The Eurostar test to establish your breaking point, part 2

I took the train to Ebbsfleet International, as advised, at 5:25AM. Upon arrival, I endure what I will later learn to call a very very very short queue.

With only one train stopping at Ebbsfleet destined for Brussels (just after 1PM), I am advised to go to London St. Pancras to attempt boarding an earlier train. I explain I do not mind the wait, but I am further encouraged to travel to London when a train ticket is provided free of charge.

They make me rush to the platform only to have that train delayed and I am sent to yet another platform.

Shortly after 7AM I arrive to, quite possibly, the busiest train station I have ever seen and proceed to a ridiculously long queue in order to get a new ticket. It takes me half an hour to establish that my current queue, even though parallel to many others, is actually going nowhere. Proceed to change queues.

Now, the real test: four hours in the queue, surrounded by people from all nationalities, whose temper gets worse by the second, and no Eurostar employees to be seen. How are we managing to create a working queue system I will never know. I fear for my toes and fingers which are learning the meaning of frostbite, my bladder has definitely seen better days (the wonders of travelling on your own – no bathroom breaks whilst queueing) and, yet, I should be thankful I am not at the end of the line which has by now extended to the adjacent street outside the station.

Shortly after, the queue system breaks down and it takes the police a good while to restore a resemblance of order. Do you not love the people that complain for half an hour of individuals that jump a queue, proceed to jump the queue themselves, and continue to rant about such individuals for a further hour and a half?

Eurostar employees do not even have the common sense to divide passengers by destinations (France vs. Belgium) and outsiders start taking pictures (and even videos!) as if we were part of Edinburgh zoo’s penguin parade.

I eventually reach the ticket office and I am given a ticket for the train I would have boarded anyway, had I stayed in Ebbsfleet International. Exhaustion stops me from punching the lady placing the pretty sticker on my ticket. However, I do not leave her side without a grunt and a huff. I have a two-hour wait ahead of me.

In X-rays they are rude and pushy. I rush to passport check (highlight of the day so far: the guy at passport control has a stunning smile) and make my way to the toilets where, since I have not had enough, I get to queue a few more minutes.

Then I realise how light I feel. But it has nothing to do with my now empty bladder: I have forgotten my backpack at X-rays. I run there, where a security guard approaches me and asks sweetly if I am okay. My brain thinks “where should I begin?” but all that comes out of my mouth is: bag, mine. He nods, still smiling and I can feel all the blood in my face. I gather my belongings and proceed to a second round of passport control (I’ll take your number now…) and find a place on the floor of the station to sit.

Little by little the blood leaves my face and my hands stop shaking. As I start writing these words, I can see thousands of people waiting to board a Eurostar train. Different moods. Different nationalities. Different colours in their ticket’s stickers.

I am now finishing this text on the train. I am finally on my way to Brussels and, as I expected, I am already forgetting how much I have detested today. How frustrated I have felt. How much I would have liked to punch or yell at someone. It really was not that bad. I can feel my toes again. I will be at my sister’s in just over an hour.

I win, Eurostar. You did not break me.

A.Nurboe 1, Eurostar 0. Thanks for the story A.Nurboe and hope your next trip with Eurostar goes better! What? You are swimming next time? Oh dear…

Related post(s)

• The Eurostar test to establish your breaking point, part 1 (Guest blog) (0)
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The Eurostar test to establish your breaking point, part 1

Most of you will have heard of the recent chaos, compliments of the weather and/or Eurostar (who you choose to blame is completely up to you – the pretty Christamsy snow that welcomed the start of your holidays, or the train company unable to forsee and handle a crisis).

CEO Richard Brown has already apologised publicly for how things went down in the weekend before Christmas, where thousands of people were stranded in the tunnel connecting London with Paris and Brussels. Some passengers spent over half a day in the cold tunnel with no food or drink and uninformed of the actual situation. Several thousands were left in complete uncertainty in train stations, both waiting to board and waiting for loved ones to reach their destination.

Two days of disruption ensued and finally, on Tuesday 22nd, a system was put in place. There were some kinks in the plan but, all in all, it seemed fairly feasible.

I was one of the “lucky” ones to have a booked ticket for the week following the service interruptions, from Ashford International to Brussels Midi.

Now, it is important to state the outstanding ability I have for denial. I choose to believe things will work, I choose to believe that people will be logical and unattached during a crisis, I believe that chaos is not chaos at all, but a cumulus of forces acting under a distribution which I simply have not recognised.

This means that when they told me to come on Thursday for my Wednesday train journey, I accepted it. I even decided that, given the two days of practice under the revised timetable, things would run smoothly when my turn came.

Alas, nowhere in any of Eurostar’s websites was Ashford International mentioned. Most pieces of information referred to London St. Pancras and Paris. I phoned customer care and (after a few hours of unsuccessful dialing) I was told that it would be best to travel to Ebbsfleet International and board the Eurostar from there. Just as well since, as it turned out, no trains were to stop at Ashford International in its way to Brussels on this particular Wednesday at all.

In the early evening of Tuesday it was reported that the new system was woking so well, they were nearly finished with the backlog and were boarding people from future days. I called the call centre a second time to enquire if I should attempt boarding on the Wednesday after all. Not surprisingly, the phone agents’ guess was as good as mine. In accordance to my optimism, I opted to abandon plans of travelling on the Wednesday to give Eurostar an extra day to gather their bearings.

That same evening, Eurostar invited all remaining passengers to travel on Wednesday. Proceed to pack suitcase and set alarm clock bright and early.

I strongly believe Eurostar was merely testing its new customer relationship management programme by pushing its customers to breaking point. If this is not the case, I cannot comprehend how such an established company could arrange things so poorly, and I am willing to assign a zoo monkey the CEO position, for surely he could not have done the job worse.

Follow-up A.Nurboe’s adventures with Eurostar in part 2.

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Unfortunately that’s nothing compared to the torture you’re going to endure for the next two hours. And all because you got duped by a well done trailer which had maybe 10% resemblance with the actual film. Yes, you do see the freaks, and yes there are vampires. Plus ‘vampaneze’. Yes, when I heard it I also went like WTF?! vampaneze as in ‘chimpanzee vampire’? Unless of course they meant ‘japanese vampires’. Because that would be like awesome, and super cool, dude. Not! Come on, when you come up with names like that you should be sent to re-education camp or something, before you spread your bullshit around. There is also some background story, which you get to hear bits and pieces. Kind of standard “destiny” thing. The pieces you get to know sound very cliché and don’t make much sense. Characters are not well developed. Beside being freaks they don’t have much else going on for them. They’re not beliveable nor noticeable. Which I guess is good since you definitely don’t want to remember this performance. Or maybe you do, in case they release a second part of this crap.

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Between knowledge being vast and brains limited, humans have found the ultimate external hard disk. When encountering an unknown word, subject or task, post-humans will not reveal their ignorance, they will just google¹ for the answer. It’s a first step from pure 100% biological humans to cyborgs with direct connection to computer networks.

As with normal issued-at-birth brains which gather during life beliefs and wacky ideas of substandard quality, the augmented brain also requires monitoring to ensure the output satisfies quality control tests².

By 2020, some post-humans will have taken the next step and have their Eees or Palmtops implanted to ensure even faster access to the global knowledge repositories…

…will you be one of them?

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The second month of olivetalks brought a continuation of the Rio Laser and Xen sagas, including some of their most successful posts so far which will be dealt with in more detail in the soon to be published post by ZoltarStark. Besides that we’ve published more miscellaneous posts about computers and a failed attempt at sarcasm. The average daily amount of viewers during the second month was seen to steadily climb to almost double the result from January. The olivetalks writers were very busy that month, trying to post something every day as documented in the upcoming post by LadyRostand.

The third month of our blog has showed an even faster growth, the total amount of views in March was over 50% higher than January and February combined! This surprised us a bit but nonetheless we are very happy with the olivetalks performance. We put at least part of the “blame” on the new fashion sense of the blog. The average daily amount of viewers in March was more than twice than in February. All that in spite of the writers changing the blogging strategy and publishing higher quality posts while reducing the posting frequency to half of the preceding months. LadyRostand is writing a post about the two main blogging strategies – often short posts or less often but longer ones. ZoltarStark will give some insights into publishing posts which attract many viewers based on our experiences with olivetalks.

Well done olivetalks

And thank you all our readers for your support, your comments or just showing up from different search engines. A blog without you, the readers, would not be half as fun!

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April Fools’ Day

The Queen of England was seen riding a motorbike; Glasgow has decided to build an escalator connecting the two existing train stations; Wales is picking up French as its new official language.

On April 1st everything is accepted. The sillier the better. The one day in the UK-calendar in which you are actually encouraged to lie. But it seems that in my life, lying comes easier than telling the truth, so everything I say, my actions and my reactions should always be taken with a pinch of salt.

But now, as I sit in the freezing library “learning” about Markov chains and Markov decision processes, I realise it is the best day of the year to let the mask slide a bit and actually tell you the truth… or some of it at least.

I do mind he has a girlfriend. I don’t want to have a fling. And coming from a broken family has not only given me my sarcastic attitude, but has left me terrified of showing my feelings in case I get hurt, to the extent that, most of the time, I don’t even know them myself.

But then again, why should today be any different? I might just be pulling your leg.

Happy April Fools’ Day to everyone.

A.Nurboe

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A Waterstone’s kindness
As my older brother and I walked past Waterstone’s (the East end of Princes Street one) on the afternoon of Thursday the 24th, a little soft toy in the window display caught our eyes. It was a tiny Spot (Eric Hill’s amazing children’s books, anyone?). We went in to find out how we could get it and saw a big selection of Spot books but no soft toy. We asked an employee and she said we were to purchase three of Spot’s books in order to get it.

Whilst debating the craziness of buying the books just so we could have Spot (I am 21, after all), the Waterstone’s employee came with the soft toy from the window display and said it was a bit scruffy and dirty, but that we could just take him. If we had lied and said that it was for a younger nephew, I am sure that our amazed faces and the sheer happiness we expressed thanking her would have easily given away that the soft toy was in fact for us. As we were left speechless I realised I had not thanked her enough. I hope this makes up for it.

PS. Yes, that yellow thing is A.Nurboe’s attempt at a cross-over between Spot and an olive… Thanks for trying A.Nurboe!

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While reading many different blogs on very different stories, there was one sentence that caught my attention “[...] when I first imported the old Blogger Blogspot version of the site into the Sciencetext.com, I believe I had 2-3 RSS subscribers (me, me again, and my mother) [...]” . The initial readers, subscribers, people that comment, etc. to one’s blog are generally family members. Exactly what happened with olivetalks. The ClustrMap had a huge dot where I live, result of me refreshing the page one (thousand) time too many and one where an olive’s wonderful brother lives. As the days have gone by, the dots have multiplied, surely thanks to the tiny olives efforts?

Ok, ok, so a couple of mother olives told their families about the page, and that would explain a couple of dots more…

Yes, it’s true that a father olive emailed his friends informing them quite innocently about

this very interesting “new” way of teaching or just relaxing by venting, called blogs, like they are doing in… let’s see which one comes to mind as a good example,… oh yeah, http://olivetalks.com

And a couple of dozens of obliging friends popped their heads in olivetalks… Some even from as far away as South America!

Alright, so that explains the southern European dots… the centre European ones… the Scottish visits… the lost penguin from the very northern part of Scandinavia… fiiiiiiiiiine, it explains whole Europe and even South America. California’s visits are obviously from ClustrMaps or maybe even Google or Wordpress, I know…

But!

Look at an image of olivetalks’s ClustrMap from today (if you click on the image you can see an enlarged version, where the dots are clearer), right in the middle of the yellow circle:

Do you see that? Do you? It’s a dot from what I’m guessing is a Japanese island (2nd guess would be a boat… 3rd a shark with Internet connection…). Yes! A user from Japan checked out olivetalks!

Can I finally consider myself successful for obtaining my first reader without any nudging involved? Can I, can I? Or should I just accept the fact that I have a Japanese cousin…

All the best,

theolive

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We intend to use this blog to comment on anything and everything that we find interesting.

Who are we? Good question. Bear with us and you will soon find out.

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