pennies

hello there

alas just one of "them" posts, look you see. bit of a whine, or moan and groan. not for the first time and, if we are (entirely) honest, not for the last it is of course all about the wonders of our inefficient, unreliable public transport system here in England land, or possibly all of the UK. except that there London (innit), for those times when the greedy staff there are not on strike for an extra few hundred thousand (each) for working on what is effectively an entirely automated system. 

recently, then, i (and many other passengers) had to put up with a delay in service. great. such things have gotten to the point where you feel compelled to be grateful that it is at least running, so frequent are the outright cancellations. for me (moi) the most recent incident was pretty much a minor inconvenience, not all that much of a problem. other passengers, however, were going to miss connecting trains, buses and, in one case, flights. 

calling trains "public transport" is, these days, somewhat misleading. of all the "privatisation" things what they have gone done, and not all are bad (for a start energy companies are competitive, subject to regulation and gone are the days of ruthless disconnections), the only one more stupid that the trains was, of course, water. the companies what run the trains soon clocked that they could charge a fortune for the tickets, cancel services at will and claim massive subsidies from the government (our taxes) as they somehow cannot "cover costs". not helping is that a different company, the comically named "Network Rail", own/run the tracks on which trains run. they simply have no interest at all in proper maintenance and would prefer it if trains did not actually run on their tracks. 

so is it a case of "eat sh!t and f*** you" from all of the train people involved with regards to us? not quite. yet it is the case that the utter contempt and lack of interest in customers (beyond their money) is illustrated in the "compensation" one gets for these delays. behold, if you will, the stunning amount i am entitled to for the most recent incident. 

i am not getting a calculator out but i believe (or think) that's not even 10% of the ticket price. to state the obvious, nor does that really cover the inconvenience of it all. and no, mine was not a major issue, but as highlighted earlier it very much was an issue for other passengers. 

putting this compensation claim on a "fast track" is something that presumably sounded witty to them. however, the reality is that is a false description. granted (true), the compensation process "has" got faster, as in putting in the claim has been "simplified" to the extent of "only" taking about 15 minutes. before it took somewhere over half an hour, required a whole load of information and needed you to log in and out. yes, you could speculate that they make it deliberately cumbersome so people just get bored or otherwise fed up (f****d off, even) and simply don't bother. 

fast track for the actual payment of the "compensation" (all of 50p) isn't a thing either. they do advise it can take "up to ten days" to process the claim, and when found correct as in you are due it then it can well be the same amount of time waiting for it to arrive in your account. presumably we should be grateful that they pay it back via your payment method and do not issue a cheque. hopefully none of the tw@ts involved in this process are reading this, or they will see that last sentence, consider it a brilliant idea and go with it. 

to make some sort of (vague) point with this whine, then. issuing "compensation" is all well and good, but the value is nowhere near meaningful enough to teach them to stop being incompetent, is it? say only half of us bother to file the claim and get back that limited amount and, well, how exactly does that seem like "punishment" for the rail company? that's a really insignificant amount of the overpriced ticket they have to pay over. 

eligibility for what they call "compensation" commences if the delay exceeds a very Andy Warhol fifteen (15) minutes. as you can see, the percentage (%) of ticket is small, and likely of negligible difference to either the train people and fat lot of good to the people (us simple passengers) wildly inconvenienced by it all. were it so that compensation, on the random 15 minute mark, started at 150% of the ticket price and increased dramatically with 5 (five) minute intervals then it would be a decent gesture of compensation and would teach the rail companies not so much to be efficient as it would just to do the f*****g job they get paid (very) well to do. 

undoubtedly our glorious, excellent new leader (he likes The Smiths so he must be good, apparently) will have this on his agenda. right now, of course, he seems busy with the most pressing concern in modern society, which i gather is allowing football fans to drink alcohol in stadiums. let us hope that getting public transport into some sort of serviceable state is next. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!