Date:	2007-04-23 12:01
Subject:	So Ready For Leave.
Security:	Public
Mood:	sleepy

Yes, I only started in February.  Yes, I've got holiday coming up already.  The job certainly has its benefits to compensate for the mind-numbing tedium that can be experienced..

Lates have to be the only shifts that I actively dislike as a concept.  I can deal with earlies, but lates are the only shift that prevents me from seeing my partner at all (weekends excepted - though since he likes a long lie in and I attend church on Sunday mornings anyway...) and a whole week of that gets a bit depressing.  Luckily this week I started off with a few 9am shifts and we did have a *little* time at the weekend, so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  This is my last late before my rest days, then I've got a few more 8am shifts at the end of the week before my leave. 

Saturday was pretty busy, the problem compounded by the fact that of the 7 gates, only two were functioning completely correctly.  Two of them were out entirely and the rest were having issues with paper tickets.  Then there's the fact that leisure travellers, which comprises the majority of weekend traffic, just don't know what they're doing in the same way as commuters do - nor do half of them speak English, so you have to physically go over and almost drag them to another barrier because they either can't or won't understand your request to "try the next barrier" or "come over here and let me see that".  Of course the people are bundling behind them meaning it takes forever to fight your way through and get the traffic flowing again... ugh.  I had to open the manual gate quite a few times, and I don't think I was coping too well.  I like the evening supervisor so it could have been worse, but I still felt like an incompetant dolt a lot of the time.  A chap finally showed up to fix one of the non-functioning gates just before the last train went.  Thanks, mate.

Sunday I was on an "assisting" shift, which we really could have done with on the Saturday instead.  There were considerably less crowds and, if the ticket office hadn't closed early, we would have had nothing to do.  As it was we were kept busy trying to help people deal with the singular useful ticket machine on the station - whose dumb idea was that, anyway?  We have one of the multi-fare machines, one 'queue-buster', which doesn't do what it says on the tin since it only takes debit/credit cards and only tops up adult Oyster cards, and three of the coins only machines that only issue singles and day travelcards.  Just to add to the excitement two of the gates were still fully broken - including the one attended to the night before. 

Tonight I'm at my least-favourite station to do lates at; last time I did I was told a starting time nearly two hours early, so I ended up doing a shift from 15.45 to 01.00... and it was dull as ditch-water.  To make things worse I had DSM's/GSM's coming through saying how nice and quiet it was and wasn't I glad I'd got this group and not somewhere in Central London... since I was praying for an assault to liven up the evening you can imagine how "reassuring" I found them.  And how bored I was.  At that stage I was still a good girl and tried not to read while on duty too much but that day I got through my book, a newspaper, and the accessibility guide to London, which is a big folder detailing the details of the disabled access provisions/help on every sort of TfL service...