22 November - Whinge & Bear It

A word I overuse, in my head at least, is “nightmare”. It runs as a refrain when I try to get on a train, when I stand on a train (and being small I’m wedged under people’s armpits and even now that smoking is banned indoors, people’s clothes stink of… I don’t know, bars, fried food, no regular dry-leaning, I don’t know. I say it when I step off a train at a tube station and see the throng trying to make it up the escalators, both standing and walking, no way to get past them. ‘Nightmare’ I say, ‘nightmare’ I repeat.

Well it’s not of course, the correct term is just ‘very frustrating’, not even ‘extremely frustrating’, all it’s doing is making me late for work. Big deal. Yes, I have a job, yes I have to struggle with public transport.
I’ve decided it’s a false sense of activity to a) wait and struggle (I hate teenagers and kids more than anything) to get on a bus that takes me to a faster tube line rather than b) sit on the rickety and spluttering slower line where trains get cancelled all the time because doing a) gives me double dose of frustration and leads to more ‘nightmares’.

The reason why we get paid more as we get older and should get paid much, much more in fact, is not because we’ve accumulated more knowledge and experience that allows us to maximise profits for our firms, do our jobs better and be all around assets. No it’s simply a payment for the longer suffering we endure, years of it in fact, in order to get to said jobs. I don’t mean that I’d prefer working from home, that carries a different set of negatives, but I just want this stupid travesty of a leading western city to get its act together when it comes to transport. In New Delhi I expect to have a stressful journey, in London I do not.