<body><script type="text/javascript"> function setAttributeOnload(object, attribute, val) { if(window.addEventListener) { window.addEventListener('load', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }, false); } else { window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }); } } </script> <div id="navbar-iframe-container"></div> <script type="text/javascript" src="https://apis.google.com/js/platform.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> gapi.load("gapi.iframes:gapi.iframes.style.bubble", function() { if (gapi.iframes && gapi.iframes.getContext) { gapi.iframes.getContext().openChild({ url: 'https://www.blogger.com/navbar.g?targetBlogID\x3d3200994\x26blogName\x3dDreadful+Nonsense\x26publishMode\x3dPUBLISH_MODE_BLOGSPOT\x26navbarType\x3dBLACK\x26layoutType\x3dCLASSIC\x26searchRoot\x3dhttps://shazzle.blogspot.com/search\x26blogLocale\x3den_GB\x26v\x3d2\x26homepageUrl\x3dhttp://shazzle.blogspot.com/\x26vt\x3d7615377689624956874', where: document.getElementById("navbar-iframe-container"), id: "navbar-iframe", messageHandlersFilter: gapi.iframes.CROSS_ORIGIN_IFRAMES_FILTER, messageHandlers: { 'blogger-ping': function() {} } }); } }); </script>

Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

Dear Fellow Commuters,

I understand that the weather has been a little bit out of the ordinary this week, and that means that the trains haven’t been running very well at all. Yesterday, a tree fell on the train that was just ahead of us on the line, and so we were held at a station for ages, and eventually told that we might as well go get buses. For the most part, most of us managed to walk steadily out of the station and find our way to the bus stop, where we continued our journey.

However, there are always one or two of us - and I’m not going to point fingers, you know who you are, Mr and Mrs Grumpy - that feel the need to complain. But this complaining isn’t the constructive type, where you might even come up with some suggestions on what you would do if you were running the service, or even suggestions to those that run the service of what they can do (and sometimes where they can stick things). No, this is the kind of complaining also employed by the woman who sits opposite me at work - the loud tut and the eye-roll, often combined with a long expletive and then a massive, theatrical sigh.

Mr and Mrs Grumpy, you’re not impressing anyone. None of us believe that your journey was more important than ours. Most of us don’t believe our journey was important at all, and we would really have preferred to have been tucked up nicely in bed with a good book and our dreamy boyfriends, but we are all commuters, and we know what must be done.

So please, when a train is delayed or outright cancelled, when the tubes aren’t running well because some poor soul has decided that jumping is easier than not jumping, when the buses are packed to the brim and the driver won’t stop to let us squeeze ourselves on, please try and refrain from tutting and rolling your eyes out of the sockets and most of all, please stop swearing and blaspheming and sighing. Especially the sighing. The sighing drives me mental. It’s not going to un-cancel the train, it’s not going to un-suicide the suicidal and it’s not going to un-clog the bus. What it’s going to do, one day soon, is earn a large, hard slap across the face from me, thereby giving you something to actually fucking sigh about.

Kind regards

Yours sincerely,

Shazzle

This entry was posted on 23 January 2007 at 11:44 am. 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment