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Nothing works any more.
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 02:42 pmAh, the joys of the 13th of the month. Thank God it’s not a Friday, too – the Karma Pixies would have exploded.
I woke up briefly around 5am and listened to the rain hammering down before congratulating myself on being warm and cosy in bed and dozed off again for a couple of hours. I got up as usual at 7 and we were out of the house just before 8.15. We had some mail to post and I was a little worried that we might have to leg it for the train because of the amount of time it took for the crossing on the High Road to actually do anything.
I needn’t have worried.
When we got to the station it was clear that not everything was as it should be. There were people stacked three or four deep at platform 3 and the 8.38 that we normally get from platform 5 had been cancelled. What we should have done was give up there and then and get the bus to Gants Hill and use the Central Line to Stratford, but there is a beguiling effect given by inaccurate but reassuring station announcements that tell you yes there are delays, but they are not that bad, despite a few cancellations.
So we waited. At any particular point, the train we were waiting for was a constant 15 minutes in the future and remained so for 45 minutes before briefly fluttering in the vortex from 19 to 12 minutes in the future, before being cancelled entirely.
As I said, we should have known better, but after you have invested a certain minimum amount of time in waiting, it becomes an investment that you are irrationally unwilling to dispense with. So we waited more.
Almost exactly an hour after we had arrived at the station a train finally crawled in with enough room for us to get on it. Ironically this was just as we had decided to cut our losses and make the journey to Gants Hill. Let’s just say that we compounded our error by getting on that train. As the doors closed we were informed of the fact that such and such a train was now 84 minutes late, sorry, and we crawled out of the station, immediately coming to a prolonged halt just a couple of hundred yards down the track. It took us another 20 minutes to get to Manor Park, about a mile down the line, but then we got to Stratford in pretty short order thereafter.
As we decamped down to the Jubilee Line platforms we heard the dulcet tones of the recorded announcer balefully informing the world that the so-and-so train was now 104 minutes late. Sorry.
Thence to Victoria with no further incident, having taken a mere 2 hours 40 minutes door to desk.
Of course, coming into the office I should have suspected something was going on: the lift lobby was rammed, but then there are lots of meetings these days as supplicants come and tell us why their grants should not be pared back to the bone or dispensed with entirely. It turns out that I was arriving just as the last of the workforce were getting back to their desks after a false fire alarm.
At least I missed that.
On gaining my desk, I find that everyone is milling around chatting. The lights are on, the air-conditioning is working and the printers are humming contentedly to themselves. The telephones are working and there is hot water at the tea point. Somehow, however, the circuit that powers the computers has blown and in our paper file-free office, none of the IT works.
For this I fretted about being late.
On the plus side, I managed to read a few pages of my history of MI:5, complete the super-fiendish sudoku in The Times, read the paper and drink several cups of coffee, before the IT suddenly came back on just a minute or two before lunch…
I can only imagine what the journey home will be like this evening. I am toying with just getting the Tube to Gants Hill and saving myself a great deal of heartache.
Oh yes. Nearly forgot: the building work around here has turned the street outside the office into a world class wind tunnel and I came *this* close to losing my fedora as I wandered around the corner.
It would have been the cherry on the cake.
I woke up briefly around 5am and listened to the rain hammering down before congratulating myself on being warm and cosy in bed and dozed off again for a couple of hours. I got up as usual at 7 and we were out of the house just before 8.15. We had some mail to post and I was a little worried that we might have to leg it for the train because of the amount of time it took for the crossing on the High Road to actually do anything.
I needn’t have worried.
When we got to the station it was clear that not everything was as it should be. There were people stacked three or four deep at platform 3 and the 8.38 that we normally get from platform 5 had been cancelled. What we should have done was give up there and then and get the bus to Gants Hill and use the Central Line to Stratford, but there is a beguiling effect given by inaccurate but reassuring station announcements that tell you yes there are delays, but they are not that bad, despite a few cancellations.
So we waited. At any particular point, the train we were waiting for was a constant 15 minutes in the future and remained so for 45 minutes before briefly fluttering in the vortex from 19 to 12 minutes in the future, before being cancelled entirely.
As I said, we should have known better, but after you have invested a certain minimum amount of time in waiting, it becomes an investment that you are irrationally unwilling to dispense with. So we waited more.
Almost exactly an hour after we had arrived at the station a train finally crawled in with enough room for us to get on it. Ironically this was just as we had decided to cut our losses and make the journey to Gants Hill. Let’s just say that we compounded our error by getting on that train. As the doors closed we were informed of the fact that such and such a train was now 84 minutes late, sorry, and we crawled out of the station, immediately coming to a prolonged halt just a couple of hundred yards down the track. It took us another 20 minutes to get to Manor Park, about a mile down the line, but then we got to Stratford in pretty short order thereafter.
As we decamped down to the Jubilee Line platforms we heard the dulcet tones of the recorded announcer balefully informing the world that the so-and-so train was now 104 minutes late. Sorry.
Thence to Victoria with no further incident, having taken a mere 2 hours 40 minutes door to desk.
Of course, coming into the office I should have suspected something was going on: the lift lobby was rammed, but then there are lots of meetings these days as supplicants come and tell us why their grants should not be pared back to the bone or dispensed with entirely. It turns out that I was arriving just as the last of the workforce were getting back to their desks after a false fire alarm.
At least I missed that.
On gaining my desk, I find that everyone is milling around chatting. The lights are on, the air-conditioning is working and the printers are humming contentedly to themselves. The telephones are working and there is hot water at the tea point. Somehow, however, the circuit that powers the computers has blown and in our paper file-free office, none of the IT works.
For this I fretted about being late.
On the plus side, I managed to read a few pages of my history of MI:5, complete the super-fiendish sudoku in The Times, read the paper and drink several cups of coffee, before the IT suddenly came back on just a minute or two before lunch…
I can only imagine what the journey home will be like this evening. I am toying with just getting the Tube to Gants Hill and saving myself a great deal of heartache.
Oh yes. Nearly forgot: the building work around here has turned the street outside the office into a world class wind tunnel and I came *this* close to losing my fedora as I wandered around the corner.
It would have been the cherry on the cake.