BBC 2 - The Routemasters

This is on as I type - gives a glimpse into some of the stuff that I encounter in my job. Thankfully, I don't get involved with as many aspects as is shown on the program, but there is quite a lot that seems completely normal to me.

Nice to see the other side of the coin being shown for once, as public transport generally gets a really bad press which can be really hard to take at times - contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of people in the industry that work incredibly hard to make every work as smoothly as possible.

 

Regular occurrence I'm afraid. Drivers being assaulted is less regular, but still too common for my liking, and staff being verbally abused is sadly fairly commonplace. Its things like this that make it all the harder to take some of the criticism that gets thrown around (don't get me wrong, some of it is justified);

Take the heavy snowfall a couple of years ago - TfL took the decision to take the bus services off the road (rightly so) because the risks of continuing to run were too high. Buses were literally sliding sideways down roads, or even sliding backwards on the slightest of inclines. Anyway, that triggered an 18-hour shift for people like yours-truly, firstly doing the administration for what didn't run (all has to be declared in triplicate), and taking vehicles out to test the roads before slowly re-establishing services. I can assure you it is no fun sliding sideways through a High Street because I did it a few times on that particular day! Hell, I even went to Tesco the following morning and bought a load of dishwasher salt from my own pocket to put down on a roundabout so we could get the final route open to traffic.

You can imagine the disappointment the following morning when you read in the papers that all the bus staff had a great day 'sitting drinking tea and making snowballs instead of getting things moving again'

Whist this series is really good for showing people what goes on behind the scenes on a typical day just to keep London moving, those that could learn the most from it sadly won't 'get it' and will simply carry on wreaking havoc or complaining bitterly about waiting an extra five minutes for a bus or train.

 

That was the one - I ended up doing 18-hours straight, home for 5 hours sleep and then back in for a further 16-hours before some normality was properly restored.

As I say, I fully understand peoples frustration when things go wrong, but to point the finger (and get abusive) as they do without thinking about the full circumstances. As your son in law will know all too well, its a fairly common response form the public.