25 January 2016, 10.30 am
I can’t remember why I thought it was a good idea to go to CIPA a day early this week. It may have been to do with spending some time with the hard-working CIPA staff, because I haven’t had much chance to do that recently. So here I am on a mid-morning train to London, which is an interesting experience, because on the mid-morning train you’re expected to stay awake and do work and stuff. I am more used to sparking out for the duration of the journey, and hoping that everyone else is also asleep so they won’t see me dribbling. To make sure we stay awake and do work and stuff, the Train Manager pops round at regular intervals to shout at people about their tickets. You have to do as you’re told by the Train Manager; he is in charge of the whole train, and everyone in it, and their bags and their tickets and whether or not they stay awake. The only two things he is not in charge of are (a) the hot bacon and tomato rolls (because this is the job of the Catering Manager) and (b) making the train start and stop (because this is the job of the Driver, with input from the signalling team, the local livestock, the weather and the gods). Since there isn’t a Platform-Train Interface Manager, every now and then the staff at Great Western Railways® have a little tiff about platform-related jobs, like shutting the train doors and blowing the whistle and chasing cyclists. This is how it works on trains these days. You get to know things like this when you commute.
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