Hurdles A visiting barrier operator told me that when people try and vault the barriers (a frequent occurrence), she'll open them whilst the person's in mid air so they end up flat on their face - true story. I must try that sometime.

Standard Procedure The guy on the barriers was talking to a young lad about his ticket. "So you've been robbed?" asks my colleague. "What?" "You just told me someone stole your ticket so you had to get this one. Is that right?" "Yeah." My colleague gets his phone out: "Well, in that case I have to call the police." "What?" "You've been robbed; it's a crime. I have to call the police." "Alright, that didn't happen." He puts his phone away. "How old are you?" "16." "Why are you travelling on a child ticket?" (If you're 16 or more you're counted as an adult on the railways.) "I always do." Yours truly pipes in: "That's illegal." My colleague backs me up. "It's an invalid ticket." "It's a felony." He looks bewildered: "What happens now, then?" That wonderful moment, when you look into a passenger's eyes and know they expect a fine. Glorious. My colleague spoke before I did: "I have to lock you in the booth." He gets up and stands outside the booth, gesturing for the lad to step inside. How did this guy buy his story: "For how long?" "Three hours. Why, do you have somewhere to be?" I still don't know how I kept a straight face. "Yeah, I'm late for college already." "What do you study?" "Sport science." "You gonna be manager of Chelsea?" "I dunno." My colleague sighs, deep in thought. My gut is stinging from holding in the laughter. "Tell you what I'll do," he says, the moment of judgment imminent, "you become manager of Chelsea, give me free tickets, and no one needs to hear about this." The kid's face was a picture.

Best song lyric ever (I only wish I could tell you which song it was...): "I punched a lion in the throat."

Lippy Little Twit I quite enjoy standing at the barriers of the station sometimes. You really do meet all sorts of people, and the barrier staff don't mind an extra pair of hands being around. This kid came up to the barriers and asked, well, actually told me to let him through. I said, "Of course - show me your ticket." "I ain't got one." He was very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. "Well, I'm sorry, mate," says I, "you won't get through without one." "But I've gotta get back to London!" What do you want me to do? Come out and pay for your ticket myself? I told him again, as politely as a Londoner possibly can, it wasn't gonna happen. Then comes the beautiful line, the line that spelled out the glory of this conversation; this is the source of inspiration for you even reading this Opuss now. "My dad works in McDonald's at London *station*." (I won't name any of our stations etc in case I get shot by my company, and I'm not talking about losing my job.) His dad worked in the McDonald's at our London terminus, and apparently that entitled him to free travel. "I came through free before. There was no one on the barriers." Well, there is now, fool. I ask him if he has a staff travel pass or anything like that with him. No. "Well then, unless McDonald's runs trains for itself that I don't know about, the only trains that run through here are mine, and unless you work for the train company, you're just a regular passenger." "I'll call my dad - he'll tell you it's ok." "Ah, so your dad's a manager in the railway company?" "Nah, he works in McDonald's." "Oh, not for the trains?" "Nah." "Well, in that case, if anything, I have authority above him, and I say you don't travel without a ticket." I was half tempted to ring London and get his dad on the phone to explain that his son was being an upstart idiot, but then he really put his foot in it. A passenger came through the barriers and this lad tried to hold them open. The chap operating the gates, the most peaceful, jovial soul I know, stormed out of his booth up to the gate and brought his red face inches from the boy's: "Break my barriers and you'll pay to fix them! Let go of my gates now! Don't touch my barriers or I'll make you pay for repairs! It's £200 to fix just one of these! Hold it open like that and I'll make sure the repair fee comes out of your pocket!" I was almost on the floor laughing. The boy let the barriers go. My colleague went and sulked in his booth. The boy turned to me: "You're shit at your job." "Young man, if I was shit at my job, you would be on a train by now."

Chicken Chips (For the benefit of the reader, I work at a railway station in south west London and have decided that blogging the regular - and often peculiar - stories that occur might be a good way to expand my creativity.) 0030 hours on Sunday morning. A night shift: 2230 on Saturday to 0640 on Sunday. A gentleman (a chavvy-wannabe-hard man, complete with black baseball cap and puffer jacket), sits down on a bench on Platform 3 and digs into chicken and chips (I say chicken: knowing most chippies it was probably once a squirrel). I approach him and politely inform him that there aren't any more trains from that platform. He explains that he's going to the next station along - in the opposite direction. "Sir, you need to be over here on Platform 2 to reach your destination." He promptly stands, packs his food back into the plastic bag and prepares to leap onto the track to reach said platform. This is when the supervisor (me), gets defensive: "Sir, you use the subway! You do not step on that track!" The bloody idiot. He defiantly presents me with the middle finger of his left hand, turns, and begins walking down Platform 3. He ends up descending the ramp onto the track. "Sir, come back!" You selfish git, you could die down there. I'm again blessed with a view of one of his middle fingers, and told non-phonetically to Foxtrot Oscar... And he's gone; vanished into the night. He can't be arsed to wait two minutes for his train, nor even to simply use a subway. That train could now potentially gain a new frontal feature thanks to his body being pasted to the front of it. So there I am on the phone to the signalman who is in turn on the phone to the driver; I'm also on the phone to the transport police (who I expect will show up in approximately four-five hours time, as usual), when the signalman phones me back to say that the driver of the train watched this young gentleman walk from the track to the platform at his intended destination and exit the station. The moral of this story, dear passengers is this: if you want to travel on a train, travel on a train. If you want to travel on the track, travel on a train. My only regret is that his diet will now kill him before a train does. But maybe that's for the best.