Mark Carroll's Journal

The intercity segment of my in-office commute is paid for by a flexipass I load onto my ScotRail smartcard. I've observed the old, exhausted passes accumulating on my smartcard and wondered about them. The new passes are meant to auto-load onto my card at my designated station.

What actually seemed to happen, first revealed by a seek assistance at the ticket gate, is that my card somehow got full and my latest pass silently failed to appear on it. Naturally, I have a number of questions, relating to how I can unfill my card, how I can know when this might happen, how I can fix it, etc.

Unfortunately, ScotRail's customer service appears to be quite useless. The in-person people are friendly but apparently not the smartcard team, goodness knows when or where they appear with their equipment and expertise. The online folks take longer than advertised to respond and then don't actually answer any questions.

When this happened, with some encouragement from me about how, yes, I did in fact have a pass waiting to be loaded from quite some days ago, a nice but confused person did manage to finally do a thing to allow the pass to appear on my card.

What about next time? Goodness knows, their website FAQ certainly doesn't seem to. I suppose that they benefit rather from a lack of competition for my required route because with a service like this I'll definitely keep an eye out for alternatives.

My employer has a major office near Grand Central in NYC and this past week I attended an internal on-site for my, er, division or whatever, I don't know how the hierarchy is categorized.

I'm more used to Newark than JFK so I came into Newark then took NJ Transit to Penn Station, which I'm used to from taking Amtrak from Boston, etc. Perhaps a lucky choice, given what shadowkat mentions about current signage in Grand Central. Just as the rail link to Paris wasn't working when I last wanted to get in from the airport, this time the little "air train" thing from the station to the terminals wasn't in service, to get to the airport proper we were jammed onto unsuitable shuttle buses: too many in each, without decent luggage storage. I realized that the secret is probably just to get off at the first terminal one reaches, go through security, then use the airside shuttle to the right terminal, those seem to remain pleasant and appropriate. The NJ Transit return train was rather better than the outbound, which was vaguely labeled New York, didn't have any next station display I could hear; the next station was, I think, uttered unintelligibly over an awful public address system.

Being flown by United was maybe the more disappointing economy experience I've had for some time. It's years since I used a US carrier but, goodness, I had so little room after the guy in front reclined their seat and the food was about the worst I've had in economy for a long time.

I don't know why but I continue to feel much more at home in the US, though more so in the kind of place mindstalk wouldn't encourage: central Ohio was about perfect for me in being open, sprawling, easy to drive around and park among. That's, er, not NYC. It was easy enough to navigate Midtown Manhattan on foot, everywhere I ate (almost all Asian) was good, but goodness the smells, and the lack of view with the tall buildings surrounding. My hotel room was quite decent indeed, though required some investigation to figure how to operate each light. I discovered the mini-refrigerator only on the last morning when doing my thorough pre-checkout search of the room.

As reported by shadowkat, there are some excellent metal tiles set into both sides of 41st, Library Way near the public library, each with quotes and such, my favorites were probably by Kate Chopin and Garson Kanin so I shall have to find out who those are. Bryant Park was less park than I had hoped for.

The weather was generally lovely, plenty of warm sunshine, I never needed my coat. I headed out of Manhattan sooner than necessary: it had gotten overly hot for a sensible stroll with luggage, and I wanted to get clear of Penn Station before the crowds and security descended for the Knicks game nearby, for which ticket prices became sky-high.

I stopped to think about how I notice the price of mailing a letter in Britain. In my youth, it wasn't a cost I thought worth much consideration. So, I stopped to investigate.

The Bank of England turns out to have an excellent inflation calculator allowing users to, check how prices in the UK have changed since 1209, which warms my heart.

If I go back twenty years, apparently something costing £100 back then now costs around £175, handwaving whatever weighted averaging they do to determine that. At that time, a second-class stamp used to cost 23p so we might expect it to cost around 40p now. They actually cost 91p so it's no wonder that I'm noticing the cost in a way that I wasn't before.

I can see why this might be so. Fewer letters are mailed at all so scale may be much worse. No doubt we have the cumulative effects of various government austerity drives. Perhaps there's simply been incompetent management. After all, somebody ought to be paying large sums of money to the many innocent postmasters who were so culpably wronged by senior personnel over many years.

Recently, in discussing other-media spin-offs, I was reminded of the three trilogies of Babylon 5 novels, which were decent enough that I would be happy to reread them. However, they are long enough out of print to be enough effort and money to obtain that I shan't bother. It seems a shame that such things just fade away.

Back when I first read them, I hadn't appreciated how that kind of book, like most manga, falls out of print, never to be reprinted. I don't know what ethicists might think but I would be quite open to a rule that put into the public domain any work that was once openly and widely available then was not similarly reoffered for a long period, assuming no conflict with the public interest.

At the weekend, I happened to be further up the Clyde at the right time to see the bow of a new Naval frigate being transported up the river to the shipyard where the warships are assembled. I didn't know what kind of ship it was for at first, I learned that later online.

Glasgow has a great city center, rather walkable and with the subway for longer hops. Next to Central Station is a fancy building some decades older than the converted Victorian mill that I live in. At least, there was, until a vape store somehow caught fire. Now there are cordoned-off streets, the smell of smoke, and a considerable number of sad, shocked people and even more rather inconvenienced ones.

I have no love for vape stores in the first place, I tend to avoid patronizing establishments that expand their range to vapes. Given vapes' propensity to catch fire in waste processing centers, etc., goodness knows who thought it a good idea to allow a vape shop to locate next to a critical transit hub in a historic landmark whose construction substantially predates fire safety codes. Perhaps we shall find out, with luck when I am not feeling grumpy and vengeful.

My commute may be quite unaffected: when I pass close to the area of the fire, I'm in a subway tunnel on my way to Queen Street, the other main railway station; I hope that tomorrow's train to Edinburgh isn't overly crowded by passengers displaced from Central which won't be open yet.

I refueled our car this evening, I figured that gas prices aren't dropping anytime soon. In probably 2003 I tried holding off filling the car with gas, back when I drove an old Ford Crown Victoria (with around a seventy litre fuel tank), but eventually I had to give in and pay the higher prices. At least, with mostly just driving around the city in our hybrid in the near term, today's gas should last us for a good while.

Update: My morning train's quite full but I arrive comfortably early enough to have snagged a seat easily. A pox on the selfish passengers who use their coat and bag to occupy two seats while others are still boarding.

Last Saturday included a combination of things that made me wish that things were done better in general.

( I was annoyed by football fans and other things … )

( … and by further things. )

I just want things to work as they should and I still find it notable they seemed to work rather better back when I was staying in Metro Manila than they do in Glasgow. I know, I should be part of the solution but this is my journal so I can moan when I like when things don't go smoothly.

I took a few days off work, I'm back in the office this Friday. My time off has kept me rather busy with all manner of unexpected things, to some extent that looks to continue. To give one example, on the evening before Thanksgiving, with a raw turkey marinating, there is a large puff of smoke, the power breakers trip, and our electric oven appears to die. Fortunately, the top element for grilling still seems to work, with which R. coaxed us a turkey after all. The new oven arrives this weekend, when we'll see if we can replace the fitted oven ourselves or if we fall back to summoning a tradesperson. Also, for making one of the pies: canned pumpkin seems to have largely disappeared from the general supermarkets, we ended up ordering that from Amazon.

Not wanting to bother with VPNs and Peacock and such, I usually find one of the free Thanksgiving parade streams that shows the centre of the action from some other city than New York. I think it may have been Philadelphia or somesuch last year, this year I stumbled upon Chicago's, not the best choice as it turned out to heavily promote some sponsor's product for cleaning up fæces.

Among other things keeping me busy, today I did my office desk booking for the rest of the month, and tomorrow we are to get our SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations: I seem to have found local Moderna which costs us £85 each but the risks are too high to not do this at least occasionally.

Late one evening back in July, I boarded a CrossCountry train at Edinburgh Waverley that then failed to proceed further. In the end, my journey was delayed by an hour so, under the Delay Repay scheme, I was supposed to be eligible for a refund.

CrossCountry's claim process wanted a QR code and and a ticket number. Unfortunately, I was using one of their flexi season tickets in their mobile app, which prevents screenshots, and the day's ticket wholly disappears once the day is done. So, I asked their customer service people how I can claim. I asked several times and got no useful response at all.

Eventually, I fell back to an effective last resort: post them a paper letter. This triggered a slow sequence of back and forth by e-mail but, last week, they finally paid me my refund. It's absurd that it took three months, and probably cost them as much to deal with me as the £7.55 they paid me, but I still don't have my answer as to how people with those tickets are supposed to claim.

I had mentioned our family visa fees. To give a clearer idea of how much the process costs to bring a family member to settle here in the UK, the full route from initial application to citizenship costs well over £8k in fees and well over £5k for NHS access during that period. That's per person, so tripled for R. and two kids. We get a bit of a discount because R.'s youngest is under eighteen but we're still looking on the order of £40k in total, and that's without legal fees which, if we were using a solicitor's team for the process, would probably increase it by half again. Of course, it doesn't cost the government anything like that much to process the applications, the equivalent process in the US is very much cheaper. Still, it strikes me that ability to pay the fees at all should be sufficient evidence of ability to support ourselves without resorting to public funds.

Living in Aberdeen, seeing the grand things around the city centre, it was notable that many of them dated from the Victorian era. I suspected it to be no coincidence that the Victorians saw the height of the British Empire's exploitation of its colonies. With the wealth of others, we built our shiny things. The bridge I walk on to work is nineteenth-century.

In the meantime, Britain declines. Local councils now struggle to provide even basic services. The health system is becoming several kinds of joke, despite the dedication of those working within it. Even those graduating with good undergraduate degrees typically can't get a job that pays well enough for them to be soon on the road to buying a house within reach of the job.

Furthermore, our population is aging. As we end up with fewer working people, and more people needing assistance, the situation can only worsen. Given that our history puts us somewhat in others' debt, I would like to imagine that we could kill two birds with one stone: welcome young families from the British Commonwealth so they can live and work here, providing services and paying tax, ideally building new towns and cities too, while probably also sending some money back home to their families.

Of course, what I describe is not far off the immigration policy we had between, er, around WWII and Margaret Thatcher. We've seen how the Windrush generation has been treated since. Further, populist anti-immigrant rhetoric abounds so we're not about to be saved by welcoming workers from overseas. So, what's the plan? We could make domestic families have lots of babies (not that they can afford anywhere to put them) or we can erode the health service far enough to stop the old people from living for too long.

Looking at the high prices, poor services, and xenophobia, I'd be happy to self-deport. However, for the meantime there are kids in education that I don't want to disrupt. Once everybody graduates, I wouldn't fault any of us for moving elsewhere. In the meantime, I can continue to hope and vote for change, both in the UK and the US.