The Death of Common Sense
Earlier this week I was returning to Copeland on the train having been working in London. Unfortunately the West Coast Main Line trains were disrupted by a suicide on the line near Lancaster, causing both myself and a number of other people to miss their final connections home.
The railway organised hire cars or taxis for the people who were stranded through no fault of their own due to missed connections.
The driver who took me back to Whitehaven was polite, efficient, and in terms of the rules as they exist today, helpful. Nothing that I am about to write is meant as a criticism of him. However, I do think that the way people are expected to operate today is sometimes a great deal less sensible than the way the world used to work ten or twenty years ago.
As the delay to the West Coast main line had caused me to miss the last train from Carlisle to Whitehaven, a car was booked to take me to Whitehaven station. This is a journey of about 40 miles, which means that the driver's round trip that evening was about 80 miles. I was the only passenger in the car.
My home is about a mile from the station. As we approached Whitehaven, I asked if there was any way to arrange matters so that the driver could drop me at home instead of at the station. The minor modification this would have required to the last part of the route might have increased the total distance travelled by a few hundred yards: I would have been happy to pay for this.
However, the driver said that his contract required him to go from station to station. Knowing how paranoid large organisations are these days about the letter of the rules, I didn't press the point. So he drove an 80 mile round trip, to drop me, shortly before midnight, about a mile from where I actually wanted to go.
As I say, I am not criticising the driver. These days nobody dares use their initiative or common sense. But remembering how drivers used to operate up to about ten years ago, I'm prepared to bet that if this had happened back before that time, the driver would have asked me without prompting whereabout in Whitehaven I wanted to be dropped and done so without a second thought, provided the passenger didn't take the mickey.
I hope that I will live to see the pendulum swing back to the point where we can use a bit more gumption to do what makes sense.
The railway organised hire cars or taxis for the people who were stranded through no fault of their own due to missed connections.
The driver who took me back to Whitehaven was polite, efficient, and in terms of the rules as they exist today, helpful. Nothing that I am about to write is meant as a criticism of him. However, I do think that the way people are expected to operate today is sometimes a great deal less sensible than the way the world used to work ten or twenty years ago.
As the delay to the West Coast main line had caused me to miss the last train from Carlisle to Whitehaven, a car was booked to take me to Whitehaven station. This is a journey of about 40 miles, which means that the driver's round trip that evening was about 80 miles. I was the only passenger in the car.
My home is about a mile from the station. As we approached Whitehaven, I asked if there was any way to arrange matters so that the driver could drop me at home instead of at the station. The minor modification this would have required to the last part of the route might have increased the total distance travelled by a few hundred yards: I would have been happy to pay for this.
However, the driver said that his contract required him to go from station to station. Knowing how paranoid large organisations are these days about the letter of the rules, I didn't press the point. So he drove an 80 mile round trip, to drop me, shortly before midnight, about a mile from where I actually wanted to go.
As I say, I am not criticising the driver. These days nobody dares use their initiative or common sense. But remembering how drivers used to operate up to about ten years ago, I'm prepared to bet that if this had happened back before that time, the driver would have asked me without prompting whereabout in Whitehaven I wanted to be dropped and done so without a second thought, provided the passenger didn't take the mickey.
I hope that I will live to see the pendulum swing back to the point where we can use a bit more gumption to do what makes sense.
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