Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
The Irish Rail website says that there are
"No Current Travel Alerts."Why then, am I sitting on a Drogheda train which has inadvertently been commandeered at Balbriggan to go back into Dublin, cruelly ejecting the smattering of school children who were hoping to get to their school to the North? Commuters in Argentina recently set fire to a train in protest for the awful service. My instinct suggests that's a bit extreme, but what can Dublin commuters do about the shocking travesty they are subjected to morning and evening? Suggestions to the usual blog@signal2noise.ie.
I live in Dublin and occasionally make use of the M50 motorway, which means I am forced to succumb to the arbitrary and ill conceived notion to make it 'barrier-free.' This evening, I decided I would register my credit card with them, so that they could deduct a toll from me on the rare occasions I traverse their toll plaza. I should not have bothered.
The webpage appears to be designed with some heinous AJAX type architecture, which sends queries back to the server depending on what details you enter. Of course, they've got the whole concept woefully wrong! Instead of allowing me to continue to enter my details - the whole point of using an asynchronous framework like AJAX - it locks the webpage and places a useless and meaningless 'Update in Progress' spinning timer in the centre of the screen. Perhaps since I'm accessing the site over a 3G connection, or perhaps because the website creators are morons, I have now been waiting over 5 minutes for the latest 'Update in Progress' ticker to go away. All in all, there are approximately 44 fieldson the page, of which roughly 35 are required. This should take a little over 120 seconds to fill in - but it looks like I'm going to lose patience for the second time this evening and just close my browser once more, having spent over 20 minutes waiting for the stupid 'Update in Progress' dialog to go away.
Dear criminal masterminds who screw us with M50 tolls, please at least have the decency to FIRE to idiots who failed completely to design your website and have the common courtesy to make paying your exorbitant charges at least a painless experience.
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posted at: 00:55 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
my laptop compressing 14GB of data into an archive is not a great definition of being idle, and is probably not a great time to go into standby state. While I was impressed at the ability to resume and continue the compression, I'd rather hoped the job would be done by the time I returned from lunch.
*sigh*
posted at: 14:25 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
...in the pub! I think it's time to have a serious word with the staff of The Hamlet about their choice of music. I just came in for a quiet pint ;-)
posted at: 21:46 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
... to the roadworks happening outside my office. Thus far, all the parties involved in extending the Luas Line have spent 365 days creating havoc with traffic, generating noise and large holes in the ground, depleting the worlds tea stocks and generally making life just a little more unpleasant for all of us working here in the IFSC. Oh... I almost forgot... they have succeeded in laying all of approximately 30 feet of track, of the hundreds (if not thousands) required for the 7 minute journey time they're adding.
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posted at: 11:11 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
...have once again screwed up my day. Signalling failure (allegedly) has resulted in the 2033 train leaving Connolly at an untenable 2119. Every Friday evening, Irish Rail habitually and repeatedly screw up the train service. I imagine it's some kind of sadistic game that us passengers are merely pawns in, played ritually by the powers that be in Irish Rail's operations office.
I admire the brass-neckery that allowed the station announcer to announce that the train was running '10 minutes late' when the figure was immediately presented on the board as 22 minutes late - which changed to 'delay' once Irish Rail realised that they couldn't remove their heads far enough from their collective orifices to arrange that a train get from a point A to a point B.
Any suggestions as to why trains in Dublin invariably break every Friday evening? Am I just being paranoid?
posted at: 21:30 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Irish Rail have cancelled the train I was hoping to get to Balbriggan this evening. I imagine they will be in contact with me shortly to offer me a reduction in the ticket price, given their repeated reductions in service.
posted at: 15:52 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
In yet another leap of competence, Irish Rail managed to signal the Dublin-Limerick train to leave Heuston Station with a single passenger on board. This train would normally be packed to beyond capacity - and in fact over 300 passengers were left on the platform, wondering why theire train was leaving without them being allowed to board.
According to the Irish Examiner's story the station controller signalled to the guard after assisting a visually impaired passenger on-board - and a mix-up resulted in the guard interpreting the signal as the last passenger having been boarded, rather than the first.
If this was a one-off failure, it would be worthy of a laugh and a joke, but screwing things up appears to be the norm for an under-capacity, woefully mismanaged, incompetent rail 'service' that Irish commuters are forced to put up with. I also think the less than generous 50% discount allegedly offered is poor compensation for yet more inconvenience thrust on the Irish public. You can be sure that the Germans, the Swiss or the Finns would not stand for such inadequacies in their train service.
posted at: 10:35 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Not even a week ago, every hourly radio news bulletin detailed the anger felt by the country that train fares, along with other public transport fares, were going up by an average of 5%. One of the reasons given, along with the rising price of fuel, is that Iarnród Éireann are now offering an "improved level of service" to its passengers. Fare increases were implemented as of yesterday morning.
Last night, about 11pm, I received a call to collect two friends from the train station in Rush and Lusk where their train had unexpectedly halted. A goods train derailed in Skerries rendering them unable to get further. I dropped them to their houses over an hour later than they should have been home. I left many other stranded passengers at the station waiting for some kind of replacement bus service to bring them the remainder of the way to Skerries, Balbriggan, and further North to Dundalk.
"Thousands of commuters face severe disruption this morning after Iarnród Éireann cancelled all of this morning's Northern Line services into Dublin." -- The Irish Times
It looks like the affected trains will not be running normally until the weekend at the earliest, and that in the standard fashion, no compensation or detailed explanation of what went wrong and who is responsible will be offered to commuters. As a friend of mine commented recently, "Public transport is great. Ireland should really consider getting some."
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posted at: 15:34 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Perhaps someone could generously point me in the direction of a hotel that does not screw up the little things constantly. I've been over in Romania for the last week, staying in the Novotel, Bucharest and as a result of business I've had to extend my stay by one night.
Firstly, for some reason known only to the hotel staff themselves, that meant I had to pay some chunk of the bill last night, despite me not checking out until tomorrow. Fine. I handed over my credit card. After twenty minutes of mucking about with the various array of credit card machines (I counted three) the helpful girl suggested that she ring the bank regarding my credit card, as it was being refused without explanation. One phone call later she revealed that my card was fine but that the machines (all of them?) were broken. Normally I would not have minded this little charade, but it left me with approximately 2 minutes to get to the 7th floor, change clothes and rejoin my colleague in the lobby, from whence we were off to another office to continue our 18 hour work day.
Today, I arrived back to the hotel at about 9pm (EET) to discover that my keycard no longer unlocked my room. Imagine the situation - I'm tired; I've just returned from 12 hours in a customer's office and I cannot get into my room. Back to reception and an equally helpful girl explains that perhaps I should not keep my keycard near my mobile phone. I stopped short of explaining that maybe they should reprogram the keycard systems when people extend their stays. Perhaps their security system is broken, along with their impressive array of non-functional credit card machines...
Finally, to put the icing on the cake, I discover that my internet connection has expired. Great! In fairness, the internet connectivity here is good (far more reliable than any home ADSL type connection I've tested in Ireland.) Still, would it have killed them to extend it? By the time I discovered I could no longer get online I had removed my shoes and settled on the couch with my laptop. I rang the front desk and yet another helpful girl suggested that I could come down to the front desk to get a username and password. I requested that she read it out to me and hinted that I was probably not going to be in a good mood if they forced me to trek down 7 floors again. In fairness, after a pregnant pause she suggested that a bell-boy could bring it up.
Don't get me wrong - this hotel seems very nice. The food is reasonable, the location is perfect for where I'm working at the moment and would be great to see Bucharest city centre, if I only had the time. The room service is prompt and friendly and the food reasonable. If only these hotels could remember that I'm here to work - and my employer is paying a premium so that I can do so and don't have to worry about anything else. These little niggles have thus far wasted a total of over an hour that I really could have spent working. In fairness, it's also annoyed me enough to make me take 20 minutes to write this blog entry.
My inconveniences at this hotel are not an isolated incident. Almost every hotel I've been to has had issues with credit card authorisation, problems with internet access, getting bookings wrong or losing them altogether (in one case suggesting that I had faxed and cancelled my own reservation, despite their inability to produce said fax when I requested it), completely failing to handle something as commonplace as extending a stay, providing a room not matching the type reserved, and many other little irritations that take time and effort to sort out. If these were at cheap hotels, I might be prepared to look the other way - but they are generally not. Perhaps if they got things right first time, and wasted less of their own staff time fixing things and having to deal with irate clients, they could economise and bring prices down... just a thought :-)
Come on hotel people - get it right!
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posted at: 21:57 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Things that make me go "Aaaaargh!" now include:
And this week's winner for the most useless, meaningless statement goes to Head and Shoulders, for their most excellent statement that their shampoo will make your hair "up to 100% dandruff free!" I think I can say without fear of contradiction that my hair is currently up to 100% dandruff free, without the application of Head and Shoulders. Not only that, but if I applied lard, mashed potato and salad cream to my hair, it would still be categorically, unequivocally up to 100% dandruff free.
I'm leaning towards understanding the vehemence in Bill Hicks' request that all people working in marketting and advertising should please kill themselves.
posted at: 15:39 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Dear Irish ISPs (Eircom, IBB, Esat BT and probaly others I've not tested) : Please fix your internet. Some fast, reverse DNS would be nice. Some not broken routing would be good. Some kind of NOT forcing a new IP address to my router every few minutes would be excellent.
I am getting very VERY fed up of ALL of my many PuTTY sessions all locking up and timing out. Please fix it and make me happy. kthxbye.
posted at: 03:41 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
7:47pm: Today I have the privilege of sampling Hazelhatch/Celbridge train station from the inside of a dark train. The lights turned off just a few minutes after leaving Heuston, Dublin. After the first 15 minutes of the unscheduled stop, the driver finally began a walk through the train to inform us what was going on and that we would be here for another 10 minutes waiting for maintenance to come and fix the lights.
7:52pm: Still no sign of any maintenance people and my iBook battery is starting to die. The battery went from holding 6 hours of charge to barely holding 45 minutes. It sucks but not anything like as much as the woeful public transport system we have in this country.
8:00pm: The view out the window has utterly failed to change. Still no update forthcoming regarding whether they are repairing stuff or whether we'll make Limerick tonight or not. I live in hope...
8:07pm: Now 20 minutes since the driver announced what the problem was, and still no sign of us moving. We're now running at least 35 minutes late.
8:17pm: Still not one inch of progress towards Limerick, and unsurprisingly no update on the train's status from anyone in charge. This is starting to get ridiculous and very annoying.
8:23pm: The driver has announced that there will be another train on the way in 20 to 25 minutes. Im assuming this is the last train from Dublin. I may as well have waited for it and had a decent meal. Public transport in this country is not just bad, it is a joke. I hope everyone on this train writes and requests a full refund of their ticket price for this fiasco. I certainly will be.
8:42pm: To add insult to injury, they have now asked us all to step off the train and wait on the platform for the twenty or so minutes its going to take the next train to arrive. At least its not raining, but it's really quite chilly just standing on an open station platform optimistically hoping a train will eventually appear. I'm too angry at this point to compose a reasonable and balanced letter of complaint. I'll wait until I calm down slightly.
8:54pm: A whistle and a light signals another train's arrival. We've been stopped in Celbridge for a little over an hour at this point.
8:57pm: We finally leave Celbridge station. Feeling is returning to my fingers and there's a hope growing that we'll make Limerick before midnight.
9:00pm: And we've stopped again. Once more, I have no idea why we're stopped or for how long. A joke, this 'transport system' is. Ah, only two minutes this time. Perhaps we'll try and exceed ten miles per hour in a while, who knows?!? Stopped again! I'm beginning to suspect this train is also broken.
Once again, the only saving grace is the good humour of the Irish. Despite having their time wasted and been made to sit in the dark and stand in the cold, they laughed and joked, mocking the trains and the situation, talking and chasing away any atmosphere that could otherwise make the long wait unbearable.
11:24pm: We finally arrive in Limerick station, having left Heuston at 7:15pm. This is a shocking condemnation of Irelands 'public transport;' moreso when you consider that I had to travel for an hour to get to Heuston from my office near Merrion Square - and that's without anything breaking down. I intend to laugh in the face of the next politician who suggests we should be leaving our cars at home and using the laughable fiasco we term 'public transport' in this country.
We were met at Limerick station by three staff, apologising for the delay and handing out forms to make claims for delays. It has a space for postcode and the currency is marked as £ (pounds.) My cup of bitterness doth runneth over...
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posted at: 11:53 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
Some muppets have released a razor with 5... count them... FIVE... blades. And a battery! wtf?!? Is anyone using one of these? And if so, why?
I wonder how the hell you get through UK airport (the-opposite-of-) security with one of them?
posted at: 01:44 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
...or, how to leave my house in Balbriggan at 1pm and still miss a 3pm train from Heuston. Where was the 1:35pm train from Balbriggan, for example? I didn't see it. Neither did any of the other people waiting on the platform. There was no notice or announcement that this service would be late or cancelled. I guess it's more fun to just play public-transport-roulette.
The 1:50pm train arrived promptly, but decided to park for 15 minutes just outside Connelly station, rendering it now even less likely I was going to be able to get to Heuston by 3pm.
The final straw was missing the Luas due to the ticket machines being so slow and the queues being so large. It's a major f**king station people! Maybe more than 2 ticket machines might be an idea. Alternatively, there's huge ptoentials for reducing transaction time per customer. If anyone dealing with the Luas ticketting system is reading this, I'm happy to consult. I know SFA about ticketting systems, but I'm pretty sure I could do a less crap job.
It's now 3pm and I've made it as far as the Jervis shopping centre. 2 hours to get to the city centre. That's impressively poor, even by Irish standards I think.
I'm probably not going to get a Limerick train for another 2 hours, resulting in me spending approximately 7 hours getting from Dublin to Limerick, including waiting times. Wow! Sucky!
There is no excuse for a level of service this poor. Ireland is a small country. The infrastructure could easily be made to link up better and work more reliably. I'll certainly be pointing this out to politicians who want my vote. Why don't you do the same and maybe I won't have to emigrate again to enjoy a level of public transport that exceeds my moderate expectations of competence.
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posted at: 15:07 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
My mother, who knows nothing about this broadband revolution or the internet, has decided it would be a good idea to get some. I think it's the attraction of being able to talk to her children for free instead of clocking up large phone bills.
43 days ago, she ordered the Wireless version of Perlico internet - because she doesn't want wires trailing across the floor - and has thus far received nothing other than a wired router (now boxed up again and sitting inside our front door, waiting for Perlico to organise collection of it) and a flat denial from the call centre that she placed any order with them for any internet at all.
She has spoken to a supervisor on some one of the customer call centres now and they have finally agreed to send out the wireless modem/router ordered over 6 weeks ago, though with the bank holiday this weekend I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to arrive.
I've been promised dinner if I visit and configure it for her. wooo! :-)
Why does broadband and broadband customer service in Ireland suck?
posted at: 17:11 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
... make a flight between Dublin and Leeds / Bradford leave / arrive on time? Ever? I've flown that route many times in the last two months and the closest we ever got to running on time was arriving a mere 30 minutes late. Get your act in order guys! Today's excuse, from the pilot of the aircraft, was that there was some paperwork that should have been filled in, but wasn't, earlier today. I mean, really...
Also, can someone explain to me why RyanAir want €30 for transporting my guitar? It's in a hard case, they don't insure it any more than they do any of the rest of my luggage, it's lighter than my suitcase and yet they want €30 for the privilege of 'handling' it. Bizarrely, the helpful check-in girl suggested that I could probably bring it onto the plane with me, but that they'll still charge the €30, even though they don't handle it at all. It's almost like they're trying to gouge the customer for no good reason.
posted at: 00:21 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
I recently passed through Shannon airport and had cause to look up some train times for my destination. Fortunately, I had an Apple iBook with me and the Airport proudly proclaims that free Wireless internet connectivity is available. To cut a long story short, despite three attempts at getting some kind of connection to the net, registering 3 times and wasting a good 20 minutes of my life that I want back, please, I gave up on the whole thing.
I remember using wireless internet at the airport before - and it was good. I could log in, check my mail or open an IRC client and converse with a few friends and let them know that I was about to jump on a plane to some not-so-exotic destination. This was all good. Then someone got ideas abd additional features, I suspect... Features are almost always a bad thing, I've found. People wanting to add features to something that already just works should consider the impact of this very, very carefully. People who only test a wireless connection using Windows and Internet Explorer, with Javascript enabled, and cookies accepted from everywhere - including places that are not the originating site, and assume everyone uses webmail and/or can access their e-mail through port 80 - should be taught a few lessons about how the internet really works, possibly with the aid of a swift introduction to my LART.
For the benefit of anyone else wishing to set up a service that they're hoping people will use briefly, especially with limited time available to them, here's a few tips on how to make it accessible:
Again I'm in the station, wanting to make the 12 minute journey to Halifax. Today the train is running 15 mins late (according to the board.) This is even more impressive given that these trains are supposed to run every 15 mins. What a crock of s**t. I will find the next politician who questions why people in Britain don't use public transport and laugh in his/her face!
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posted at: 16:52 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
