Sulkyblue - Miscellaneous

top banner - sulkyblue.co.uk - Miscellaneous

The Seventh Circle of Hell - Morning Commute on the Tube

The seventh circle of hell is home to the violent. While you may not consider yourself a violent person, by the time you've finally arrived at work following your morning commute you'll be wishing all kinds of violence on just about anyone that's crossed your path.

One of the first things you'll be confronted with is an announcement board informing you of the state of the network. This has 4 settings – 'good', 'minor delays', 'severe delays' and 'utterly knackered'. This gives you an opportunity to consider taking the Piccadilly via Reading to avoid the circle line or just going home and calling in sick. Consider this matter carefully.

Seasoned commuters are armed with their Oyster Cards allowing them to skip the pain of physically handing over a small fortune for the privilege of entering hell. It also means you don't have to queue with the tourists where you'll inevitably have to explain to one of them how travelcards work and that there's no such place as Glow-Kester Road. You just slap your card on the reader and it slams the barrier open and lets you through. Except when you're in a large crush of people at which point it displays the dreaded "seek assistance" error for no particular reason and you end up with half of London pinning you in place. The first of many times on your journey you end up chanting the "I'm sorry, excuse me, pardon me" mantra.

You make it through the barriers and head towards your platform, dodging people trying to work out whether they're going east or west on the Piccadilly line when they actually thought they were going South. As the platform swims into sight you are met with the unpleasant view of a sea of humanity and you know your day is going to take a dramatic plummet.

My morning commute starts with getting the District line east from Earls Court. This is the point where two branches of the district line converge and two branches diverge again occasionally performing some magic crossing over in the middle. To further confuse matters the trains also have the option to lose enthusiasm for the journey half way there and terminate at Tower Hill rather than face the terror of having to go all the way out into Essex.

This confusing system allows the platform announcers and signalmen to have all manner of fun. The most popular game is to have both trains on platforms 1 and 2 going to the same destination. Not only does this piss off all the people trying to use the other branch, but it also leads to a game of chance involving which train goes out first. Contrary to common sense, there's no guarantee that the first one in will be the first to leave. The platform announcer will mumble out which train is going first and there'll be a flow of people rushing to get out first, accompanied by a secondary flow of people trying to get a seat on the now nearly empty second train. Occasionally just for the fun of it, the announcer will then change their mind and all the passengers will engage in a round of musical chairs. Or even better, the first train out will leave the platform, move 20foot, and stop in the tunnel while the second train overtakes it.

Of course even once you've decided which train you want to get on, there's no guarantee there will actually be space for you. The fickleness of the commuters and trains means that the platform can be empty one moment and 6 people deep the next. As the train pulls into the station a Mexican wave of sighs flows down the platform as people see that the incoming train is already packed. Now comes a delicate moment; you need to move away from the doors to allow people off, but at the same time you don’t want to give up your lucrative spot at the front of the pack. It's like penguins shuffling round to keep warm; you don’t want to be the sap at the back freezing their tail off.

With a fair amount of "excuse me, sorry about your toe" mutterings you squash onto the train, badgering people to move further down while you try to avoid giving up occupancy of the lucrative spot leaning against a partition. The aim here is to avoid the high-risk places where you can't reach a pole and are either relying on being wedged in place between the other commuters or are using one of those dangling spring contraptions which is a) only just within reach leading to pins and needles and b) not actually stationary and therefore no use at all.

As the bleeping noise alerts you to the fact that you’re about to depart even more people try and squash on, running at the door and hoping to use their momentum to magically create space. This trick is repeated at each station; one person struggles to get off ("excuse me, coming through, please drop dead") and six people try to get on to replace them. You gradually occupy a smaller and smaller space squished between umbrellas, bags and people trying to read tablecloth-sized newspapers.

Eventually you get to your destination, probably just as you get a seat. I get off at Blackfriars, a popular station for city workers, which unfortunately cannot cope with the number of people getting off trains at 9.20 in the morning. All dressed in black you look more like penguins than ever as you do the 'commuter waddle' shuffling up the stairs over a carpet of discarded Metros. You finally get to the barrier just as it slams front on the bloke in front of you and informs him to seek assistance. You try to back up to let him escape while he mutters "excuse me, very sorry, I just want to die".

And as a reward for surviving this hell? You get to spend the day at work and then repeat the entire process in reverse again!