Wasted wasted day. Had a job interview this morning in Turnpike Lane, an area of London ungraced beforehand by my footsteps.
After a long long tube journey (I’m supposed to do this every day if I get the job?) I get to the tube station. I find to my horror that I am now in Zone 3, without a passport. I hope that the barriers will be wide open, I’d already spent £5.30 on a travel card.
The barriers were shut and I was sent to a window. I queued on my own but no one was there. The interview was due to start at any minute. My phone rang, it was the agency, just checking to make sure I was there. I told them I nearly was, this seemed to be sufficient.
Eventually I was allowed to pay another pound for the privilege of leaving the station. The instructions I’d been given were to come out, turn right and go over the railway.
There was no railway.
I refered to my A-Z, the road I was after (Hampden Road) was round the corner. Lovely.
I get to the street to find it completely residential. No offices at all, I go up to the end, nothing.
Thinking it a good idea to ring the agency I get out my phone, but like an idiot I hadn’t written the number down, and he had called me from a private number (the only way that Tina Turner gets her money these days, except that as soon as I finished typing that I remembered it was private dancer, not number, but I can’t be arsed to delete it. Pretend it’s funny, go on, laugh).
Eventually I give up and go home.
I am in a bad mood, this was lifted considerably by a new feature I will be running called “Idiots on the London Underground”. Back on the Piccadilly line (another pound to pay) I found that the train was at the platform but with doors closed, either just arrived or about to depart (that’s for you non London people who have never seen a train). But it stayed there for a long time. I walked up the platform to see that a man had his foot in the door of the tube, his wife inside him outside.
Normally the doors will re open, but the driver must have been in a bad mood, leaving the man half trapped. Morbidly I hope the train would pull away.
Someone was trying to help him, he was quite sure he was stuck, but I wondered to myself whether he was just so giddily in love with his wife that he couldn’t bear to leave her for a few short minutes, or maybe he’d taken her hostage and didn’t want to lose her.
He seemed quite reluctant to accept the help, maybe he was a terrorist, trying to kick the tube to death.
Eventually he got his foot out, the door closed and the tube departed.
And he never saw his wife again.
Hopefully