I walk through Waterloo Station nearly every weekday. In the 3-4 minutes I’m in the concourse, the announcer never shuts up, running through all the departures in an endless repetitive loop. Obviously, at some point, there was one massive recording session to get everything taped (digitised, recorded..) Do you think they have to go and find the guy again everytime a new train journey is added? But most important – do you think he gets residuals for everytime the recording is used???
The other thing that struck me was the status board at the entrance to the Jubilee line. It lists all the tube lines and has a number of sticky signs that can be added to the board to give the travel status of each line – saves the staff writing things out. Occasionally, everything is running OK on every single line, but they do not have enough signs to tell us this. The staff either have to space out the little signs evenly across the board or write the additonal ‘good service’ reports on their. So why is this important? It’s telling me that this is an organisation that expects to fail, when its staff will not produce enough status markers to say everything is OK.
I have noticed that as well. London Underground definitely has a mentality that “today, shit will happen” and most likely there will be a signal failure on Hammersmith and some dude will fall on the tracks. aaaaaah.
I worry that I think that when they announce that “all lines are running normally” this means that there is a problem. Normality is relative. 😛