How 3 minutes becomes 35 minutes on the Tube

Fooking broken down trains on the Dilly Line

I left my flat 3 minutes later than normal this morning and with a hideous saga of missing connections by minutes and a broken train, I ended up being 35 minutes late.

I'm not going into the full boring step by step acccount of my journey, but remember getting to Richmond where I face my usual Libran dilemma every morning. Tube all the way in? Or British Snail to Waterloo, then Bakerloo line to Piccadilly Circus? I ran down the stairs and got through the barrier to see the slow British Snail train just leaving - thought 'shit I have 10 seconds to catch a District Line' which was just about to go, according to the platform indicator display and typically I just missed that too.

Me and another woman had exactly the same thoughts and swore at the same time, except with our age differences I said "Fuck", she said "Poo" and we both rolled our eyes, knowing, we had a six or seven minute wait for the next District Line. The fuck and poo thing really reminded me of that thing going round the net right now - the Channel 4 ad with celebrities saying their favourite swear words - The Tube should do one, they must hear a huge amount of expletives every day.

When I got to Earl's Court on the Piccadilly Line, I realised that more swearing was on the way. We were all sitting in the carriage and nothing happened and I had the massive feeling of deja vu. Except there was a rather worrying alarm bell going on outside for a minute, then switching off, then switching on again. A few more antsy people than me looked out of the still open doors. After five minutes of this, even I was beginning to get antsy. Advanced mumbling over the tannoy by the driver was no help. By his third announcement, he decided to take the cotton wool out of his mouth and leave his Marlon Brando impressions to Alastair McGowan, and we learnt the train wasn't going anywhere due to something at somewhere else.

On the platform a clearer person had been employed to say that there was a defective train at South Ken and the Piccadilly Line was fooked between Kings Cross and Arnos Grove, so for the second day in a row, it was everybody out.

Fuck and poo again.

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Friday, March 19, 2004 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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