A Day In The Life

This week I have just two shifts at work on the railways. One of them was this morning. I saw barely a soul. The car park, normally full, had just one vehicle parked up. And that was mine. I sold just one ticket, to someone who almost certainly isn’t supposed to be using the railway. He’s elderly and off on a jaunt to escape the boredom.

The TVM has been damaged. Someone has at some stage over the last few days tried to force out the note box to get at the cash. There is no cash in there, of course. Cash is no longer accepted on the railway. There’s a big poster on the machine explaining this. He or she failed to get the box out anyway.

I had one task today though. I took delivery of a bunch of floor vinyls and duly stuck them on the ground. Subtle reminders to keep your distance. You can’t escape the reminders. If you’re not looking at your feet, there are posters every few metres at eye level. At the moment these are all unnecessary. There simply aren’t enough passengers in this neck of the woods for two people to be able to get within two metres of each other.

At some stage, they will need to ramp things up. A railway is not a sustainable enterprise at 15% capacity. It’s a mass transit system. And when it’s transporting the masses, these signs will prove impossible to obey. But the sentiment is right, for now. It’s ‘on message’.  It’s focuses the mind. We do what we can. 

Politicians keep referring to ‘the moment of greatest danger’, and providing descriptions of what that is. I’ll do it for them, with a more simplified and to-the-point description. The moment of greatest danger is when we’ve all gotten really bored of this coronavirus thingymajig. That moment has arrived. I’ll confess, my hand washing ritual has decreased from an enthusiastic OTT 30 second scrub, down to a  slightly begrudging 15 seconds.