The swing door operator.

Today I swore at a member of TFL staff. Okay, so not directly at them, but my point was made and as I stormed off (as much as you can be described to 'storm' through a platform full of sweaty, aggrevated commuters all heading home for a Friday night reprieve), I immediatly started to feel guilty. You see, the thing is the guy didn't really deserve it.
It was his ferverously inept colleague that did.

The joy of commuting from the commuter belt means that you get lovely little season tickets. Mine's currently heading to be a month old. That's all well and good. For the joy of not having to queue every day for a ticket, which is hell itself, you end up with a ticket that after four days of use no longer works through the manual barriers in any station.

(The hell fury of queueing daily for a ticket is because normally for me, my train is due to depart in five minutes and I'm five deep in a queue of people whilst the person at the desk is buying a train ticket for Kuala Lumpar for five people, not travelling this month and enquiring about the transport connections and weather for that time of year).

So with my ticket that no longer works through the barriers, I have to seek out the poor sod assigned to letting people with bulky luggage and tickets that no longer work, through the swing gate next to the barriers. These people are not often immediatly attentive. You've run up several flights of stairs, bustled past slow moving sweaty and tired people, a faint achievement of being ahead of the herd sweeps over you, and then you're suddenly plunged behind those people and you find yourself finally sweeping onto the concourse with the less abled and those trailing ten kids on the journey. The people that operate the swing doors are most normally; the opposite end of the barriers to which you arrived, sometimes held up by tourists asking for information, often distracted by fellow colleagues, and more than normally lobotomised. I don't mean to sound cruel, nor do I wish to generalise staff of TFL but my current experience does not example otherwise.

On today's occassion the woman in question was in violation of several commuting offences:
(1) Holding up the entire moving walkway, through lack of management of the volume of people trying to exit through the gates. This meant that the normally swift underground movers were forced to stand stationary on the left side of the moving walkway where they would normally be able to walk. The moving walkway moves at a speed of 1mph. You can also see numerous tubes depart during this torture. You could have been on one of them.
(2) General jobsworthnyness. No I do not have time nor inclination to prove to you that my ticket is no longer working by putting it through the manual barrier to be met with the barrier exclaiming "Seek Assistance". Neither, do I expect did the 20 people infront of me who were also put through this procedure.
(3) That she would not allow those with non-functional tickets to go through the swing door. Only persons with bulky kit could go through them. Thus people with 'broken' tickets had to wait idly by closed barriers, whilst she SLOWLY allowed persons with their kitchen sinks to pass through. Many people tried to get through the swing door during this process (I must have been 50 people deep at that point). When I finally had enough of this, I too tried to pass through the swing door to be met by her colleague explaing "No Ma'am come this way", pointing at the manual barrier. For the best part of my journey I was hot, tired, my feet hurt; I'd been jostled, shoved, elbowed, stuck infinately in queues with people in the same disposition.

I then swore.