Alexander never had an iPod

I've decided to treat myself to an iPod. For the philistines amongst you, this is not some new plant seed but a portable music player from Apple computers. Apple seem to preface all their products with an 'i' - iMac, iTunes, the Lancashire version eyeUp (I made that up) - so we get an iPod.

The iPod is a very smart looking, small (3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27) and light - I love it. The size is a bit of a problem. Bets are already being taken in the office as to what I'll do with it first - lose it or put it in my back pocket and sit on it. However, I digress.

The real problem with the iPod is not the unit itself. It's the flaming earphones. You may ask what this has to do with Alexander the great - bear with me on this one.

When Alexander was beginning his rampage across the Asian continent he came to a place in Greece called Gordium. Here there was a knotted rope so complex that no-one had been able to untie it. It was prophesied that the man who unravelled the knot would conquer Asia. Alexander did a bit of lateral thinking and cut the thing apart.

You do get the feeling that there is a bit of spin going along here. You can just imagine Alexander's press officer going around the local papyrus makers telling them what to put in their next daily/weekly/summer solstice scroll.

Nowadays, of course, he'd be hauled up in front of the local magistrates. 'Alexander of Macedonia, you are hereby charged with causing deliberate destruction of property and ruining our tourist trade; how do you plead?". "No guilty and if you don't let me go I'll make trouble for you". "Oh yes, you and whose army?" ....

Anyway, to get back to the earphones. The lead on these earphones is white, long and made of a particularly sticky type of plastic. They also have magical properties

Namely this.

However carefully you wrap them up the lead will coalesce into a frightful, tangled knot that would make the Gordian knot look like a child's shoelace.It's no good adopting Alexander's approach - I want to be able to use the damn things. So, every morning on the way to work I take the earphones out my pocket and carefully untangle them, and every evening I do the same on the way back home.

I've yet to listen to the iPod. I'm spending so much time untangling the darn leads that by the time I've got them into a useable state it's time to put them away again.

The only solution I can think of is just to leave the things permanently attached to my ears. The only problem is that you can't hear what's going on around - There I am, tapping my feet and humming the accompaniment to 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and world war 3 could have broken out for all I care.

One of these days on my normal commute I'm going to miss my stop and end up in a siding somewhere

Train Troubles

I've made a deliberate decision to travel by train. In the long run, viewed over time and all things taken into consideration, I reckon it's less stressful than traveling by car. It's certainly safer.

Let's just take the latter point. The alternative to traveling by train is, for me, the M6 motorway. Now, I have to set the picture here. I have to be at work by 9:00 am at the latest. This means leaving the house at 8:20 (assuming that traffic is clear etc etc). Now, I don't know about you but I tend to leave things to the last possible moment. So, I leave the house with the minimum time between getting up and driving. Let's just assume that the other people on the motorway are therefore like me - half asleep, low sugar level, cornflakes haven't kicked in yet, still doing my shirt up.

This is factor one.

Second factor is the fact that this is a motorway. Now, this isn't New Zealand, where the only traffic on the road is a couple of crows dining off the roadkill from the previous night. No, this is the UK, with bumper to bumper cars full of people with low blood sugar trying to work out if they are going in the right direction and still doing their shirt buttons up.

Third factor is that this is a motorway going east. This isn't too bad in the summer; by the time I leave the house trailing cornflakes the sun is well up.

In winter it's a different matter. At some point in the transition from autumn to winter things get totally suicidal. By the time you get onto the motorway the sun is just peeking over the horizon. Direct into the car. Obscuring all the other cars on the road. In the spring it's even more fun - due to the existing slow slide of winter into summer it's usually freezing so they've heavily salted the road with this compound that seems to be one part salt to one part super glue - it welds itself to the screen and is almost impossible to get off. And because it's freezing there's no way that the windscreen washer jets are going to work because they're jammed with ice, and the engine hasn't warmed up yet so the screen keeps on misting over.

So you're driving east along a packed motorway with a whole load of half asleep people traveling at 75 miles per hour with the sun reflecting nicely off the white glaze that is your windscreen and you can't see a thing which is probably just as well because no-one else can either.

This is why I go by train.

On average traveling by train is OK. I get a chance to catch up on the sleep I've missed, I can read the newspaper at my leisure (No, it's not the Sun newspaper - you don't read that, you only open it to page 3 and let your eyes pop out, or in my case, yawn), and I get a bit of a walk at either end so I can say to my doctor 'yes, I do have a daily walk, the flab around my waist just appears there by transmutation'

I said on average. On some days the journey is exceptional (clear carriage, beautiful day, a particularly interesting book to read and a nice sleep on the way back).

This means that there have to be some bad days to compensate

I had all of them last week.

We can start with the arson attack on a signal box. Now, to be fair, there's not a lot that the rail companies could have done about this, but they did fall over in a wibbling heap as a result. It appears that the more modern the technology is the greater the disruption when the train managers have to fall back on more traditional techniques.

In this case, it felt like they were falling back on a man walking in front of the train with a red flag

My train to Rugby was cancelled. This is an hourly service, and although the one the next hour did leave, it still had to follow the man with the red flag. I was late that day.

The next day we were still in red flag mode although they had made it official this time. I could have got my train if I had got on the laid on 'special' that commuted past the burnt out box. Unfortunately this left at 33 minutes past the hour and I arrived at 33.00001 minutes past. So, another hour's wait. Late to work again.

They eventually got the signals repaired, made the red flag guy redundant and we were back to normal.

Until our train broke down.

Now I had spoken earlier about modern technology. The train company that runs the Birmingham to Rugby local route has just taken delivery of some brand new, wizz bang, up to date, state of the art trains. Amongst the many things it can do it can automatically close the doors.

A history of door closing is in order.

In the old days you had to open and close the doors by hand. Unfortunately this had two down sides.

a) Most of the UK were born in barns as far as door closing is concerned and the train staff had to go down the length of the train closing doors before the train could leave, and then walk back up the platform closing the doors that some late running b*****d had opened in order to slip onto the train.

b) Some people opened the doors whilst the train was still moving. Sometimes this was because leaping from a fast moving train is one way of getting away from it all, but people would also open the doors as the train came into the station so they could make a quick getaway. This sometimes had the effect of sweeping the platform clear of people which appeared to upset these people.

So, they invented guard controlled locks that could lock the doors when the train was moving. There were two benefits of this

a) People no longer got swept off platforms.

b) The entertainment value of being able to lock the doors 30 seconds before the train left and then watch the hapless tardy traveler try and get on must have been immense and probably more than made up for all those b*****ds who used to leave the doors open

However, technology marches on and we now have state of the art doors that open at the touch of a button and which can be closed by the guard (and in the REALLY state of the art, automatically close after a time as well (or close just as you're putting a load of suitcases onto the train, leaving you on the platform and your luggage on the train))

Which is fine but state of the art implies more complexity and to return to the subject, in our case state of the art failed. We had just got to Berkswell, a nice little village between Birmingham and Coventry when the door close switch that says that the door was closed decided to take a holiday. We knew that the door was closed but it didn't, so it just kept on beeping saying that the door wasn't closed and no, the train can't be moved because it wouldn't be safe to do so and some passenger might accidentally fall out of the open door.

So we had to get off, the train was driven off, still frantically beeping and we were left in pleasant Berkswell, no cafeteria, no seats, stand and watch the express trains roar past (I did try and thumb a lift but they weren't having any of it)

I was late again that day.

As an aside, the new technology does have one major benefit. If for some reason I hadn't slept well the night before I would tend to go to sleep on the train. This is no problem for the Rugby to Birmingham route (the train terminates at Birmingham) but in the other direction Rugby is not the terminus. With the old trains I would usually be woken up by the bang of the doors closing, and by the time I had sorted out who I was, where I was and most importantly where my feet were the train was on the move. With the new trains the doors insistently beep as they open which is a good way of saying 'Wake up Bill, this is your stop'. Haven't slept through Rugby yet.

The rest of the week's annoyances were minor. A giggle of girls on a night out in Birmingham (I can't understand why text messages should be so shrieking funny), two teenagers who had one of these nice new portable DVD players and who decided to watch the film 'Bang, Crash, thump, scream and other annoying noises' and a family who had been watching the news and had decided that the instruction to 'evacuate your house and take as many belongings with you as possible' applied to them as well. I've never seen a kitchen sink so fetchingly wrapped. Oh, and the gentleman who obviously smoked several 100 cigarettes a day and whose clothes were a cancer hazard to anyone within 10 meters of him

Isn't life funny.

Sob