle of over the magic dog that shits gold bullion will dwarf even that petty scrap at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (you know, 264 hours in).

Now there is one thing about my broadband service that’s important to note: it’s called ‘Pipex Xtreme’ –  which proudly declared itself 'unlimited'. Now had assumed that didn’t mean unlimited Pipexes, delighful though they sound, but rather unlimited broadband. As many bytes as could squeeze through my skinny little phone line, like stuffing an elephant down a snake and then ordering it dessert.

So, when TalkTalk cunningly slip a distinctly not-unlimited 40 GB/month cap into the smaller print of a letter headed “A Small Change to Your Direct Debit” rather than “HA, YOUR BROADBAND IS NOW UN-UNLIMITED, SUCK ON THAT! (Oh and by the way, we’re taking your money and using it to buy our boss a dog that shits gold bullion)” I feel a slight build-up of what is best called grumble magma. Not enough to erupt, but enough to set the green ink needle wobbling on nearby seismographs. It was late at night, so I located the customer services email of Pipex and sent my uncommonly reasoned response to mildly demand that they return my broadband back to its full, unrestrained glory. Now, I’ve only dealt with Pipex’s attempts at customer services once before, and it didn’t disappoint.  Admittedly, I had set my expectations lower the a midget limbo dancer's world record attempt bar. And sadly it was too late to take more effective path of writing the message on a piece of paper, stuffing it in a bottle, and then taking  the train to Southend to fling it from the end of the pier. Instead I was forced to send it thrumming down that piece of antique telecommunications string.

I anticipated a quick and simple solution to my problem...

Surviving Customer Services (Part 1)

Once upon a time, when you needed customer service, you turned up at the business in question, found your way to the special office dedicated to just that, and pinged a bell on counter. One harmonious, self-important moment later someone would pop out of the back office to provide you with the kind of service that a customer could expect. The person behind the counter didn’t pretend that you had suddenly become invisible. He or she didn’t put on a funny accent and claim you weren’t speaking English. They didn’t start screaming at you like you had developed a third eye, horns, a reddish skin complexion and threatened to consume their firstborn children in some blood-curdling demon orgy, when all you had really asked was if you could get a refund on a jar of mouldy raspberry jam.

Of course, this good, solid kind of customer service was magical in that way that things remembered are, untempered by any kind of reality (and as such the world that Daily Mail readers still live in). You forget the wait time that stretched back into the dark ages and you’d be joining behind someone with the black death and that these desks were staffed by pustulant ogres who could burp the stench of Satan’s recently filled shit-can as though they had eaten garlic pickled dead babies for lunch. But these were the good old days when the world was rendered in black and white, slavery was OK, and World Wars were the character-building equivalent of gap years for the nation’s youth. Like it still is for Daily Mail readers.

Times have been a changing though. Firstly, there came the Internet, a magical system of global electronic spaghetti invented by men looking for a viable alternative to buying their porn from the newsagent (usually best sandwiched between two slices of semi-respectable newspapers). And for those who couldn’t reach the heights of the top shelf, the only other option was to spend their time smut-foraging in road-side hedgerows and verges like hungry foxes in search of the pornographic equivalent of a half-eaten Ginster's pasty. It’s no wonder several collective pulsating, febrile tonnes of male brain worked together to achieve such a marvel of modern communications technology.

Despite the humble aims of the internet, it redefined the world as we know it. We can now squeeze our entire lives through a wire, in the same way as forcing an whole pig through an industrial sausage machine produces budget-friendly strings of reprocessed meat products The outside is that place glimpsed over the top of your glowing monitor, somewhere that makes your eyes feel slightly nervous, like middle-aged men caught outside a school at going-home time. It also created an opportunity. A devilishly brilliant opportunity that Satan himself wished he had patented. Outsourcing. Why not farm out your service operations to dim-and-distant places no one had previously heard about, such as Kirkcaldy and Hyderabad, and effectively any other place where the likelihood of your being understood is low-to-negligible. This lack of communication is instantly useful, since they may well be solving your problem or making it worse, you simply can’t possibly know, which reduces your number of avenues for complaint. Of course, you know you’d get the same responses from them if you composed entire sentences solely out of the words ‘pork pie’ and shouted them down the phone, like a madman in Greggs.

Now, in 2011, Apple can invent a phone that understands you. Even if you shout “pork pie” at it, it remains unfazed, and probably gives you directions to Melton Mowbray. It’s a phone that could get more GCSEs than the average schoolchild and can tell the capitals of countries you can’t even spell. Yet customer services provides a working home for a mutual lack of understanding. They don’t understand you. You don’t understand them. And to be fair, they don’t even understand themselves. It’s like everyones caught a virulent brain disease that makes them shout in Klingon at each other for several minutes before the unstoppable urge to munch brains takes over and puts a finally bloody full stop to it all.

To be continued...

Apologies to Kurt Russell

It has been asked whether I planned to spend the rest of my life discussing the pros and cons of London train stations, like some fixated alt-trainspotter. Sadly, even at my current prolific rate of blogging I couldn't fill an entire lifetime of bloggery writing solely about London's train stations. Unless it was a lifetime about to be cruelly curtailed in a freak accident during a research trip to Birmingham New Street.

I'm going to have to write about something else. Plus, let's face it, how much can you write about Marylebone. It's, erm, quite nice and you can buy flowers there. And someone already wrote a Wikipedia page about it. London Victoria, who knows, I'd anticipate standing outside for a while waiting for the bowels of the station to be flushed free of its backlog of commuters. There’s a joke in there about bowels, flushing, and Victoria. I am not making it.

It has also been pointed out that I wrote an entire post entitled 'Escape from Kent' without once making an reference to Kurt Russell. Something to be corrected, I'm sure. As anyone familiar with the Saturday nightlife of Chatham will know, he was quite lucky to find himself banged up in a dystopian, grimy New York and LA, filled with criminal lowlifes and mutants. At least they weren’t being vomited out of a local nightclub after 2am with a full tank of Thump Juice and a ill-recalled sense of grievance. Personally, I’d take sewer mutants any time. You know where you stand with sewer mutants. They’re going to try and eat you regardless of whether you may have looked them funny / looked at their girlfriend funny / looked at their pint funny.

In the spirit of “I’ve started so I’ll finish” I will wearily complete my tour de gare of London with honourable mentions for London Euston, which offers a quicker way to travel back to 1960s than building your own time machine, with fewer visits to Maplins.

London Blackfriars will shortly be the only station with entrances on both sides of the Thames, filling both the niche of train station and the thing we used to once call a bridge in one fell swoop. That’s the future. It’s only a matter of time before they build a Tesco that does the same. Shop as you cross.

If I have forgotten a station, don’t remind me, this subject is done.