An exciting week, sort of

25 to 28 March 2015

It was too sunny to go to work on Wednesday morning but, being a concentious sort of girl, I did anyway. There seem to be magnolias popping up everywhere and I spotted some lovely ones, still speckled with dew, in the gardens I passed on the river route. I love the excitement of spring, seeing new flowers every day. One side of the road has moorings and, as I passed each gate and fence I peeked through and over at the blue sky reflected in the river. It would be nice to have a mooring and a little boat. If I did I could sail to work.

We had a busy telephone day for no particular reason. Most of the enquiries were about bus times and lost property but two calls were from one of our serial complainers. He phones about twice a day to moan that the driver doesn’t give him a ticket. This would be all very well and good if he didn’t have an OAP pass. Concessionary pass holders do not need tickets, as we keep telling him, their pass is their ticket. Despite being told twice a day for the past year he insists on calling every single time he gets a bus and he can be quite rude. Last week the RCSM wrote to him to tell him drivers were not allowed to issue him a ticket and that he was to stop phoning and wasting everyone’s time, especially as he was so rude to her staff. When Sabrina mentioned this he told her had had the letter but he was not going to read it, swore at her and put the phone down. He has too much time on his hands in my opinion.

Thursday morning got off to a bad start. It was pouring with rain when I got up and things hadn’t improved by the time I left the house. The spring flowers were all looking a little soggy and sorry for themselves as I made my way to work and the sky over the boardwalk was grey and threatening. There was a train coming through as I crossed Horseshoe Bridge and I stopped to take a photo for want of something more exciting.

Excitement came soon enough, although I rather wish it hadn’t. Almost as soon as I got in the door reports began to come in about a serious accident on the motorway. For once it wasn’t the city of  Bristol grinding to a halt, it was the two big cities on the south coast. The accident had happened between Southampton and Portsmouth, When a lorry hit several cars and a huge fire ensued. We were told someone had died but that was about as much as we knew. The motorway was closed all day. People were stuck in their car for six hours. Buses were running three hours or more late. Our phones went mad.

Most people were understanding. Sadly some weren’t.
“What are you going to do about it?” one angry man said. “I’ve been stuck at this bus stop for an hour and you can’t even tell me when the next bus will come. What kind of customer service is that? I’m  it even anywhere near the f***ing motorway so how can an accident make any difference?”
He couldn’t grasp that both cities were gridlocked because everyone who would normally use the motorway was now on all the other roads, which weren’t designed for so much traffic.
“I’ve missed my dentist appointment now and I’m sending the bill to you,” he went on.

All this wouldn’t have been quite so bad if his destination was more than a mile from the stop he’d been standing at all this time. He could probably have walked there while he’d been moaning at me on the phone. The motorway was closed all night while they replaced the fire damaged surface.

The weather had done a complete turnaround by Friday morning. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and it felt as if spring had come back. For a change I decided to take the boardwalk route to work. Now they’ve started work on the eastbound carriageway the footpath on my side of the road is open again, meaning I could get onto the embankment and take the steps down to the path to the boardwalk. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to do that.

The tide was out and, from the river path, I looked out over the mud and wrecked jetty at the bridge. The skeleton ship made me smile as I approached the embankment, even if there is a lot less of it these days and someone has decorated it with one of the road cones. Looking out from the middle of the bridge at the con trails reflected in the water remineded me of all my walks to work at Silver Helm. When I reached the steps at the other side I almost walked past and carried on towards town on autopilot.

Right at the last moment I remembered where I was heading and made my way down the steps, under the bridge and onto the trail. In the distance I could see swans gathered by the rocks and Horseshoe Bridge in the distance. Behind me I could see the workmen’s digger on the bridge but no sign of any work taking place. I swear they could have done this in a month if they’d actually been working the whole time.

As I got closer to the rocks I thought I spotted black swans amongst the white. Closer still and I knew I was right. Two of the three black swans were happily mixing with their mute swan cousins. Mute swans are an indigenous species in England while black swans are rare in the wild. They originate in Australia and all the ones found in the UK started off as imports in private collections. Over time some have escaped and continue to live in the wild but there are very few of these. In 2004 the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust recorded just forty three with only nine breeding pairs. The three I’ve seen regularly on the Itchen don’t seem to have bred yet but I’m ever hopefull of seeing black cygnets some day.

The better weather seemed to bring a better day at work too. The RCSM was in and we had a team leader meeting, which proved interesting. There are big changes afoot, although all the details aren’t clear yet. It sounds like it may mean a new job tile and some added responsibilities, making my role a little more challenging, but in a good way. Even more exciting is a change to the early shift. Of course this will mean early starts but it will also bring an end to working late evenings which can only be good.

The angry pensioner was back in the afternoon but the RCSM took care of him. When he started to swear at her she told him she would have him banned from all our buses if he carried on phoning up and swearing at her staff. Hopefully that will do the trick but I’m not holding my breath.

It was fully light on Saturday when I left for my early morning walk to work. This will be the last of the daylight early starts for a while though because this weekend the clocks go forward. The most exciting thing about the walk to work was seeing an abandoned crutch on the pavement as I walked towards the slipway. I couldn’t help wondering how someone could lose a crutch and not notice. Maybe there is magic in the air around these parts. If they realise there’ll be people queuing up to take the curative waters. There were two herons sitting on one of the wrecks, at least I think they were herons, they were too far away to be sure.

Sabrina had the day off so I was on my own from seven until ten when Elaine arrived. Usually Saturday mornings are quiet but, for some reason, this time it was busy. Most of the calls were the annoying kind.
“I need a bus time.”
“Where are you leaving from and where are you going?”
“Um, Sainsbury’s. I can’t remember the name of the road but it’s near a big roundabout. I want to go to that big new shop, you know the one, they built it last year, it’s right outside that village, I can’t remember the village name now but they have a church with a spire.”

By the time Elaine came in I was tearing my hair out. Even with two of us on the phones it seemed like it was going to be one of those mornings, full of people who thought we were mind readers and then got exasperated when we didn’t recognise the vague descriptions of places that could be anywhere in the south of England. The call that took the prize was mine. It was a man complaining about a bus driver pulling out on him and nearly causing an accident.

“Did you get the service number of the bus?” I asked when he’d finished ranting.
“No, I was too busy trying not to hit him,” he snapped.
“Maybe you got the registration number or the fleet number, the string of large numbers written on the back, front and side of the bus?”
“No! I told you, I was too busy trying not to hit him. You could hardly expect me to notice things like that. I want the driver sacked though, he shouldn’t be allowed on the road.”
“Obviously we would like to trace the driver and interview him,” I said. “We could also download the CCTV from the bus but, to do that, I would need to know which bus it was. So far you haven’t given me anything that would identify it. Maybe you noticed which way it was headed?”
“No I didn’t. I was traumatised. It was coming out of the bus station at about ten to nine and it was a red double decker. Surely there can’t be many red double dockers coming out of the bus station around that time? If you refuse to do something I’m going to go to the police and report it.”
Hopefully he will because they are going to have as much of a laugh as I did when he’d finally put the phone down on me. Talk about a needle in a haystack!

All in all it was in exciting week, if not always for the right reasons. Wonder what next week will bring?