Probably the best one yet...?

Seen outside a Baptist (I think) church on one of our night bus routes last night. Apologies for lopping off the bottom of the poster, the bush (not a burning one, lol) got in the way!)

It says, in full:
"There is probably no bus....
So why not come in and enjoy God?"

Nice comeback on the original the Atheist version, I think - ten out of ten to them for the riposte ;-)

Silent Callers...

OK, rant time.

For the past five days (Sunday excepted), I've been woken from my slumber by some anonymous muppit (and that's the polite version) on an unavailable number (means it's a foreign caller according to BT), who persists on letting the phone ring until the answerphone picks up the call, and then hanging up.

I was woken THREE SODDING TIMES today by this (insert your insult of choice here).

Enough is more than enough. Because of this (insert your insult of choice here), doing my shift tonight's gonna be challenging as hell, to say the least.

Frankly, this is completely unacceptable, outrageous, and irresponsible. It's also bloody rude to boot (It's called silent calling - link here). And yes, I registered with the Telephone Preference Service over six months ago to block marketing calls.

Now, while there is no specific law against it per se, the Communications Act 2003 states:

127 Improper use of public electronic communications network

(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—

(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b) causes such a message to be sent; or

(c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

(4) Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to anything done in the course of providing a programme service (within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1990 (c. 42)).

This has a loophole. It's called Foreign Call Centres, who are generally not subject to English Law.

BUT.

If the call centre makes the call on behalf of a UK entity, be that a retailer, person, or whatever, then an offence has been committed by that entity under s. 127(2)(b) CA 2003.

So, whoever the hell you are, be warned.

I'll have you.

And if you're really, really REALLY lucky, silent caller, I won't stuff your curly corded phone somewhere that even your proctologist won't be able to reach

Neat logo :) Made me smile :)

OK, as company logos go, this one's rather natty :) I like it. It's simple, to the point, and rather imaginative.

It also got me grinning, imagining how Tower Bridge might look if it actually WAS made from Tetra Paks...

*cough - splutter choke* How much?!?!?!

OK... next to one of the bus stands we use on one of the night bus routes we run from my depot, there is a branch of a fairly well-known chain of sandwich - well, long roll, anyhow - retailers.

It regularly supplies our many day shift drivers with their lunch, and coffee for those of us night drivers lucky enough to get there before it closes.

It also does cut price 'meal deals' for students, as evidenced by the photo to the left.

At a cost of Three Hundred And Forty Nine Quid for a bleedin' sandwich?!?!?! (OK, now I'm bug of eye and splutter of cough or something)...

Ahem.

Sorry, my mistake.

That one's obviously for the lottery winners amongst us.

In all seriousness, I actually realise that someone, somehow, forgot to put the decimal point there not once, but twice ;)

If not, as the Carlsberg misquote goes, "Probably the most expensive sub roll out there"

"It never rains but it pours"...

Fate has a funny sense of humour at times.

I was a third the way through my shift last night, having done one round, chomped my lunch, and done another round, when I got to the bus stand at the south London end of one of the two night bus routes we do. As usual, I did a quick walk inside the bus, in case there was someone who'd fallen asleep, and yup, two sleepers. one, a friendly young lady who woke up promptly on my yell of "wakey wakey, end of the route!", went downstairs immediately.

The other didn't respond at all.

He was alive, I knew that, his chest was rising and falling as he breathed. The snoring was a bit of a give-away too, truth be told, but would the pilly sillock wake up, or even show signs of being awake? Nope. OK, time for a code red and the boys in blue, then.

This at around quarter to four in the morning, of course.

In between getting from sleeping ugliness upstairs, to the radio, I found the young lady to be still on the bus. "I missed my stop" she said, stating the rather obvious, and gave a point roughly half-way along the route that she wanted. "I've got a pass-" she showed me a printed travelcard, still valid - "and really wanna go home. When are you going to go back?"

I apologised for what I was about to tell her, and pointed out the problem of the sleeping lad upstairs, and what I had to do (call the Old Bill), and she muttered "that bloody-" something I didn't catch, probably just as well, lol, and settled down in a resigned kind of way. You can please some of the folks some of the time, etcetera... I got on the radio to Centrecomm, and let the know what was occurring. They said they're send the boys in blue immediately for me.

Cut to half an hour late, still no sign of the Met., and my following bus has arrived. Amber, who was now mildly awake and chatting to stay awake, asked if she could get the other bus when it left, if we were still waiting for the Police. No problem there, I made sure the other driver was aware, and she got on that bus when it left, and away she went, to get home, have a half hour of sleep, and get up again for her flight back to Australia. Hope you had a good one, Amber, and say "Hi" to Melbourne for me :)

Anyway, the buzz-saw upstairs was still on board, and I called Centrecomm again, asking for an update. They told me that I'd beaten them to the call, was the guy still on board, as the Met wanted to know, in case they didn't have to turn up. Nothing they like less than a sleeper on a bus. Wastes their time when they could be dealing with more serious stuff. Personally, I couldn't agree more, but if I shove the fool to wake him up, it's assault. If they shove him to wake him up, it's justified. Go figure. Yep, I told them, still on board.

Another half hour later the Met finally arrived, looking mightily heaved off. Bless. Two yells a shove and a bellow later they got him standing up. Definitely reluctant to move from his nice comfy (Comfy? a bus seat by the stairs with no neck support? Strewth!) place, he was given more encouragement by the Met: Two more yells and a bellow of "Don't try to have a fight with us, you'll lose" and they got him off and walking away from the bus. Sorted! I started the bus up, preparing to get way from the buzz-saw.

Or rather, I tried.

Kerchunk. The starter failed to engage, and all the lights on the dashboard went out.

Oh, bugger. Flat battery. Oops.

The radio was knackered now there was no power, so I used my phone and called the iBus desk (company Radio Controller), and gave him the news.

He was less than pleased, of course. I'd already lost a half round to the buzz-saw, and now it looked like the entire round was gonna be lost. He was NOT a happy teddy bear, in any shape or form. Neither was the engineer tasked with coming all the way out to the stand to give the bus a booster start. Tough. Not like I could push start the damn thing, was it? And yeah, I lost pretty much the entire round. Oh well. Sods law had hit with all the fury of a drunken squirrel, and that was that.

When I finally called Centrecomm to give then the clearance call, what did the bloke up there say?

Yup. You guessed it:

"Never rains bus it pours, does it?"

Bloody tell me about it!

Hmm... tube strike. Glad I'm off!

Once again, the Tube is pretty much flat on its' back, thanks to a strike over pay etc.

Having seen the news, listened to the traffic jam reports as well, is that I'm damned glad I'm on two rostered nights off right now. I go back to driving my bus on Thursday night shift, unfortunately smack dab into the end of the strike, but at least I won't have to contend with much in the way of extended traffic jams in central London.

I pity my bus driver colleagues from all the bus operating companies in this traffic, I really do. They're likely as not getting the thick end of tempers from irate (and late) passengers who only want to get home.

I also feel for the passengers, in a way, too, but only because they're stuck squarely between and rock and a hard place, smack dab in the middle of the situation.

Now, I'm a Pro-Union man at the end of the day, even if I'm a member of a different one (the T&GWU), and if my Union calls me out on strike, that's where I go: "United We Stand, Divided We Fall", being the operative working phrase. Unions are there, first and foremost, to protect a workers' Rights. They also provide other material benefits, by group negotiations on pay and conditions, discounts with such places as insurance companies, finance houses, and so on. It's a widespread network of support that a Union provides its' members, and rightly so. But the weapons at our disposal against employers who want to hold us down with unfair situations, be those pay, conditions, or whatever, are a graduated series of measures, from press campaigns, to working to rule, to the ultimate weapon of strike action, where we withhold our services to an employer in protest at their actions or inactions in regard to the problem at hand.

This is the place the Tube Driving RMT membership finds itself at. And before you say "but the union'll give them strike pay!" Well, yes, they will. A few quid per day. Not even close to a proper working days pay for driving a tube train. In some ways, driving those things must be miles more stressful than driving a bus - I know for a fact that the medical they have to pass to drive a tube train is somewhat tougher than the medical I had to pass to drive a bus.

But the non-Union general public appear to know little about the workings of the movement. The News organisations never seem to concentrate on this support mechanism: They only look for the sensationalist headlines. A phrase I've heard time and again is that the News Hounds never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Well, maybe that's true, maybe it's not: I'm not a newsman. I do know that I cannot recall ever having seen any of the good and often charitable work that unions undertake on behalf of their members and others. It's a crying shame, that.

Another thing that a shedload of folks who've never been in a union don't appear to realise is, when you are a member of a union, one of the things you agree to do is fully and completely support whatever action the majority of the voting membership decide upon. It's called democracy. If they decide no strike, then no strike. If they decide on a course of industrial action, whether it be a work to rule or a strike, then that's what you ALL do. No ifs, buts, or maybes. Solidarity of action is the key to a Unions' strength, after all.

It's why the Conservatives tried to kill off the unions powers after the Miners Strike.

They damn near succeeded too, and that WOULD, make no mistake, have been a bloody disaster for all working people across the country.

Frankly, in this Tube Strike, like all other forms of industrial action in the past, and most likely the future as well, there're no winners, and plenty of losers, in this one. Classic no-win situation, I think.

Let's hope it all gets resolved in double quick time.

None so blind - or nasty.

OK, this happened in the middle of my shift last night, right after my lunch break, while I was in central London.

One of the bus stops is hooded, that is, not in service. An in service stop looks similar to the example on the left. Out of service, the example on the right.

One young man was waiting at the bus stop, under the shelter (it was raining), and wanted to get on the bus. No problem you might think. Wrong.

The bus stop was hooded, and out of use. Why? it was smack dab in the middle of where the central reservation was being dug up, and there was only one carriage way available. So, London Buses staff (called Network Traffic Controllers or NTCs) had placed what is called a "Dolly Stop" (a temporary bus stop) not twenty metres before the regular stop, for the convenience of waiting passengers, and hooded the original stop. The NTC responsible for the hooding had also, for the convenience of those who never look up at bus stop flags, plastered massive yellow "Bus stop not in use" stickers on the timetable spaces as well.

So. I'd served the dolly stop, closed the doors, and moved off, and chummy decided to stick his arm out. No way can I stop, it'd block the traffic and the box junction behind he to boot, so I carry on, much to his displeasure. So much so, in fact, that he kicked the door, and the side of the bus. Of course he got caught on camera doing this - both on the bus-borne system, and the Westminster CCTV system that ALWAYS seems to be looking at that bus stop (there have been other problems at that stop, hence the CCTV coverage). Not that this occurred to him, of course, and not that it helped me any at the time, really.

Well, I'm not about to stop for some half-wit unobservant and probably unemployed wotsit who boots buses, so I thought stuff him and his boots, and carried on to the next set of traffic lights.

Blow me down if chummy doesn't spring past on foot and leg it to the next stop.

Here we go, thinks I.

Yup. Next stop, guess who's there, red of face, steam of ear, attitude of face, etc.

He promptly storms on and yells at me all manner of rubbish about me "not serving the stop". I pointed out politely what the yellow hood was all about, and where the dolly stop was sited, and that that I had, in fact, served the dolly stop.

Shouldn't've bothered. Out came the insults on my being a "****ing ***** with no prospects so got on the buses and can't even do that right" and then the normally obligatory death threats from him. "I'm gonna **** you up and **** you dead you ****" etc. Charming. Pity there's no audio on the on-bus CCTV, it'd make for excellent police evidence. ho hum.

Anyhow, I'd had more than enough at this point, so called code red, requested immediate Police help, and described what was going on. And noticed, probably like tofu for brains, the cop van not fifty yards down the road, because he then shot off the bus and up the road at near supersonic speed in the opposite direction. job done, he's gone, so I cancel the Police, thank Centrecomm, and get going.

Thing is, this kind of thing happens every day to London Bus Drivers. It shouldn't happen, but it does - for no other reason than the fool delivering the abuse (etc) not actually using his bloody eyes to see what the cause of the problem is, rather than jumping to the wrong conclusion and going on a very nasty rant.

How many of the buggers that threaten us, abuse us, and generally need a lobotomy with a rusty spoon, actually get nicked for the crap we get given by them? Precious few, sad to say.

I suppose that I should point out that this is the sort of thing that we London Bus drivers each see/experience maybe one or twice a year; we'd rather never see it at all, of course. Never the less, let's hope things change for the better before one of those over-ego-equipped anger-management-deficient idiots actually carries out their insane threats, and murders a bus driver who's doing his job properly.

***

And I STILL didn't match five numbers and two stars on the bloody Euro Lottery last night, so it's back to work again tonight, dammit (mutter mutter etc).