[Due to LiveJournal technical issues, I'm having to post this via email, several days after it was written...]

Today was my first shift at Bounds Green; fairly busy during the peak and the TOM's - that's Ticket Office Machines - were playing up a bit to add to the excitement. The staff on duty were all male and all pretty friendly, and the meal relief supervisor was one I get along with well too, so all in all a pretty good shift. I had to explain this weekend's Hammersmith-Acton Town closure and the resulting detour required to get to Heathrow to a couple of people, and was thankful that I'd read the posters thoroughly. *g* Tomorrow will be more fun for that though since there will doubtless be plenty of people turning up who haven't bothered checking their journey in advance...

Apparently there were severe delays on the Circle today caused by a mixture of staff shortage and a signal failure, summarised by the PA as "an earlier service disruption". Heh. But, hm? A staff shortage at a Circle, H&C and Met station... while the Station Supervisor is on leave? Coincidence? Surely not?

Wednesday and today I took a rare trip on the Underground that *wasn't* on the Piccadilly - to wit, out to Walthamstow Central, changing from the Piccadilly at Finsbury Park, obviously. I'm sure all Londoners think of their local line as the "definitive" Underground line, but in my case, with working on it and being new to the area, that feeling is magnified several times over. The carriages just seemed a little wrong, the stations a little off, from my usual comforting feeling of familiarity.

Clearly this is a good excuse to spend some time going round the Underground with no clear destination in mind.

__

Today was a patchy day all in all. I was working at Wood Green as a spare turn (they've started actually sending us out to stations rather than have us all at the main station for the group... thank goodness!) and I knew before I got there that it was likely to be interesting, because I checked the service status on TfL's site before leaving, to discover we had had a late overrun of engineering works at Acton Town, meaning that the eastbound trains were delayed in coming through. Luckily I go west into work so had no trouble getting there.

It was my first time doing a morning shift at WG, so I don't know how much busier it was compared to normal. The delays on the Eastbound were pretty dire, however, with the worst being:

"Platform to base... where's my next East?"
"Uh........ Leicester Square. It'll be here in... 22 minutes."

Suffice to say we had a lot of irrate customers, the worst being a woman (W1) who had a go at the male CSA and I for both dealing with the same customer (M1), despite the fact that I was actually talking to an entirely different customer to show her where the bus stop was, and was then trying to get W1's attention since she'd been trying to get that of the male CSA, who was being verballed by M1 and therefore was unable to attend to her. (M1 had sod all on his Oyster card and hadn't touched in at his destination anyway. Telling him to go to the assistance window got a load of yelling and some story about how he'd slept overnight in Victoria after touching in there at 5 o'clock in the morning. Or something.)

At 9 I went to take over the Westbound platform - several trains were being reversed since there's a siding there, and their West is generally pretty busy anyway. With the delays added it was pretty chaotic. Lots were going back to Northfields instead of Heathrow (though there always are quite a lot of Northfields in the peak anyway) and people were wanting to get to Heathrow and not grasping that they could just change at Acton Town or Northfields - despite me announcing it several times on PA, and pointing out on PA and occasionally in person that I didn't know if or when there would be a Heathrow train along, etc, etc, etc... the usual things that make you wonder why you even bother! I was also blithely doing my usual "Please let passengers off the train first" spiel and completely forgetting when trains were coming in from the sidings - and therefore were empty. Duh. I kept my eyes on the PTI (Platform-Train Interface... in not so fancy words, the side of the train) and Platform Repeater so as to avoid any odd looks from customers.

I went up shortly after half nine after darting over to the East to assist with a detrainment - strictly I wasn't required but I had already left the West when I heard the announcement, and we had plenty of staff on upstairs. I then took a short break, after which I was informed I was being sent to Oakwood for sunlight. One short tube journey (and a change at Arnos) later, I arrived to Oakwood to find one of the DSM's in the Supervisor's Office, and 90% cloud cover. No sunlight duties for me! Apparently they'd also had a signal failure, but it was all sorted by the time I got there. Instead one of the ticket machines was eating banknotes and the ticket office was closed because the SAMF was on meal break. So I did a bit of gateline with occasional trips down to the platform to do the hourly checks with drivers to see if sunlight was a problem (it wasn't) and also dealt with a reverser and stabler. Then while I was on the gateline at about 1:30 someone from Revenue came along to take a statement from me regarding a small run in with a ticket tout that happened a few weeks back at Wood Green. Nothing major; he'd noticed me looking over at him and he came through the barriers, tossed some unsavoury language my way, and went down to the platforms. But he's been a persistant problem there and they've decided they want to try for an ASBO so they need to build a file. That took me up to pretty much the end of my shift, and that was that!