Season Ticket Failure

Last Tuesday I renewed my annual railway season ticket. Because on the the state of our economy and the fact that the Westminster Muppet Show have loosened controls on the fares train operators can charge, my ticket has broken the £2000 barrier for the first time. This equates to a 7.7% increase from last year, which is more than 2% above inflation. I'd like to point out that my salary is extremely unlikely to keep pace.

Southern Trains have over the last couple of years been fitting automated ticket barriers and my home station received them early last year. This shouldn't be a problem if you have a valid ticket to insert into the machine. However, mine stopped operating the barriers in just over a month last year. This meant that everyday I had to queue up at the manual side barrier four times each day. Mostly this was fine, but on a couple of occasions the speed of the queue ment I missed my train.

I was so please when last Tuesday my new ticket let me through the barriers without any delay. Unfortunately I seem to have set a new record as this morning it failed to work. I made that just seven days of un-impeded travel. I have two choices, visit the ticket office & ask for a replacement or spend the next 12 months queuing up 4 times a day!

Regards
Chris
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January Blues

I was going to write about all the things that have been getting me down this week. In fact I wrote over 200 words on the subject, but that just made me feel even more feed up and I was sounding like a “Super Grumpy Old Man”. So I stopped my moaning and got on with my day instead. By lunchtime I was snowed under with work and started to feel useful once more. The final therapy came at 3pm when I received the weekly gentle reminder from my calendar to fill in my timesheet. This of course signals that the weekend is now insight. A fact which always cheers my heart.

Then I cheered myself up further by writing this little song.

I woke up this morning,
And crawled out of bed.
Outside was dark & wet,
Indoors was just cold.
I moaned to myself,
like I always do,
I just can’t get out of these, January Blues

It sounded much better when I sang it to myself in the kichen. Honest it did!

Perhaps January isn’t all bad 8-)


Regards



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