Northern Fail
Come listen to my tale, dearly beloved, a tale of public transport.
Not too long ago, in a land very close to me, there was a Railway company who'd won the right to run trains in the North of England.
And for a while everything was… If not actually creamy, then mostly OK.
But then a great and powerful Wizard cast the spell: Fire anyone senior enough to know what the fuck is up.
And suddenly the time-table was re-worked to put all the trains in service for shoppers, but almost none at the feet of the staff who actually opened and ran the stores and large financial institutions that did something or other with money that made the city rich enough to have all kinds of neato shops.
And after a while with much angst and screeching and people complaining of missed trains, Northern Rail decided to do something about it all.
Instead of admitting they cancelled a train they were responsible for selling expensive tickets for, they reassigned a train that was scheduled, to be the next scheduled train. And thus technically, no trains were cancelled. Merely delayed so much that they vanished. This sucked if you actually needed to be places on time.
They raised the prices.
They ran less trains because they found out there's no upper limit to the number of passengers on a train. The part where more than a few passengers passed out, but were unable to be removed from the train or seen by staff with First Aid training due to the overcrowding, was considered incidental to the people who were making money.
Maintianance was reduced to practically none. Who cares if the seats are damaged beyond use?
Things got so bad that the official Northern Rail app for finding your train was deemed useless, as it didn't reflect where and when the trains would actually show up. Some brave soul who's name is lost to time (Nicholas Mitchell) created a more accurate train tracker called Northern Fail - Which obviously honked the bippies of Northern Rail who absolutely refused to fix their own app or stick to their own timetable, so what can I say?
Northern Rail also had the bright idea to strap stress monitors to their customers. Which is like saying "Dress some swimmers up like tuna and give them blood flavoured sunscreen, and we'll get some data on shark attacks". Which is where I came in: Having a nice easy, relaxing day except when having to get on a train. Or I'd like to have gotten on a train, but since they often showed up on the wrong platform at the wrong time, or not at all, this became a bit of a spike in the ol' cortisol.
On a particularly bad day, my 45 minute commute (Which realistically should have been me reading a book or taking a nap), would somehow stretch out to several hours: And if the morning and afternoon were bad (As they frequently were), I'd have a 4+ hour commute for an 8 hour working day.
And then one day, on an overcrowded train that was so hot, I'd started bringing a battery powered fan along, I was moved to say something very sarcastic about the service.
At which point a BBC reporter was summoned from the ether, leaned over my shoulder and asked if I'd repeat that while he recorded.
So I did.
And when I got to work, I had to apologise for being late due to the trains, and was thusly informed that showing up on the BBC World-Wide News delivering a soundbite about the situation to the english speaking world, was going to be considered the new office gold standard for justified lateness.
And that was my small, minuscule contribution to the re-nationalisation of Northern Rail, which was the first step in slowly reeling in all the other terrible train and bus companies.
Because while it may not feel like much, combined, these sorts of things are like an avalanche.
And yes, the service has improved.
And no: Everyone did not clap.
