Spotted on the way home from work...

This made me laugh... it was on the back of a minicab, would you believe!

Finally, a minicab driver with a sense of humour...!

Uh-oh... looks like the gritters are staying at home...

... because, as I drove in to work at 04:40 this morning, the snow was falling fairly thickly, and the road was covered in it - with no sign of it having been gritted since yesterday.

So, (with a tad of editing later to make this more coherent) let's go with the flow, and see how a shift works - or doesn't - when the gritters take a day off, and it snows heavily...

Arriving at work, 05:15 or so...

I expect we'll see a token presence of gritters later, but for now, I'm expecting a fair number of silly and avoidable 'amateur hour' collisions to happen today.

We shall see... more later...!

06:02...

OK, got my bus, did my walk round, got it up the really steep hill to the eastern end of the route, and as I thought, the gritters are all on a day off by the look of it. The road conditions are... challenging, to say the least, and I expect that the roads'll come to a standstill before long, when the kiddie-run hour hits.

Looks like it's gonna be another loooooooong day....

11:08...

Well, this was an interesting round and a half - NOT.

Traffic was worse than last weeks' mess, with queues all over the place. Most times, it was a less than five mile per hour crawl from one queue of stopped traffic to the next, kind of like a five yard slug race.

Finding myself running very late (half an hour at one point), I'd radioed control to ask if they knew if the gritters would be out to play any time soon, and was told that they hadn't a clue, and if I wanted to know, to call Centrecomm on "code blue" (we have two ways of calling Centrecomm on the radio - Code red (emergencies only, a bit like the 999 system) and Code Blue (non-Emergency), and by the way, could I let them know what Centrecomm said, please?

Well, on calling Code Blue, and outlining the question, I was told that the gritters had "packed it in to go to bed at 1 am", and that they "hadn't a clue when they'd be out to play again" (can someone change the blasted script, please?!). Oh joy. Well, I relayed this to control, much good did it do any of us, and went back to regarding the exhaust pipes of cars in front of me again...

We eventually only saw one gritter - and that was rather ironically stuck in traffic (photo left), and to cap it all, when I should have been at the western end of the route, on my meal break, I was in fact close to ten miles away at the eastern end of the route, trying not to get stuck on the turning point before coming back again (it was well slippery).

Luckily, control took pity, and ran me light (empty) back to the relief point, so I could have a late meal relief - this, they don't really like doing, but sometimes it's the only thing they can do to get things back to a semblance of normality!

We shall see how the rest of the shift pans out later....

11:45 or so...

Well, after an abbreviated late meal relief, I was directed to take my second bus two-thirds the way down the route, and spin round at the bus station there, to come back on time. Well, ok, fair enough, thinks I. Not unreasonable, given the mess on the roads, and actually quite a good "turn", as we call such a curtailment.

12:50...

No sooner do I get there, than the controller there comes up and tells me to run ten minutes early back again!

Now, I know the schedule had been torn up, shredded, and set on fire again, but this was only gonna make my next set of passengers ready to set fire to the bus, let alone the time table!

13:50...

How wrong was I?!

The controller had failed to tell me that that my leading bus (the one in front, in other words) had broken down (the exit doors were stuck!), and when I got to it, they were so pleased to see my bus (earlier than expected), that they thanked me profusely and that, as they say, was that - the traffic had calmed down or gone home, the roads had by now been gritted at least once and were passably safe to use, and I got back to the start point in plenty of time and with the get out of trouble instruction "WTI ADV +11 (NLM)" plastered on the back of my log card... translated to somewhat more understandable English that means, by the way, "Working To Instruction, ADVance eleven minutes (ahead of schedule), No Lost Mileage" to wave at the start point controller!

Even my ferry back to the depot was on time!

Not a bad shift, all things considered!

Nukem all!

It would appear that someone else in the company I work for, doesn't like the antics that amateur drivers get up to, either!

I found this on my first bus of the bay this morning - I mean Monday morning! - just after I got in the cab


It's the assault alarm button, of course, but I fully endorse the sentiment

OK, it's Sunday, and the Sunday Drivers are about writ large...

What IS it about the weekend, and particularly Sundays, that seems to generate more complete ****wits on the roads? You know the sort I'm on about...

The 24mph merchant, looking for his flagwalker...

The meander, who can't decide what side of the dotted white line she wants to drive alongside...

The Sunday Shopper, (pictured left) who decides she's more important than everyone else, overtakes the bus, and then proceeds to park on a bus stop...

Yeah, they're about in the week as well, but there seem to be more of them on Sundays...

By the way, the clue to help you, the normal motorist, to avoiding this problem, is to notice that the box you're parking in is coloured RED, and bordered by a bloody big yellow dashed line. On, and it's also usually double yellow-line marked as well. Those are the clues to help you to avoid any future "why is the bus parked on top of my car?" issues!

The Five Finger Racer, who, in a queue of traffic, cannot abide being behind a bus, so in a fit of pique, guns his Vauxhall Nova's 1.2 litre sewing machine and, on the wrong side of the road, barges past everything to get past the bus - including, to their horror - the drivers of oncoming traffic (actually, this git's about pretty much everyday, normally after darkness falls)... oh, and why five finger racer? That's because of the very rude gestures he's making out of the drivers' side window.

The helpful idiot, whose lack of forethought borders on the jaw droppingly moronic - like this pair of twits, who, rather than push the failed car OFF the junction to a more suitable and safer place, proceeded to hook up a towing cable just over the stop line at a very busy set of traffic lights. Apologies for the blurred photo - I was in a bit of a hurry to snap these gits.

Now, thinking about the above, where the hell are the overworked, under-appreciated, much maligned Traffic Cops when you most want 'em?

Anyone with a decent answer, please let the Commissioner of the Met know, eh?

In the mean time, here's one that made me laugh. Not often you see a company with a decent sense of humour, but this coffee and tea merchant got it just right

Some good snow driving advice from the beeb...

Nice advice piece here... but it missed one vital thing - on snow and ice, use the TEN second rule as a bare minimum: That is, ten seconds should have elapsed from the point the back of the vehicle in front of you passes a particular spot, before your front bumper passes that spot. This allows for the possibility of skids and slides, and gives you more chances to stop safely without having an accident.

Here's the article: Note that it's got a video clip embedded in it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/newsbeat/newsid_8445000/8445100.stm

Snowballs and SuperSoakers...

What is it about kids lobbing snowballs (sometimes containing more solid stuff than snow or ice) at buses?

I don't see the point: The driver can't stop to make it a proper snowball match (with the chances being that the drivers' aim would be markedly more accurate), so the bus is a defenceless target, and can't fight back.

...Hang on...

That makes these kids bullies, right?

Bloody hell, there's a first - buses are being bullied!

Maybe we ought to see SuperSoaker-equipped old bill on the buses, to deal appropriately with these juvenile delinquents?

Picture it, if you will... Junior goes crying home to mummy, bawling about those nasty coppers soaking him in freezing weather for lobbing snowballs at buses...!

Heh... There's a comedy sketch in there somewhere, methinks!

New layout...

I've taken the opportunity to change the layout of the Blant today as well. I think this should be easier to read, although I still prefer the navigation and widgets to be on the right, not the left. I'll see about doing something about that over the next few days, If I can.

If you like this new layout, please let me know!