never again...
First post, so here goes...

I work for a large musical instrument manufacturer and a perk of the job is that I get to go to the music trade shows. As a musician myself, I always really enjoy these shows. I can sometimes take my mates with me and get them into the show using passes purloined from other people at work.

A couple of years ago I took a couple of mates to the British Music Fair at the NEC. A friend from work suggested we take the train. He'd been earlier in the week and said how quick and easy it had been on the train. "only took 40 minutes, drops you off right at the NEC, piece of piss" etc.

So we took the train.

First 20 minutes were fine. Then the train began to slow down and eventually ground to a halt.

We waited......

and waited......

eventually we began to move again, but very slowly. The rest of the journey continued at a snails pace, with frequent stops and took about 2 hours before we finally got to the NEC. Fuck knows what the problem was, there were no announcements over the train tannoy and no apology.

That was just the outbound journey, the return was worse....!

On the way back, the train was absolutely packed. Crowded, stuffy and smelly. We set off.

Not long into the journey we stopped again.....

And we waited again......

This time for about 20 minutes. Eventually a guard came walking down the train and was asking people if anyone was an engineer! The train had developed a problem with its windscreen wipers, and the driver and guard on board were unable to fix it. If it couldnt be fixed we would all have to get off at the next stop and wait for the next train. So after more waiting around, the train limped off to the next station (which was Rugby if I recall correctly) where we had to wait around even more, before getting onto the next train, which was already packed and now had several hundred more people trying to get on. Obviously they had not been able to repair the windscreen wiper. Oh, and it wasnt even fucking raining!

It was while we were waiting for this last train that I pointed out to one of my mates the pass that he had been wearing all day on a lanyard around his neck. This was a laminated pass with a name written on it in marker pen. Except that I had rubbed out the original name and written a different name on it.

For that whole day, everyone who met my mate Joe thought his name was Gaylord Bender!

Im evil.
(Lionel Tiger, Tue 3 Jun 2008, 20:25, Reply)