Travellers arriving at York railway station yesterday were thrilled to discover that the trains weren’t running to Newcastle and there was a replacement bus service instead. As you can imagine, the mood was light-hearted – even festive. Think of the smiling faces, the gay laughter, the sense of fun that was rippling through the assembled crowd on the concourse. It was the perfect moment to inject a sardonic, tongue-in-cheek piss-take, and the people in charge (I use that phrase loosely) were equal to the task. Their brilliant wheeze: to have the replacement coaches arrive with the legend “Choo Choo i’m [sic] a train” emblazoned where one would normally find information about the destination.
No, I’m not making this up; yes, it actually happened. I have the photo to prove it. Somebody genuinely thought that: a) the situation called for some levity; and b) that this message was the appropriate way to achieve it. Either that or they had such contempt for their passengers that they simply decided to have some fun at the paying public’s expense, which is perhaps more likely.
It has become a truism that nothing in Britain now seems to work. This is bad enough. But what’s worse is the feeling that nobody who is purportedly in a position of power or authority seems particularly to care. In normal countries where adults are still in charge, the people who run the railways apologise to passengers for inconveniencing them, and feel a sense of shame for doing so. They don’t pretend that everybody is mates together and just in it for the ‘bantz’. They display a sense of decorum and recognise that when somebody is forking over a large sum of money for a long-distance train ticket, they’re owed a certain level of service. And, perhaps more importantly, they preserve a level of formal distance; they understand that the relationship between a professional and a client or customer is not the same as one between friends or acquaintances. You forgive a friend or acquaintance who is late, or lets you down, or irritates you in some small way. The expectation that you should do the same for a train company assumes an informal relationship where none has been granted on your part – a taken-for-granted over-familiarity which would be obnoxious enough in a pub bore, but borders on the genuinely insulting when performed by a commercial operator.
There is a word for this: it’s called impertinence. It’s an old-fashioned word, which is nowadays barely used – it sounds like the utterance of a Victorian gentleman sweeping aside a beggar with his cane or a mine owner dismissing his workers’ pleas for more gruel at lunch hour: “Damned impertinence!” To invoke it in the modern day makes one sound like Victor Meldrew, and leaves one open to accusations of pomposity or self-importance. We cringe at the prospect of being seen to be taking oneself too seriously.
But sometimes one needs to describe a phenomenon for which only one word will do, and this is precisely that kind of circumstance; trying to engage in “Choo Choo i’m a train” banter with passengers who one is already grossly inconveniencing simply is impertinent, and damnably so. You grant your friends and loved ones license to treat a situation with levity when you would rightfully otherwise be annoyed. For a train company to imply that it has that kind of relationship with you is frankly insulting. It isn’t taking oneself too seriously to object; it’s the natural reaction of a grown-up.
The wider point, of course, is that (as I’m sure you’ve noticed) we’ve now reached a situation in which even the pretence of caring about almost anything at all has been abandoned – in which it is rare to receive even a grudging apology when subjected to huge inconvenience. We’re expected to simply accept it with good humour and chortle along merrily with whatever japes we’re subjected to. This is strongly correlated with the gradual slide into entropy that has set in across the nation. As things collapse around our ears we might do well to consider a rethink. Maybe it’s about time we stopped worrying about sounding like Victor Meldrew, and started complaining a bit more. Maybe it’s about time to recognise that if you want to have a country in which things work properly, you have to stop accepting banter as a palliative to crap service. Maybe it’s about time we resurrected the concept of impertinence and started using that word a little bit more. Above all, maybe, just maybe, it’s about time we realised that the danger we face is not that of taking ourselves too seriously, but of not taking the business of living and getting things done seriously enough.
Dr. David McGrogan is Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School.
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I have a feeling that lockdowns and furlough have inflicted serious damage on the work ethic of a substantial number of people.
This phenomenon has been endemic in Britain for some time now, and as you say lockdowns may have exacerbated it for some people.
A former colleague of mine summarised it nicely: ‘Nobody gets shouted at’.
Yes. I don’t like rudeness but we’re not disagreeable enough – disagreeableness is a trait we needed much more of during covid.
Right on. Calm, factual disagreeableness (with the focus on ‘disagree’ rather than being unpleasant) is vital for progress.
Fake niceness is destroying our civilisation
I am robust in bringing incompetence to everyone’s attention but I compare miserably to my spinster sister in her mid 70s. She is a large lady and needs a stick and she lets no-one get away with anything whether to someone giving her personal service like a cafe or online. Nothing is ever permitted to be below the standard she had assumed she would be offered. Airports, cruise liners, railways, cafes are all ‘fair game’ for my sister.
I have seen grown men grovelling at her insistence on proper service and as she also speaks loudly, everyone else listens in stunned silence, secretly wishing they could be like her because she gets everyone running around her.
Online, she berates everyone with two of her targets being Ebay and Amazon. I have lost count how many things she has be given twice, in their haste to placate her.
Of course, she is not a happy person and that is the rub with most people; they are not prepared to spoil the occasion; so suppliers get away with poor service.
”I don’t believe it!” Ah…classic.
Two episodes from yesterday evening coming to mind here:
I was on a concert (Revocation) at the Dome Tufnell Park London yesterday evening. The last band has just finished playing, the room was emptying quickly and everything was been shut down. There was a sizable queue in front of the cloak room and it was pretty clear that it’ll still take some minutes before everything had been processed there. People were also still emptying their drinks. It seemed unlikely that the counter staff was willing to sell another half pint to me but since I was rather thirsty, I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask. This I did and the reply “No, hahaha! We’re only selling water by now!” I found this rather annoying and thus replied with “I suggest you cut the silly jokes. They’re not making you look sophisticated”, went to the toilet and drank some water. I then obviously got thrown out for being unspecifically abusive. My idea of the situation, however, is that I was a paying customer and not the butt end of jokes the counter staff (a woman, obviously) feel like making and that a simple “No.” would have been a much more appropriate reply to my question.
The train back to Reading reached Slough around 00:55. There, it stopped for about 40 minutes because a passenger had reportedly fallen sick and needed an ambulance. This means GWR made a few hundred tired people wait 40 minutes in the middle of the night, with periodic “We’re sorry but we cannot presently tell when the train wil get going again. Thanks for your patience” announcements as icing on the cake, because it was apparently impossible to get the sick person off the train and under someone’s care who could then wait for the ambulance instead of forcing everone on the train to join in the wait for no particular reason.
I’ve come to regard both as typically English: Service personnel is always (not always, but really frequently) impertinent because any customer complaint can be dealt with by having customers manhandled by the bouncers. And Nothing works but nobody’s responsible for that! aka Nobody here is getting paid to think on the job! is just the way people employed by large companies always operate.
I’d say that’s not untypical.
Service usually better from family-run businesses where the owner is present most/all of them time and/or staff working there (family or otherwise) feel they have a stake in it.
My mindset at the moment would lead me to think the passenger was another casualty of mRNA injections, although that time of night other substances might have been involved.
When everyone owns everything, nobody owns anything.
Nobody cares, because nobody has personal responsibility nor their own money on the line (so they think).
Travelling from Cyprus to Stanstead in 2008 my plane arrived on time and there was nobody there at the immigration desks. We all had to wait an hour before the work-shy civil servants turned up to let us in.
I recall another occasion in which I travelled from Budapest without a hitch, only to find that the trains were restricted to 20mph for some reason connected with lack of track maintenance.
The current shambles has been a long time coming.
I thought the author was Toby Young until I got to the end, but thanks instead to David. The pyschology, the cultural degeneration. Well analysed and expressed.
And in other news, Sweden are forced to chuck millions of doses of bioweapons away due to lack of demand. Word’s getting out then…
”Finally we have some good news, this time coming out of my home country of Sweden.
Just a few weeks after a massive conference in Stockholm where top doctors warned about the dangers of the mRNA shots, news is coming out that Sweden has thrown away almost 8.5 million doses of the covid shots.
That means that around 1/5th of all covid vaccines Sweden bought has been destroyed. The cost to the taxpayer of buying in these shots only to be thrown away was a whopping $144 million. That is money that went straight down the drain because the state bought something that people do not want.”
https://petersweden.substack.com/p/throwing-away-doses
The other observation I have is that some employees have got used to being little dictators, bossing their customers.
i went to the Vermeer exhibition yesterday and these were timed tickets. You were given a wristband and I put this clearly visible on my handbag. One of the guards asked me to put it on my wrist. I asked him ‘why’. He then told me ‘these are the rules’…!
This now works on me like a red flag to a bill….so I asked him again ‘give me one reason….’ He could not come up with one reason, so I suggested he started thinking for himself.
All very childish, I know, but I am jus my fed up with this level of bullying.
My (CONservative) MP is so concerned about the wreckage his Government has created over the past 3 years that he’s stopped bothering to respond to my emails.
THAT’s where the problem starts and ends: with our Pretend Democracy and the low calibre MPs who have been foisted on us by the Party Machines.
Very well observed & assessed, also have you noticed how many roads including main trunk roads are Closed for various works even during normal hours ! It seems now that lockdowns have been perpetrated ,anything is possible by TPTB without a flying F- – k for the public that they used to have to serve with a modicum of perceived respect .
You should try Godfrey Bloom. He fit the bill. And he’s been right on all this Covid nonsense from the start.
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
They’ve all got pound shop degrees in communications and they’re the same vapid clueless drones who force me to be friends with inanimate objects. In my gym, the broken machines are hung with signs that chirp “I’m afraid I’m feeling a little under the weather today.” And my plastic bag in the supermarket introduces itself with a “Hi, I’m you’re new sustainable bag for life.”
Coming soon: “Hi, I’m your handy new digital pound app and carbon footprint pal.”
The deliberate infantilisation and dumbing down of everything is an important step when you’re trying to build a global tyranny.
M&S and Impronouncible Syllables introduce your new, sustainable bag for life. It was designed by the artist Impronouncible Syllables inspired by his experiences working at M&S and supposed to bring out the dreamer in all of us. The object thus advertised being a rectangular plastic bag in gratingly mismatched semilight orange, yellow, blue and green forming an unclear pattern of lines, splashes and dots. I guess the message must be Working at M&S on LSD means a bad trip is guaranteed.
How many readers are aware that it is still impossible to go to your post office and post a normal small parcel overseas?
Only one person I know was aware.
This started on 10 January when (allegedly) Royal Mail suffered a ransomware cyber attack. Googling tghis throws up a few results from a month ago and the odd extra result more recently. But basically, little publicity.
I have a Grandson in New Zealand who has a birthday mid- March. My wife bought him a tee shirt, some socks and a card and on 23rd January, having wripped it, worked out postage and stuck on £7.75 worth of the new self adhesive stamps with QR codes and a completed customs form, took it the the Post Office, only to be told they weren’t allowed to accept it. I hadn’t heard about the “cyber attack”.
Googling Royal Mail I found the appropriate announcement and noted that letters were “now accepted” and also business’s online ordered tracked and signed parcels (the most expensive and most dependent on Royal Mail’s apparently ‘poorly’ IT service.)
Even now, my Grandson’s pre-paid economy parcel can’t be accepted although it requires only handing over and dropping in a sack.
Noone cares that there is now no cheap way of sending presents or goods abroad. No-one cares that Royal Mail hasn’t recovered from this problem after a month!