crap

I’ve just tried to take a crap on a train. Didn’t bother, as the bowl was full of paper, and the tank empty, so it wouldn’t flush. And in my current state, well, I’ll spare you the details.

This is, though, not an unusual experience. Attending to basic hygiene on trains is becoming increasingly hard. There is often no water to flush, or wash hands with. Washing hands is a current concern of mine. But, most irritating of all, is the loo roll. If there is any, you are expected to pull it out through an aperture of such restricted size, that it basically acts as a shredder. You need to coax the sheets out one by one, and end up with each fifth attempt yielding a functional sheet. I asked a guard why, recently, and was told it was to avoid theft. Yes, that’s right, the shredders have been installed to stop people nicking the bog roll. I can just imagine the board meeting…

Suit 1. Very good, it’s great to see we’re making real progress in achieving a financially stable, cross-service, non-flavour deviational catering provision with built in costumer choice restriction. Great work, team. Now, the next item, sanitary systems delivery in a cost constrained budgetary environment.

Suit 2. Yeah. Thanks. Right. We’ve progressively rolled out an all-fleet refit of hygiene related paper issuing systems with hard engineered theft elimination protocols as standard. (Pauses to allow emphasis of ‘as standard’ to sink in.) As you can see from the spreadsheets (cues a powerpoint slide) this is delivering a month on month suppression of theft related paper loss of between 7 and 19 percent! These are unprecedented outputs, and I think this train operator can be confident we sit at the bleeding edge on this one.

Suit 3. See where your coming from, Mike, but (looks down laptop screen) if we could cue table 4.2, we can clearly see that this is hitting our bottom line.

(Stunned silence)

I mean, our comparable paper related outlay is actually showing an elevation above the high level prediction trend line of 3 to 7 per cent! Over the last quartile, this represents a real world cost of a full 2.76% of our total revenue take!

Suit 1. Hang on, you trying to tell me that this whole paper non-theft compliance policy is costing us money, Steve.

Suit 3. Bang on, Mitch. And that’s before we factor in the full costs of the paper issuing equipment refit, which amounts too... (scrolls through some more spreadsheets)

Suit 2. (looking peeved) Just a moment, here, guys! These socially excluded transgressors were perpetrating massive incidences of unauthorised paper removal! Any inaction in the face of such activity would be tantamount to approval, this is a moral issue. It’s a new world out there, and, post 9-11, we have to consider more than the bottom line. It may be costing us to eliminate paper theft, we may actually be using more paper to deliver the same hygiene related functionality, but we need to take a stand here. That paper’s our paper, and it should damn well stay ours till it hits the tracks, and I’ll quit squash before I let some filthy arsehole have it any other way!

Suit 1. See your vision, now, Mike, like your thinking. Could be a Queens Award for Industry in this for you.

Suit 3. Gotta hand it to you, you were just too darn out of the box for me there. Nice work.

Suit 1. Good, glad that’s sorted. Now, active information cross compliance platforms for on demand timetable distribution frameworks. Anyone got a clue what the fuck that means?