OBITUARY: R.I.P., Chunky. You're going to be missed.

German shepherds are prone to suffer from Hip Dysplasia to one degree or another; a lucky few seem to suffer no ill effects. Sadly, Chunky was not one of those, and she'd soldiered on for some time with an ever-increasingly severe form of the condition. Sadly, it became too much for her, and today, she was assisted to a better place, and passed away peacefully in the arms of my other half.

I'd known Chunky for something like six and a half-odd years. A German Shepherd of advanced years even then, in my other half's pub, she was friendly to all (well, most: She was a pretty good judge of character), and a complete space cadet. It didn't take me long to give her an affectionate nick-name. I called her 'Chunky', because she was a few chunks short a tin of Winalot. And that summed her up perfectly: She was wonderfully bonkers, even in her twilight years.

Like most people who knew her, I'm going to miss that furry lunatic; I'll miss her in more ways than I suspect I know, to be honest. She was a member of my other half's family, and from day one, she always made me feel welcome. Despite the annoyance, I'll miss her head-butting me in the nether regions for attention and a skritch between the ears (Dog lovers know what a skritch is, but for you other folks, it's a cross between a rub and a scratch, containing elements of both). Actually, I think it was more amusement and shock that she caught me there again and again and again without fail. I'll miss her shedding all over my clothes. I'll miss her wandering over and standing on my foot to tell me to stay put and pay her some attention. I'll miss her wandering over when I'm eating, and giving me that look. I'll miss her hopping onto the bed and lying over my legs (correction. Whumping down on my legs. OOF!) to prevent me from getting out of bed, before I paid her some attention. I'll even miss that apparently sixteen foot long tongue of hers, rasping over my mug to wake me up (and the associated doggy breath. GAGH!). And here I am tearing up again :( Gone through a lot of kitchen roll in the last while, for some reason :-(

She was not my dog, and yet she belonged to a lot of people. She had that kind of a character to her.


Chunky is survived by a (somewhat confused) sister ('Achtung') who doesn't quite understand what's happened, and a loving family and friends.

Good-bye, Chunky.

You're in a better place now, and we're all diminished by your absence.

Wow, "time flies like a banana", so the saying goes...

Well... it's been a hell of a while since I updated this blog, so in keeping with the general theme of it, I suppose it's about time for another rant!

Route planners.

Uh-huh, I hear you mutter, as you sagely nod your head, hopefully in sympathy, not in amusement...!

OK, we all use route planners of one form or another. Either by asking someone how you get from where you are, to where you want to be (White Van man: "OI! MATE! Where's the 'Nag's Head'?!" Passer-by with a dry sense of humour: "Um... on top of her neck?"), or by looking at a map (Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was upside down. It was also in bloody Flemish! Stop gloating!), or by using a SatNav system ("Whaddya mean, drive up that bleedin' Goat Track?!"). Some of us even use the internet, to get a rough idea what the route might look like, before we set off, or to guestimate how long a drive might take (thus stifling the back-seat-complainers and their "Are we theeeeeeere yet?" bleating)... but it all comes down to knowing whre you are, and where you want to be.

So, here I am, trying to use the best of the online journey planners, helpfully supplied by the Department for Transport, at http://www.transportdirect.info/... and the bloody thing's broken. You can get to the route planner page, but then it comes to a grinding halt, as if someone forgot to fill the fuel tank on the web server that's running the show there. It's infuriating, because I've yet to find another that's so comprehensively effective at getting the routing right, the fuel costs near as dammit spot on, and the timings bang on correct. The others, yeah, they might get the routing right, but they cannot, or will not, give you options like allowing you to specify maximum speeds to use (e.g., 50 mph for engine/fuel efficiency), or MPG costs, and whatnot. Transport Direct does.

Or at least did Transport Direct, until today.

Now, I fully understand that a government-run departments services tend to slow down a bit at the weekend, what with a lack of staffing, but when the complaint system is held apparently on the same server that's gone tits up, it's a tad bloody difficult to get the attention of the webmaster to fix the gruddam* thing.

None of the other planners that I can find, of course, now meet my requirements. they can only supply routing, not the bells and whistles that I desire.

Not even the Satnav stuff (I HATE the invented word 'App'. It's like a little burp. And they are NOT sodding 'Applications'. They're ****ing software packages!!!) I use on my android phone, either the Google Maps Navigator (comes as standard now), or the NavFree (get this - it's FREE!) package that I use that when there's little or no 3G/3.5G Vodafone service (which is happening more and more. It's like a reverse service plan, they seem to be shutting down mobile phone towers, not setting up more. As a result, they are NOT getting my business again next year. I'll be going 3 instead: They've yet to let me down), can do what the Transport Direct route planner does.

So. the good news: I know where I am. I Know where I want to go. I *DO* know where my towel is (I'm a Hoopy Frood**, guys!)...

Bad news: I haven't a sodding clue how long the drive is going to take. I drive a Series 3 Land Rover these days, it's rather slower than modern cars, and as a result, I also don't know how much fuel I'm likely to use.

So, all in all, I'm bleedin' well pissed off with Transport Direct.

How DARE they fall over when I wanna use the system?!

How DARE they become so indispensable that I have nowhere else to turn to, in order to get the precise information that I want?

Ahem. yep, I'm so ticked off with them I wanna stamp my feet and have a screaming tantrum like a little girl, which should suit the Pro-Nanny State folks a bit, I suppose... They see to enjoy such dramas, from what I've seen...!

Seriously, though, when the heck did the government decide that it was going to make available such a useful and actually well-thought-out tool as the Transport Direct website? It's bloody outrageous - the government is supposed to be as completely useless as a fart in a hurricane, and shouldn't be able to produce anything that actually *is* useful or effective!

Also, why the hell did no-one else think to match, or even better, this service?

More to the point... when the hell are they going to fix it so it works again?!

Anyone?





* Gruddam. Contrived and fictional curse word used in the Judge Dredd comic owned and published by Rebellion Developments.

** Hoopy Frood: A fictional term to describe someone alert and aware who is a force to be reckoned with. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of books by Douglas Adams, towels are described as "about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have," an example usage being to ward off the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The fictitious time/space traveller and Guide Researcher Ford Prefect uses the idiom "a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is" to mean someone generally alert and aware. Some of Adams's fans seized on this idea and now use towels as a sign of devotion to the Hitchhiker books, radio series, TV series, website, etc. Towel Day is held each year in memory of Adams. ((C) Wikipedia)

It was the worst atrocity that London had seen since the Blitz...

...But it wasn't caused by a foreign power in a declared war, with the Geneva Conventions governing its conduct.

It was committed by four insanely misguided followers of the Islamic Faith, who had corrupted it's tenets and intent, who had then set out to murder innocent people.

7/7

To misquote Roosevelt, "The 7th of July 2005 is a day that will live in infamy".

They did not care who they targeted. They claimed that they were Islamic Soldiers acting in response to worldwide attacks on their religion, but they did not target the politicians who they must have held responsible; instead, they strapped on backpack bombs containing powerful home-made explosives, and targeted innocent every-day members of the public. Workers and tourists, women and children. NON-COMBATANTS, in other words. In a properly declared war that's a war crime, by the way.

Some terrorist groups attempted to claim responsibility. Seven years on, there are still no grounds to reasonably confirm these claims, other than their intent to jump on the bandwagon.

Let us be clear: I am not a Muslim, but I believe in God. I was raised a Christian, but I am far from being a perfect one. I say now: The Islamic Faith is NOT responsible for this outrage. Four bloody madmen were.

Remember the victims. There's a memorial in Hyde Park, should you ever be near there.

And do NOT, EVER, allow any religion to be perverted into messages of hate and fear, ever again.

There's a full history and timeline of the events of that harrowing and horrendous day on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

ITN News: Fail, do not pass "Go", do not collect your bonus...

Independent Television News (ITN) really stuffed up their reporting of the bus strike, and reasons for it, this evening. It was really atrocious. You could almost have been forgiven for thinking that they were in the pay of the employers, the way they misreported the background and situation.

So, here it is again, for the hard of hearing (ITN, are you reading this?), in bullet-point format...

Please also read the previous Blant entry below, for the background and reasons for our asking for this £500 bonus.

• For close to ten months, we've been asking the employers to come to the negotiating table. It took Boris ordering them there, to get them there. Even then, they did not even attempt to negotiate, either in good faith or bad. They attempted to dictate terms to us instead. How would YOU feel if your employer did that to you? "Peeved" is probably putting it mildly, I suspect.
• We asked the employers to come to ACAS. Not the other way round. We've never done that before: This was a measure of how seriously we are taking this mess of the companies' creation.
• Our union representatives at the conciliation service ACAS tried to agree an agenda for discussion, but the employers failed to budge on any single item. That's not negotiation on the part of the employers, that's dictation.
• £30 million was not offered up at all at ACAS. The employers only offered the monies Boris freed up, this being the £8.3m or so from the Olympic Delivery Authority. They point blank refused to add any more to the pot (another six million or so would have made up the difference). The ODA monies would have resulted in a £350 payment, not the £500 we asked for.
• Further, the employers wanted us to accept a per-hour rate, not the flat rate award that all other passenger transport workers in London are to be receiving. This would have left the majority of bus workers with less than even the £350 that the Mayor for London, Boris Johnson, offered up.
• Boris has stated that "Hard Core Union Activists" wanted a strike. NOT so. The membership as a whole didn't want the strike, but we were left with no choice in the matter. A strike could not happen were it not for the vote that approved such action. This is required by law, before we can down tools. Again, ITN misreported the situation., painting a picture that we wanted a strike. Nothing could have been further from the truth: We were pushed into a corner, and we came out fighting, just as anyone else would.
• In what we believe to be a highly questionable decision, three companies, London General, Arriva The Shires, and Metroline, were then granted an injunction at the High Court last night. Their staff were required to work as a result. This injunction is shortly to be challenged by Unite.
• Several depots from other companies, using non-union drivers and managers, and a small handful of union members who disgracefully crossed picket lines to report to work, also ran buses on TfL routes. They were heavily over-boarded by passengers in many cases.

Regrettably, as just mentioned, at a handful of garages, some union members crossed picket lines. I'm not at all happy about that, as you can imagine: They let the rest of us down. In the old days of Closed Shops, they could have been expelled from a union for this offence under the rules; these days, with Closed Shops being outlawed by anti-union legislation over the years, and with membership of a Trade Union being considered by many to be a Human Right, we most likely won't wind up expelling those who crossed the picket lines, but they certainly didn't gain any friends by their disgracefully selfish and disloyal actions.

In summary then, the reporting by ITN was inaccurate, hurtful, plain wrong in many places, and shameful, and I for one won't trust a bloody thing ITN say from now on. By contrast, the BBC London News got everything spot on, and may I pass my thanks on to the BBC and in particular to their reporter, Mr Tom Edwards, for their timely, accurate, unbiased reporting: He's a credit to his profession, and kudos to the Beeb for doing it right.

I know that some of you are rather peeved at us...

...and for this, I apologise. We had nowhere else to go than a strike. Despite all the jokes and smiles about "YEAH! Stick it to the man" etcetera, we really and truly didn't want it. For a start, many of us will be loosing a days pay that we really and truly cannot afford to lose. But we had no other choice left to us.

We've been asking the companies for months to get around the table and talk this through. It took the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to get the Olympic Delivery Authority to free up some cash (not enough, sadly), and practically order the companies to get around tables at ACAS.

Even then, they wouldn't or couldn't agree a framework for the discussions, and the talks failed. So, the strike is on, and the monies conditionally promised (that they'd be disbursed if there wasn't a strike) by Mr Johnson are now most likely withdrawn, so we're back to square one. Again.

And yet, despite the companies saying that they're brassic, they somehow found the monies, in three cases, to hire expensive solicitors and barristers, and go to the High Court in London, and obtain an injunction preventing the Unite Union from allowing the strike to happen at these three companies - Arriva The Shires, Metroline, and London General. I call that blatant hypocracy of the highest order by the Companies concerned.

The union has commented publicly on the profits that these companies make; it's not unreasonable, given the bonuses that they pay their executives, to roll a little of this money to the staff in turn, surely?

And then there's the argument that only routes serving gaming sites of the Olympics will be affected. What utter rot and nonsense. Only a handful of the visitors attending the Games will be staying in hotels, guest houses, and B&Bs located in Central London or near the Gaming venues - there just isn't the capacity all that accommodation requirement in those areas.

So, they'll be all over the place within the M25 and surrounds. They'll invariably use buses to travel to the Gaming venues at some point in their trips to the Games, and so the usual numbers of passengers we serve will increase - TfL have themselves admitted that they expect an additional 800,000 trips to be made each day of the games, this over the usual six million or so workday trips that we service, making close to a 20 percent average increase in daily workday passenger numbers - this percentage increases when you think about weekend Olympic loadings, as compared to normal non-Games loadings.

Not many of these additional customers will speak or understand English, and many of them will not have a blessed clue as to how to get to where they're going. Having driven buses in Central London, I can hand on heart tell you that they'll treat the bus driver as an information point, thus causing more delays to the bus as the driver tries to assist them (where this is possible, language barriers not with standing). This in turn will undoubtedly cause stress and anger to regular passengers, and this in turn will be directed to the driver, causing him or her more stress in turn. It's a truly vicious circle, and I've seen similar situations all too often in the last close to ten years I've worked on the buses.

All of this, in addition to the increases in road traffic during the Games.

Yes, many people will actually heed the recommendation to leave their cars at home. But many won't. People are like that. Get over it. The point is, road traffic will increase, especially in the suburbs. People will drive in from the sticks to the suburbs, find a place to park (if not a proper car park, somewhere on a street, likely as not in the worst possible places), and thus road congestion will increase; as a result of these car trips, passenger loadings on these suburban routes will also increase, as these additional passengers make short or not-so-short trips to rail, tram, and tube stations - and other buses, of course. So the combination will really clog up the system and roads like you'll never have seen in living memory before.

And you think you're not going to be affected by all this? Really? Well, I'll allow that those who have the ability to get the hell out of Dodge will avoid all of the associated shenanigans, but the rest of us who live and work here won't have that luxury.

THIS is the very reason we've been asking the bus companies to rethink things, and sit down and talk to the union. They refused. They wouldn't even acknowledge the requests, in some cases. That's arrogance of a magnitude that I'd never even heard of before in industrial relations. Seriously, the rudeness and arrogance of it shocked the crap out of me.

Then, there were the bonus awards made to the other public transport systems here in London, the Tube, London Overground and other train operators, the DLR, and the Trams.

But not us poor saps on the buses, who have been given the shaft for so many years by successive governments and the companies alike.

This, then, was the straw that broke the camels' back.

So we were balloted by the union - twice - on this issue. Each vote was massively in favour of industrial actions leading up to and including strikes. We felt, and still do feel, this strongly on the matter.We had hoped that the Companies and TfL would heed the warnings supplied by the votes, and come to the table to talk like adults to our union representatives and negotiators.

They didn't. They stuck their fingers in their ears and started la-la-ing loudly instead, probably thinking that all these nasty unwashed bus drivers would bugger off, or something. Got a newsflash for you, guys. We didn't, and we're still here.

And this is the result of the Companies' arrogance. Strike action.

All we want is to be treated equally with our colleagues in other modes of passenger transport in London, whose employers have recognised that this will be a one-off occurrence, that demands the recognition that staff will face unprecedented stresses and strains during the Games. But sadly, it seems that this is not going to happen until the Companies and TfL get their collective heads on straight.

So, we're sorry it came to this. You, the travelling public, have been caught in the middle, and for this we are truly sorry. But we had no choice.

Normal service will resume on the buses tomorrow morning.

Bus strike: It's all about fair play and fair pay.

You'll have read in the news that London Bus Drivers who are members of the Unite union have voted overwhelmingly (at an average of well over 85%) for the first London-wide bus strike strike in over 30 - I think 50 has been mentioned here and there - years.

Well, it took the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, finally pulling some financial strings yesterday, and then telling the companies to pull their fingers out, but we've finally got the companies to sit around the table at ACAS today.

Negotiations are ongoing as I write this, and I have no idea what the outcome will be, but either way, we're finally making the companies sit up and take notice that we will NOT be treated like something you'd want to scrape of the sole of your shoe.

An excellent blog entry by adzmichael at "The ramblings of a 20 something" entitled 'In Support Of A Bus Strike', puts why we voted for the strike into excellent perspective, and I couldn't have done a better job - or even close to it - myself.

So, whether or not the strike goes ahead tomorrow, read his blog entry, and know WHY we voted for it in the first place.

Victor Meldrew, eat yer heart out!

I hardly ever work on my days off (we call them 'rest days' in the bus game). I need the break from work, not the pitiful extra money that comes with it (you never seem to get the full whack, the tax man always slices it in threes, and takes two of those bits, leaving you, if you're lucky, with two and a half pence to rub together, the slimy wotsit); occasionally however, I will do one. Mostly, I'll be doing a 'work/rest' as a favour to someone, or to repay a favour owed.

So, there I was yesterday, doing a very rare rest day, to replay a favour to one of the officers at the depot, who got me out of a slightly sticky spot the other week. "No worries", thought I, signing on that afternoon, "It's only a short job, two rounds, and bugger off home again. No trouble." You'd think, after close to 48 years on this mortal coil, that I'd have at least learned not to tempt sodding fate, wouldn't you?

Well, apparently I haven't. Dozy half-witted sorry excuse for... well, the list goes on if I want to berate myself, so I won't bore the crap out of you. Suffice to say the wall here in the study of Chez Moi is a tad dented right at the moment (where'd I put the polyfiller?!)...

Anyhow, being a Friday, and being how it was the extra bus for the school run, I figured that the first round would be the round from hell (which is why I went to permanent lates a few months back, to avoid the little shits), and the second, after my meal relief, would be a doddle.

...OK, the wall in here just got a bit more dented...

The first round went somewhat better than I'd expected. My leader (the 'Leader' is the bus in front; the bus behind is called the 'Follower'. Clever, eh?) caught pretty much every one of the little buggers, the poor sod. Yeah, OK, I was damn near laughing my backside off, as I was enjoying myself with a practically empty bus. It was utter bliss compared to what I'd been expecting!

My meal relief was relaxed; I decided I'd treat myself, and had fish & chips from the chippy across from the bus stand at the eastern end of the route, and very nice it was too.

Round Two (seconds away, ding ding), and I had a slow bus. OK, no real hassle, it was twenty minutes late into the stand, and I got a light run to the next bus station down the route, thus picking up some time, which I slowly lost down the route as the damn bus was so sodding slow when moving off from the halt. Again, this wasn't a real worry for me, as I'd be knocking off in a couple of hours. Or so I thought, anyhow...

The return leg of the round, I was cut short ("Curtailed"), and told to take my bus to the half-way point bus station, to 'sub' (Substitute, or swap) a 'soiled' bus back to the depot. Hmm. More overtime, thought I. Oh well. On getting to the bus station, I saw no soiled bus, so phoned control.

"It's on it's way and should be with you in a few minutes."

"Oh, OK, cool. What's wrong with it?"

"You'll laugh?"

"I will?"

"Some poor woman had a bit of a personal accident over one of the seats. It's a hell of a mess."

I won't go into the full disgusting details, but ladies, please, pack a spare for those times of the month, OK?

Anyhow, after the "Ewwwwwww YEUCH, that's just... foul!" reaction,  I shrugged, went "OK, fair enough, hope the aircon's working" and left it at that, pending his arrival.

Five minutes later, he arrived, and parked his bus behind mine, fully in the road-paint marked 'bus stop cage', and we swapped buses, his soiled one for mine. I dumped my bag in the cab, sat down, and wasn't even halfway done adjusting the seat position (I've got shorter legs than my colleague), when I heard the sudden and loud unmistakable sound of a vehicle collision, and felt a slight jolt. "What the..?!"

On looking out of the window, another bus was now level with me, and looking in the mirror, there was debris all over the road. The other driver was looking very sorry for himself. I did what most other drivers would do in the circumstances. "I don't belieeeeeeeve this!" (doing a VERY good impression of Victor Meldrew, I was later told by one highly amused bystander). I then got out of the bus, and yelled "What the hell've you done to me bus, you idiot?!"

It turns out that he'd tried to thread a 4-inch hawser through a sewing needle.

The bus stop was on a bend in the road, and while the cage was properly marked, it hadn't been updated to when they put the tram tracks in opposite the bus station. As a result, while cars could get through the gap between a bus servicing the stop on the corner of the road, and the separating kerb stones from the tramway, a larger vehicle could not.

Most PSV and LGV drivers would, of course, realise this on approaching that point, and it appears in most Hazard Awareness Notes on the routes that pass through this bus station. Not this guy, though. Either that, or he hadn't read the HAN. And this was the result.

He'd scraped the nearside of his bus, immediately to the aft of his exit doors, on the offside rear corner of my bus, and ripped off my rear offside lighting cluster, which includes the indicator, sidelights, reversing light, and fog light, all of which were now hanging on by their connecting cabling, the rest of the associated fibreglass bodywork now lying in bits alongside my bus in the roadway.

Then, to compound the problem, he'd carried on going, causing a rent in the bodywork on his bus aft of the doors, and scraping the bodywork down to the bare metal all the way aft to his engine compartment. His Depot Governor wasn't going to be too chuffed with him. Mine either, but at least I hadn't parked my bus, or even taken it over on the paperwork, and I was stationary with the service brake (that's the hand brake, to you!) applied when he hit my bus!

Anyhow, to cut a long story short, I contacted my controller to give him the happy news (he wasn't at all happy, strangely), and having calmed down a bit, talked to the other driver (on loan from another depot for the day, it seemed), and we exchanged details. Then the bus station controller, with the help of a network traffic controller (London Buses traffic supervisors, the guys in the red London Buses Incident Response Vans), both of whom who happened to be on-site at the time, helped me shift my now unserviceable bus off the road, and into a spare waiting bay at the side of the bus station, pending my engineers arriving.

In the wait for the engineers, I got chatting to a few other drivers, some from the firm that operated the bus that hit mine; they were all of the amused variety, of course. Goes with the territory: You have a bump, and everyone's a critic! It was all good-natured ribbing though, mostly of the "Enjoy the overtime, mate" kind - my normal response being "Bugger the overtime, there's things I wanted to do tonight, like have a drink or ten!" - and then, of course, there was the Metropolitan police carrier (a minibus, they call them 'carriers'), cruising though the bus station doing a regular evening safety patrol, the driver of which paused on seeing a group of bus drivers by a bent bus, looked at the damage, looked at me, and pulled a horrified face - my reaction?

A massive theatrical Gallic style shrug, and "IT WASN'T ME! HONEST, GUV!"

Cue all of us damn near wetting ourselves on the floor, coppers included!

Anyhow, the engineer eventually arrived, and we took the bus back to the depot (me driving the engineering van), whereupon the paperwork had to be done.

I eventually knocked off somewhere in the region of an hour and forty minutes later than intended, and never did get that drink, either, dammit!

At least the depot officer I was repaying the favour to had the grace to say sorry to me!