Salocin

I was going back to Windsor (via Slough) on the train last night - I caught the 11:05 train to Slough which takes 17 minutes to get to Slough and therefore arrives in good time to catch the last train to Windsor.

An hour and a half later, in the boiling hot non-air-conditioned carriage, the passengers were not in the best of moods. Most of us had deliberately missed the previous train because it's a slow train that stops at every station. This was supposed to be the fast train and we hadn't even reached the first stop.

What really gets annoying in the UK, however, is the tendency to treat customers like mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them on shit.

After standing still for about 30 minutes, the train driver finally came on the intercom and announced that we would be moving in 5 or 10 minutes. Then we had complete radio silence for another 45 minutes. When she came back on the intercom and said that we would be moving in another 10 minutes, nobody believed her anymore, and a collective groan rose from the entire carriage.

It wouldn't take much to give the customers just a little more respect than that - you have, after all, confined them in quarters smaller than those of a prison, for the best part of two hours, without their say-so and without letting them know when they might be set free (sounds a bit like Guantanamo when you put it like that, minus the abuse and the overalls). All it would take would be to let them know what's really going on.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're very sorry, but an incompetent colleague of mine authorised works on this line without letting you know before you got on. I know you wanted to get home in 20 minutes, but at the rate things are going, we're going to be here for a couple of hours. You have my apologies, although I understand if that really doesn't cut any ice with you at midnight, seeing as it's clearly ruined any chance of your getting a decent night's sleep". That would be refreshing...

If they did that, however, passengers would break through the windows, walk off the train tracks and find themselves taxis. This is unsurprising, but clearly would shift the problem from the passengers to the train company that now has a broken set of carriages - and they wouldn't want that, it might be inconvenient.

It costs about the same to drive from Paddington to Bracknell every working day for a year as it does to get an annual train ticket (including the discount one gets for buying it annually). Around 3000 pounds. When you factor in the cost of the delays you will inevitably be experiencing by using the train system, it's a wonder we're not all driving, every day. At least when there's a traffic jam, I can turn on the radio and find out what's going on, how long the delay will be, and adapt my journey accordingly, or perhaps inform people I am travelling to how late I will be. Until they manage - at the very least - to inject some predictability, information-sharing and consistency into the train system here, I'm afraid they're always going to be on the receiving end of the disdain I witnessed from more regular passengers on the train last night. And rightly so.

As some people who have read this weblog in the past will know, I am no stranger to computer failure. Over the past 3 years, my IBM Thinkpad has shown me blue screen after blue screen - hard disk failure, boot sector corruption, motherboard meltdown, screen glitches, graphics card self-destruct... I've seen it all.

Through it all, IBM's expensive but essential 3-year warranty has fixed all the disasters the laptop has been able to throw at me. They've installed 2 new motherboards (the first one they installed was broken out of the box), and given me 3 new keyboards. But it is now August, the warranty ran out in July, and the computer failed a week ago.

Much as I admire IBM (although now I think it's called Lenovo) for their machines, I have to say that without the warranty I would have been up the proverbial creek, using the screen as a paddle, long ago. Their service (provided you pay for it) is cool, but their computers fail - and this is the rub, I don't think that makes them special in any way.

All laptops fail, that's why companies depreciate them over 18 months. I'm now typing on my company's Dell Latitude D600, and while it's not creaking or falling apart at the seams, and while it still boots fairly quick, it's a child's toy compared to my old IBM T30. No DVD player on this corporate tool - it's like being in the dark ages (cinematically speaking).

I shall now have to find a way to (a) get the IBM fixed and squeeze another 6 months out of it, or (b) buy a new laptop. I'm edging towards option (b) but don't want to shell out a lot of cash. Looking at the online stores, the difference between a 600-pound computer and a 1600-pound computer is limited - half a meg of memory, a faster processor, a better graphics card, more HD space and so on, but what does it really mean? Unless I expect my new laptop to be able to play GTA3 like the IBM could, I don't need all that nonsense - I just want to be able to code websites, write emails, watch DVDs and browse the web.

But it's still 800 pounds for an acceptable low-spec laptop that's actually portable (the 600-pound ones have 1 hour of battery life and weigh the same as the sofa I'm sitting on).

I guess it all boils down to expectations - I had gotten used to the idea that the IBM would last for at least 5 years, but that's just not in the nature of these things - just as animal lives can be measured in breaths taken or beats of the heart, computer lives can be measured in keystrokes, reboots, or perhaps 'maximum number of windows updates'.

The IBM has had it's day, RIP Thinkpad, "'It tried to boot but the hard disk shuddered, the screen went blue and now it's buggered".

And the bastard took all my music with it.