{"id":1019,"date":"2004-10-01T23:53:14","date_gmt":"2004-10-01T17:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk:\/blog\/?p=1019"},"modified":"2004-10-01T23:53:14","modified_gmt":"2004-10-01T17:53:14","slug":"friday-1st-october-2004","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/friday-1st-october-2004\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday 1st October 2004"},"content":{"rendered":"Friday 1st October 2004<\/p>

When you place the most important decisions of your working day into others, you are their mercy. When these decisions can make or very much break your day, you at odds. I think, we all as human beings hate being out of the loop, hate more not being in control. I will be the first to admit that I am a control freak. Many of my friends have commented in the past, that I am likely to die from a heart attack, after all the stress I place upon myself to stay in control. During my placement, the journey to work, the responsibility of getting there on time, rested with me. Of course, road works, accidents and general mayhem on the roads affected my journey. However, as I was driving, I was in control. I was in the driving seat (quite literally!) Now, working in London, I find myself at the command of Arrival<\/a> buses and Chiltern Railways<\/a>. I have little to complain about this week. I caught he bus, which was on time each morning and apart from one time at the train station, I caught the 6.39 to London Marylebone. With my journey to and from work, going so smoothly, there must be nothing that can get in my way. I wish this was the case, but frustration and disappointment are the words to describe my progress. The work load, is becoming more manageable by the day, but will everything be done and dusted by the end of the month. I was confident, of this being so at the beginning of the week, but right now, I am not too sure. We shall see.<\/p>

All this talk of decisions being out of hands would make you think I am trying to shed myself from all reasonability. This is not the case, for Tuesday evening turned out to be a mistake. A colleague at work, takes the Central Line<\/a> home, gave me an idea. Would it be possible to take the red tube line, across the city and then catch the Chiltern Railways<\/a> turbo back to Wycombe. On Tuesday, I decided to test the water with this journey, knowing full well that this would take longer than my usual route. I did not mind, as I had the company of my colleague for the forty minute trip. As he alighted at Northolt<\/a>, I waited for the next station, to hopefully catch my train home. I was completely lost, not knowing what time the next train would be and whether it would stop at South Ruislip<\/a>. To add to the frustration, a vehicle had a hit a bridge on the line between Marylebone and Wycombe, with a knock on affect of delaying or canceling many services. I got to the platform seconds after 7pm, to watch a train depart into the dark Autumn night. At first, I was angry at having missed the service by a few seconds but then realised that I had no idea if it was heading for home or not. There were a handful of other commuters also waiting for trains heading in the vicinity of Wycombe. South Ruislip, is like a growing number of stations, completely unmanned. The public address service is connected via modem to some call centre, so they dial in to give any announcements. (You can clearly hear the touchtone phone over the tannoy before the announcer speaks.) The next service was at 19:36, which meant a good wait. So I headed out of the station and to the nearest newsagent to grab some chocolate. I was low on energy and needed a quick pick me up. On my return to the platform, a group of passengers were in bitter discussion regarding the lack of information from the rail company. I am not sure if this is a feature at all unmanned stations, but there is a novelty assistance system. You press a button and once again, a creaky modem kicks in to dial a call centre and you are connected to an operator. They can then relay back to you real time travel information and the ETA of the next train. After waiting for the advertised train, as shown on the platform screen, I was disappointed to note it vanish from display within a few minutes of the expected time of arrival being reached. I assume it was cancelled. A fellow commuter was at his limit and used the phone device to find out what exactly was going on. During all this time, train after train had been flying past the station, heading north to Birmingham and beyond. We were informed the next train would be with us, within the next ten minutes and would be calling at all the stations we had asked for. I knew this service would be packed and prepared to stand for the remainder of my journey. The only comforting thought was the fact that this was only a twenty minute journey and my sister would be at the station to pick me up and take me home. So much for taking the ‘easier route’. I was trying to be clever and lazy. Rather than changing on the Underground, as I do at the moment, I was hoping to find the perfect journey to work. I have discovered that there will never be the perfect journey to work. Well not for me anyway, this is something the Gods have bestowed upon the ‘Beautiful Ones’.<\/p>

There has been a disappointing response to my request for recommendations. Nobody offered to suggest any computing literature and only my ex-house mate Nav, provided a comical look at a networking naming convention. It may not be extremely original but it does work and maybe the ‘Hobbit’ network will be put in place. For the time being, I have a long list of things to do, before this planned reinstall of Windows XP. I must admit, I am looking forward to it.<\/p>

So what have you got planned for the weekend?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday 1st October 2004 When you place the most important decisions of your working day into others, you are their mercy. When these decisions can make or very much break your day, you at odds. I think, we all as human beings hate being out of the loop, hate more not being in control. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.t-e-g.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}