42042 & 42365
It was a very FGW day today.
First of all it was that red ringed and highlighted day of the year that means I get to spend over £4,000 pounds on a tiny slip of paper that allows me to travel between home and dirty old London town everyday for the next year. Remember kids, the ticket is for the journey, not for the seat.
This mucky deal was carried out by the best thing to happen to Thatcham Station since they repainted the platform shelters, Nice Peter, who made it the fastest 4 grand I’d ever spent but at least I was safely ensconced on the 06:57 and started the new travelling year with an on time arrival at Paddington.
What wasn’t on time is the 15 working days it took FGW to reply to an enquiry I’d sent in after the 2 hours I had to spend in a field just outside Theale. (Remember this fun episode fans?) What I was enquiring about was I’d heard that FGW produces letters for passengers to give to their employees when their time-keeping is called into question. As my three month review was due on that very same day I felt that being armed with such a letter might be prudent.
Alas what I got back from a certain Nigel D’souza wasn’t quite what I expected and leaving aside the fact he hadn’t bothered to sign it and the quite bizarre staple stamped in it in the middle of the page, there was no way I’d have presented this to any employee, even if I had been working for Fred Karno’s army, mostly because of the confusing sentence that read “…feel so let down especially you get late to work.”
I know it’s a cheap shot to take the micky out of one single missing word (God only knows how many mistakes are littered throughout this blog) but had this been included along with a signature and a properly presented letter I may have found it easier to believe Nigel’s ascertain that he was “genuinely sorry”, and hadn't just printed off a boiler-plate reply, shoved it in an envelope and was probably first in line for the canteen’s shepherd’s pie lunch as normal.
Still, he’s made the blog so that’ll be nice for him!
Tonight I got 42042, a Carriage D on the Penzance Service and 42365, a Carriage B on the Frome Service. I had a seat on both. Bargain!
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