29 September - Canary Wharf in 11 minutes. Same as from Knee Hill to Sainsbury’s
In the early days of computing if you reported a bug in a program the
complaint was too often brushed aside as being ‘a feature’.
Perhaps it doesn’t happen now that it would be next to impossible to get any
sort of reply from a big software provider but for Transport for London it is
still a neat way to excuse a problem.
The pedestrian controlled lights outside Sainsbury’s in Abbey Wood have been
faulty on and off for the past ten months, the current failure has been
ongoing for a month or more.
I came out of Sainsbury’s yesterday at 1:30 with a couple of bags of food
destined for East Ham. I just missed the green man so stood by the roadside
entirely alone for a minute at most with the button untouched. The green man returned unasked.
When I got home I found the message below in my Inbox. Apparently the constantly
cycling lights are not a fault, it is an intended feature.
That has to be load of nonsense doesn’t it?
I had to be in Bromley today for what I thought might be a two hour job on an AV
system and wi-fi that had stopped working.
I was on the road by 9 a.m. and six minutes later found myself gridlocked on the
Knee Hill roundabout because of the long tailback from TfL’s wonderful new
feature. The queue went fully half way up new Hill; so much for TfL’s plan to
run a fast bus route (301) between the Crossrail station and Bexleyheath. It’s
what is called Joined Up Thinking.
The job in Bromley took seven hours and not two - but at least it ended in
success. By the time I got back home there was another message in the Inbox. It
said the Sainsbury’s crossing was mended during the day and was working properly now.
But for how long?
I had three short blogs planned for today, now I can’t remember what they were going to be about.