Dom Davis (The Blog)

I’m sure I’ve whinged about this before, but I’m going to again. The ticket barriers in Norwich station are beginning to really piss me off. Not because they’re there (I spent over a decade commuting in London, you kind of get used to them), it’s just they are so slow.

Go to any central London station and you’ll either see the new issue slimline TFL gates or (assuming any are still kicking about) the old style tube ticket gates. Now, we’ll forget about Oyster, forget about other people, it’s just you and the TFL gate. Doesn’t matter which style, either way you can walk up to one of these, feed in your ticket, retrieve your ticket and walk through, all in one deft motion without breaking your stride.

The same action at Norwich involves you trying to feed your ticket in. Assuming you can. While it’s never happened to me, some people seem to be unable to feed their ticket in, and I don’t think it’s through blind stupidity as it happens far too often and isn’t something you see often in London. The next party trick is for the mechanism to pull in the ticket, then spit it out, the pull it in repeatedly while the hapless traveler tries to time the retrieval properly. It does stop after 5 or so goes but there isn’t the immediate (and admittedly ignored) beep, “Please seek assistance” you get from the TFL gates. Let’s say you’re lucky and your ticket goes through. It’s now a wait of at least a second, if not more before the gates slowly open. It’s enough to make you wonder if it’s even accepted your ticket. Anyway, eventually you walk through and, an eon or so later, the gates close behind you.

Stick that kind of gate into Bank station at morning rush hour and you’d have queues from the ticket hall all the way to the DLR (a sod of a long way). And that’s from people who understand the concept of a ticket barrier.

Now add in all the holiday makers and day trippers to whom a ticket barrier is a novelty. They stand in front of the barrier (an act that would get them trampled to death in London), fish out a ticket, attempt to feed it in, wait for it to open and head through. Even if the person behind has their ticket to hand they’ll invariably wait for the gates to shut before making their attempt. It just takes forever. It’s little wonder they throw open one if the disabled gates and just have someone take a cursory glance at people’s tickets as people stream through. Or they could have just invested in some proper barriers that work instead of these annoying, slow cheap ones they’ve got.

You know when it’s raining, but not really enough for a brolly so you just sort of grin and bear it? Yeah, it was wetter than that this morning which rather makes the decision not to deploy my ever handy umbrella somewhat silly and leaves me just a little damp. Still I’ll dry.

Anyway, my own stupidness aside, today I’d like to talk about ACAB. If you walk about around the cathedral you’ll see ACAB sprayed everywhere. They style is the same so it’s obviously someone’s tag and the work of a single yoof. ACAB is still active as his tag appeared, in marker pen this time, on a sign near work.

Now, ordinarily I’d just ignore the graffiti and not even bother commenting on it, however, nestled in the riverside walk is a gate bearing the phrase “All Cops Are Bastards”. The writing uses the same canmanship as ACAB and it doesn’t take a genius to realise that ACAB is more than a tag, but an acronym too.

And here we come to the crux of the post. Perhaps one day ACAB may google for his tag and find this post. Perhaps an acquaintance might find it and point him here.

ACAB, you may find cops are slightly more forgiving if you didn’t run round NR3 spraying every available surface with crap. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest you are probably involved in other antisocial, if not illegal behaviour but your low IQ means you are unable to cover your tracks which has lead to a number of run ins with the police. Furthermore, while there are regrettable incidents of police harassment, I’m going to suggest that yours is not such a case and any repercussions from law enforcement agencies is entirely justified.

Just in case that’s all to much for you to understand I shall break it down for you: You, sir, are a dick. Please stop.

That will be all.

So they’re improving Morrisons in Cromer. I have no idea what these improvements entail, but two bits of the car park have been closed off and works are going on, and the cigarette kiosk area is covered up and a temporary one set up. Since I don’t know what the changes are I’ve decided to make some up. Here is what I’d like to see:

Both car park works are close to the pedestrian crossings. It’s my hope that cameras are being installed that will sense when cars ignore the pedestrian crossings. This will then feed details of the car (size, location, velocity, direction of travel) to some form of high calibre weaponry or artillery piece. Hellfire anti-tank missiles would also work. Lastly an articulated arm would be used to push the smouldering wreck into a storage pit for later retrieval and recycling. Past experience would suggest the pits would need to be very large and the ammunition would need to be replenished regularly.

The works inside the store are by the entrance. Hopefully a new “express” entrance is being built. This would be for people who are going to walk into the shop instead of just fucking stopping dead once they’ve got inside, thus blocking it for the rest of us. This entry would again use cameras and under floor sensors to ensure people are maintaining a minimum speed through the entrance. Failure to achieve this speed, or stopping dead will result in a hail of 50 calibre heavy machine-gun fire aimed at the culprit.

These two, very simple alterations would vastly improve my shopping experience.

I have a dental appointment this morning which will be fun. I’m rather hoping it’s going to be a quick affair of go in, bet teeth looked at, get told all is OK, leave, get next train to to work. Thankfully my dentist here isn’t big on lecturing you which is something that really put me off dentists. It’s bad enough just having a check up what with lying in the chair with the bright light in your face and the desperate need to swallow while someone pokes about in your mouth uttering cryptic phrases to the dental nurse without then getting a lecture on your oral hygiene. Do I have any fillings? No? Do I need any fillings? No, good, then get off your high horse.

I think what really put me off dentists for life was having two teeth drilled out in order to make space for my wisdom teeth. This procedure was done at a reasonably young age and resulting in… leaving a big gap in my mouth where the teeth should be. Teeth did not move, wisdom teeth still started to become impacted and I still had to have them out. The only saving grace was the, because they were impacted, and needed a general aesthetic to get them out it’s considered a medical, not a dental procedure and my health insurance paid for it.

Fast forward a decade or so (actually when I found out I needed my wisdom teeth out) and I’m being told I needed 3 grands worth of cosmetic work doing. I ignored that, changed toothbrush (to an uber power one), toothpaste brand and 6 months later I had better, albeit still crooked teeth. 3 grand my arse.

On the plus side it’s Friday.

Update: Well that all went fine and was over and done with in less than 10 minutes, which is nice. My teeth are fine and I just had to endure a short torture of a ‘polish’ which seems to involve blasting watering into, and then sucking it out of my mouth while I’m fighting the urge to swallow. All done until January, Friday the 13th :S

The Zozo has her birthday very close to mine which means that celebrations tend to get all mixed together. this year we’ve got some of my family coming up and the plan was to go out for a few drinks. The Zozo had then asked if she could go off with her girlie friends and have a girlie night. Not a problem, thinks I. I can head off into London and go clubbing. Job done.

But no. You see, to get to and from London I need a train. There’s no way I’m driving as I can’t drive back with no sleep, it’s simply not safe. While there are trains they are, thanks to engineering works, infrequent and beset with changes onto buses and then back onto trains. If I didn’t mind turning up a bit late I could leave Cromer at 8 rather than the more usual 9 but then I’ve got a huge problem coming back. My options are:

1. Leave Slimelight at 6am, walk to Kings Cross, get a train to Cambridge, train somewhere else, bus to Norwich, train to Cromer and arrive 5 hours later paying £48 for the privilege. That’s £10/hour.
2. Leave Slimelight at 7:30 (kickout time), kick about London for 2 hours (bearing in mind I’ll have been awake all night and really just wanting to get home to bed), then get the train, bus, train, train home for 1:30.
3. Leave Slimelight at 7:30, go to a hotel, crash and die, get a later train home.

The first option is a pain, expensive and morally reprehensive. The section option is doable, but real faff. The third option is expensive since I’m to early to check-in for Sunday and I’ll want to make use of the room for longer than most checkout times allow so I’ll need to book for two nights. I’ll need to mull over whether I can be arsed to deal with the faff and if I can get away with ditching the family early, and if I can occupy myself for 2 hours in London on a Sunday morning since, lets face it, that’s what I’m going to have to do.

In the mean time I’m also wanting to go down on the 18th of June to see [X]-RX. This is too far in advance for me to book at the moment and I’ve no idea if there are even going to be trains. Between now and me being able to book train tickets for that I shall be getting some extra toys for my pram because, believe me, if it’s not a case of normal service and easily getting to and from London on that night I’ll be throwing all my toys out of the pram.

Great. I’ve just been sent a document by a friend who has access to these things that would suggest there are going to be buses from Marks Tey to Ipswich that weekend. The London to Norwich line is just a joke.

The barriers at Norwich station annoy me. Not so much their presence¹ or the fact they’re ugly and slow², it’s that they’re never bloody in use, and when they are no one can ever use them.

Here’s the thing. Arrive at Norwich and I, plus an (admittedly small) trainload of people, want to get out of the station. So they throw open the disabled gate and let us funnel through. We’re just waved through. No ticket check, nothing.

The other way is even worse. I invariably arrive at the station when a ruddy great big intercity disgorges it’s passengers onto the platform. They throw open all the ticket barriers (all 4 of them) and everyone piles through. Meanwhile I’m trying to get through in the opposite direction and I can’t go use the other set of gates because they’re blocked off due to their being not enough staff to monitor them.

And boy do they need monitoring. On the days when the barriers are actually working you’ve now got a bunch of people getting off an intercity who, judging by their reactions, have never seen a ticket barrier in their life, a bunch of people trying to get onto the platform who are so used to just walking through that they’ve now got to stop and start rummaging round for their tickets and the usual handful of clueless travellers. No one steps to the side when they’re blocking the gates and it’s panda-bloody-monium. Something that’s usually solved by just flinging the gates open again.

In my view they should just get rid of the gates entirely. All the trains have guards on them checking tickets anyway and you’d reduce congestion immensely. Alternatively install an express gate; block it for more than 1 second³ and you’re shot. Everyone else can fight it out at the normal gates.

¹Having lived and commuted in London for over a decade the ticket barrier has practically been a way of life. In fact, on more than one occasion it’s made me realise I’ve forgotten my ticket, which lives in a holder along with my work pass. Something I’d rather find out 5 minutes from home than in the centre on London looking at a £10 fine and the faff of signing in at work.

²If you can’t feed your ticket into the slot, retrieve it and walk through the barrier without breaking a brisk pace it’s too slow. TFL have got their barriers very right, especially with Oyster.

³Plenty of time for the prepared commuter to insert ticket, retrieve ticket and walk through a TFL style gate, or to realise you need to step to one side to find your ticket.

RMG, the people who handle being the management agents for the development my flat is part of, have recently written to me explaining that a) my ground rent is due and b) they’re launching a ‘Brand new portal’ which will allow me to ‘manage my account at the touch of a button’ and that I can find my login details below. This final part was on a letter that started ‘Welcome to RMG Living, your online portal to account management’.

This is fine if it weren’t for a few small points:

I’ve been using this online portal since the day I’ve moved in, although I wasn’t sure if I was just looking in the wrong place because…

They never actually listed the URL for the portal anywhere on the letter, I just happened to find it was the same URL in the small print of the letter demanding payment and annoyingly…

From my cursory look about nothing has changed on the portal (including the bits that don’t work and haven’t worked properly for two years) except for…

My login details which means changing my login on 3 machines and trying to remember not to login using the details I’ve been using for over 2 years now because apparently if I use the wrong details they’ll happily take payment and then continue to hound me for the money and it will incur possible administration fees. Finally…

The letter asking for payment is saying that my new reference number (and one assumes login) is purely for my ground rent and that my reference number for my service charge remains a number that I’ve never actually seen before, and certainly not the number I used to use, so I may actually end up with three logins, my old combined one and my two new individual ones that have been created ‘for my convenience’.

Anyone want to buy a hideously overpriced flat with good rental potential?

So the good news is I can still make it out, club all night and get back to Colchester without passing out.

The bad news is I no loner live in Colchester, I live a further 2 hours down the track.

The worse news is that there are engineering works (sorry, “Route Improvement Works”) today and I had to get a bus from Ingatestone to here.

But the absolute best news, and this is a doozy, is that the buses haven’t been given enough time to get from one station to the next so I watched my train to Norwich pull out without me and a whole bus load of other people. So I get to spend an hour sitting at Colchester station. Somewhere that I thought I was done with in terms of waiting for trains.

It’s unfortunate for the customer service guys that their office is right by where our train was 30 seconds before. Some ire may have been vented by some passengers. I stuck with resigned dejectedness. It’s not their fault, there’s bugger all they can do and they’re probably going to have a day of this.

Funnily enough a combination of 8 hours of thumping music and the slight auditory hallucinations I get when very tired means that the rumble of the rail replacement bus engines is hitting my brain as a banging, if a little monotonous, tune. That, blogging and incessant Facebook updates are passing the time and stopping me from falling asleep on this bench.

The new version of wordpress for my phone is doing my head in. Before I could bounce in and out of the app happily gathering links, lyrics, and other useless shit to scatter among my posts, but not any more. The new ‘autosave’ feature means that rather than coming back to my post in the exact state I left it I now come back to it in the state it was in the last autosave. Or blank, as was my experience just now. It’s buggy, crashes, doesn’t do what it used to do and is generally making blogging on the move a pain rather than just a bit fiddly. You lot are now 3 posts down. Sorry.

You’ll have to excuse me for a moment and indulge me while I blow my own trumpet. I am very good at my job. The last time I was looking for work in London I regularly tested in the top 5% of my field. I’ve pioneered new ways of doing things and solved problems no one has ever solved before. When I was working in London I had the pleasure of working with some of the finest developers around and together we did some amazing things.

Since most of career has been at a bank the majority of the software I have written has been financial software. There is code I have written running today that handles billions of dollars every month. Systems I have designed will cope with throughputs of trillions and trillions of dollars in their lifetime. The figures are staggering. This is Big Business on a scale that is hard to understand, even when you’re in that business. I’ve worked on systems where $50,000 is a rounding error (go and read that again, let it sink in). I’ve worked on a system called Groundhog (Guaranteed Routing of Orders Unless Denied by the Hand Of God – seriously), with levels of redundancy that border on the insane.

I mention this because I’m used to working on things that, when they break, you fix. NOW! No ifs, no buts, you do whatever it takes, whatever time of day or night it is. OK, no one is going to die if it’s not fixed, but people can, and do, get fired for cock ups and the higher ups really don’t care what they’re interruption when they call you. All the care about is the hole your system is putting in their bottom line for every second it’s down. There is a reason I used to get paid insane amounts of money.

These days I work for an Internet retail outlet. Yes, it’s bad for the bottom line if things break, but, at 3am I’m asleep and so are our customers so it can wait until I wake up. Anything short of “we cannot process orders” falls into the fix it when I get into work category.

One of the things that had me so flat yesterday was the immense amount of running about and panic over an update that I considered minor and not particularly well thought out. Still, I pulled out all the stops and had the update written, tested and poised ready for release in record time. Then, as I knew would happen, people thought it through some more, didn’t like some of the implications and decided to hang fire. Since my definition of critical involves fistfuls of cash being thrown out of the door, or something that is causing massive repetitional damage (which basically equates to fistfuls of cash being thrown out the door) deciding to hang fire isn’t an option. Hanging fire costs money. No, what we have here is, at best, something urgent and therefore something that can dealt with when I’m in the office. Suffice to say I left yesterday with everything still poised for release and no decisions made.

In order to cheer myself up from my work-induced misery I took The Zozo out for a nice meal last night. Poor old Zo had to put up with a down in the dumps me with sad eyes that put her in mind of Hatchi¹, but we both had a good time, some nice food and some pleasant wine and I was left feeling that, with a good nights sleep, all would be right with the world.

Work, it would seem, were not happy with this state of affairs and, as I was paying the bill my phone rang. The world, it appeared was coming to an end and small children would die unless my update went out now.

This is not the first time I’ve been here. For every multi-million pound outage I’ve fixed in banking there have been hundreds of much less severe problems that I’ve dealt with which have, nonetheless found themselves elevated to world ending status. As I’d left work I’d left everything in a state that meant that the world could be rescued and the small children saved at the click of a button (two clicks actually, but you get the point). I had rather hoped that it could be done this morning, but apparently not. Anyway, it’s done now. I didn’t check if it worked. I figure the world is still here so it must have done. I had much more important things to deal with. Things that work had needlessly interrupted. Today will involve long, ranty emails on the subject of planning. I don’t like having my dinner interrupted.

¹ The saddest film ever. Ladies, bring tissues, gents, be prepared to spend the last part of the film Concentrating Very Hard On Manly Things Which Require Your Urgent Cogitation.