5 things that ‘Grind my gears’ when travelling on the underground
I am lucky enough to work in Mayfair, one of the nicest parts of London. However, due to other commitments, I live outside of London and have a ridiculously long commute every day. On average it takes me about 2 hours to get to work. This involves walking from my house to the train station (10 minutes) a long train journey (1hr 40mins) and a 20 minute walk from the train station to work. However, if I wish to shorten this journey, by about 10 minutes, once I get to London, I can get the tube to work. Now, don’t get me wrong, the London Underground is an impressive feat of engineering. Beginning operation in 1863 and servicing over 270 stations with the track length totalling over 460kilometres, the London underground managed to transport over 1.1bn passengers in 2011 alone, with that number expected to rise year on year for the foreseeable future. In a nutshell, the only thing more impressive is getting a hard on, watching paint dry, after 2 bottles of whiskey and a gallon of beer (your average Tuesday night)
However, as impressive as it is, it still has to be said that there are just some things that really do grind my gears when travelling on the tube.
So, get your Oyster card ready as I take you through my top 5 annoyances when travelling on the London underground.
5. Sweat
There are certain times of the day when it’s advisable not to travel on the underground. One of those times is rush hour. This occurs between 8am to 9am and then again between 5pm to 6:30pm. Unfortunately, due to having to work a 9-5 job, these are the exact times when I have to use it. When you consider that each Underground train is around 10 carriages long and can hold around 1000 people at any one time, if it is filled to capacity, it’s gonna get a little bit toasty. In 2003 the London Underground reached 52°C. To put that in perspective, it is illegal to transport animals over 35°C. Oh, by the way, when I say that it holds around 1000 people at any time, that’s just an estimate from the good people who run the underground, Transport for London. In essence, it is a free for all and the only way to determine actual capacity is kind of a trial and error method. As in, when the train is busy, and people are already spilling out of the doors, you have to give it a go and see if you can get on. Even if you don’t have to be at your specific destination in a hurry and you know that the next train will be along in under 2 minutes, you still have to try and get on.
Here’s the problem. If you do manage to board the massive motorised sardine can and your journey is anything over 20 seconds (which all journeys are) then you are going to sweat. And I mean sweat a lot!
4. Newspapers
This happens more in the evening than it does in the morning. There is a free newspaper given away just before the rush hour that seems to be made of magic. It’s called the Evening Standard and on any given tube journey you will see around 9 out of 10 people reading the same it. There are a few reasons that this annoys me. First of the bat is the fact that out of those 9 people that are reading the newspaper 9 of them have already read the news stories during the day either on the their work computers whilst they were meant to be working or on their smart phones, on their cigarette break, whilst they were meant to be working. Secondly, as previously mentioned, during rush hour, the tube is rammed! There is barely enough space to blink let alone open up a frickin newspaper to read news that you have already read that day.
And finally, it really gets to me that the idiots who decide to take this free news paper, purely because they can’t sit on a tube for 5 minutes and not do anything, seem to think that it’s absolutely fine to just discard the paper on the floor, seat, behind the seat or over one of the handrails. The thing is, these idiots only do this with newspapers. If someone is drinking a coffee and has finished with the paper cup, they seem to do this with
Alternalists 
Posted on April 3, 2012
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