Sunday - Snow Job

The forecast snow finally arrived today and has coated BasVegas and the rest of Essex.

And it's still snowing (with a forecast of more) so it looks like I'm going to have to dig out the Fatmobile tomorrow!

Coda: Someone has actually done one of my favourite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons for real!

Insane on the Train

Would you risk almost certain death to catch a train?

No, obviously not. I mean you'd have to be stark staring mad, wouldn't you. Well, I saw this very thing on Friday night.

I caught a slightly earlier C2C train from Fenchurch Street on Friday evening. I'd managed to get to West Ham station via the Overground and the Jubilee and a rather crowded 18:00 train pulled up as I got on to the platform. I was stood up most of the way until we got to Basildon at around 18:20, when the vast majority of the train emptied. As the doors closed, a bloke launched himself at them, missing by a few inches, and started banging on them to be let in. However, they're electronic and once shut, you can't open them again, neither from the outside nor the inside. There was a guy stood next to the doors and he tried to open them too, but to no avail. This is where the insanity came in.

You and I would simply curse our bad fortune, kick the doors maybe, rant and rave for a few minutes and simply wait for the next train, due about five minutes or so after us. Not this bloke, oh no. He tried to open the doors by pulling at them. If he'd had some kind of jemmy or crowbar, he might have done it, but not with bare hands. Then we started to move off, so he stood on the tiny ledge outside the door, which is about two or three inches wide, as we accelerated down the platform. He hung on to the train for a good fify yards or so, screaming at the guy on the inside to pull the emergency cord, which a woman in front of me told him not to as it would stop the train (yeah, obviously), but would you have let the bloke on the train by now? The mad bloke eventually jumped from the train as we were doing about 20 miles an hour and someone said that he'd fallen as he landed.

Now whether this is commuter madness or Basildon madness or just some random nutter, I'll leave that for you to decide, but I hate commuting.

Friday Sign-on

This Friday is sign-on day at the dole office, sorry, Job Centre Plus. The office is at the other end of Broadmayne from the flat, Broadmayne being the large dual-carriageway running the length of Basildon. It's about two miles, so I walked in, which took about 40 minutes. I have to sign in once a fortnight and demonstrate that I have been looking for work, so I keep a list of job applications on a spreadsheet and print them out.

The last time I signed on, it took about an hour or so, because one of their systems had screwed up. In the end, I pointed out that I was just there to sign on and had been waiting a while. They just filled in a line on a form and asked me to sign to prove that I'd attended. This time was the same, but he paid attention to the spreadsheet and what was on it. He also asked me to bring a little form they'd given me about voluntary work. Plus everyone seemed to be on the ball and it all took about ten minutes from me walking in through the door: I'd barely got started on a new number puzzle.

And there could be worse times to be out of work...