How not to apologise.

So I know that I have not written for a while but I do not have any A level classes at the moment so no one to inspire me! I was going to apologise but then I thought of the recent empty apologies that I have received and now I have a topic.

I must admit that most of the lame platitudes have come from, what used to be called, British Rail. I know that in my lifetime the railway network has gone from giving no information at all as to why the train has ground to a halt or is running on a totally different schedule to the one published, to now giving way too much information and the snowflake blame culture seems to have slipped in, as it is never their fault. This is really surprising as in other areas of our lives we are encouraged to be kind to one another and that any wrong word is tantamount to bullying, even if it is an actual fact. I digress.

So the normal excuses of 'leaves on the track' have now been replaced by 'a person who has entered the railway's property'. For the latter excuse, we were informed that a helicopter was looking for the unfortunate human, although after an hour of us just sitting on the train, the driver and those in charge decided that enough was enough and we went as fast as possible missing out about 6 stations towards our final destination. I am still unsure what that achieved. Those on the train were either trying to work out how they were going to get to their destination which was no longer a stop or the rest of us were waiting in anticipation for the bump bump as we all finally found the alleged person who had entered the tracks illegally. I am pleased to announce that noone appears to have been injured in the making of this blog but I also wonder whether there really was an actual person. Possibly the driver needed to have a break as their number of allotted working hours had come to a halt. This is not a random suggestion, this is another apology used by travel companies at the moment, the train/bus/plane is cancelled as there are not enough drivers/pilots, they may have Covid or been contacted by Track and Trace, well that is unlikely! What is surprising is that this nearly always happens on a Sunday. Questionable but worth blaming the current pandemic.

When I said there was more information given to the public, I probably also meant that it is more frequent. On a tube the other day the driver apologised 4 times that we were waiting at a red light. To be honest I feel that once was enough. It is not like any new passengers had got on and not heard the notice! We were in a tunnel where only those with the fanciest phones were able to tweet that noone had told us what was happening. I am sure that you have all noticed that the only way to get a response from a company is to bad mouth them on social media.

On that note I am going to leave you with no apology but just to say that I am off to tweet about Opodo and their lack of customer service or my refund. Possibly then the person who has been going to ring me straight back for the previous year and a half will eventually make contact and blame someone else for not doing their job.