Brynja 🐉 𐑚𐑮𐑦𐑯𐑘𐑨

65 emails in my inbox. All are from the Rail Data Marketplace and have the subject "RDM: Contract renewal notice"

Say what you like about the RDM, but the email subjects always tell you exactly what you need to know about what's going on.

dans med oss 🎶

right dave, we've got a site visit for you. nah, not milton keynes, low earth orbit, I'll send you the details

I can foresee some problems with maintenance too

honestly at this point the funniest thing is that I am notionally pway but I've not actually done any pway on NRMI. It's all either different shades of civils, or being a glorified porter

I honestly only notice your avi and display name when they change, otherwise I get used to it pretty quickly

client I've been working for the last two weekends apparently likes me so much that they're thinking about hiring me? fucking wild, never expected I'd end up with a career in drainage of all things

but yeah, ten keys, gives me plenty of spares to distribute at work and earn my way into the good graces of colleagues, railway keys are usually jealously guarded!

Railway keys are a massive rabbit hole and I'm pretty reluctant to discuss any other specific keys in detail because some of them do open critical things and are even easier (if not necessarily cheaper) to get hold of

I can either pay £10 to get it through HOPS, they'll ask my boss whether I need it and it'd be a massive faff, or I can spend roughly the same and end up with 10 which the factory overproduced and sold on the domestic market, presumably not expecting exactly this to happen.

I'm now the proud owner of 10 BR1B keys. I do have a legitimate reason to possess them (since some SPTs are locked using them), but I didn't get them through a legitimate supplier, oh no no, they were being sold as "charms".

yeah i bet you have

bradford

I genuinely don't understand how someone can walk past something that's very obviously on fire and decide it's not their problem, took no more than fifteen minutes of our time and preserving the shelter is very obviously in our interest (and theirs!) too

we waited until the firefighters arrived, showed them where the fire was, then buggered off. We were on the last train of the night, if neither of us had been there, entirely possible no-one would have reported it!

Platform shelter at a station, light fitting in the ceiling is burning and dripping molten plastic

Had a slightly more exciting evening than I bargained for, myself and another passenger took it upon ourselves to call the fire brigade. As far as I'm aware, we were the first - and possibly only - people to report it, despite about a dozen passengers getting off, and the guard also seeing it.

The public think we have it good, and the "real" rail staff don't think of us at all!

TOC staff live in something of an alternate reality, for many of them, their conception of the "railway family" and "rail staff" begins and ends at those directly employed by train operating companies. For us, there's little solidarity, and little recognition of the fact we even work on the railway.

I have to pay full price to ride over the same tracks where I was freezing my arse off with a surveyor and a COSS the night before. Some guards are friendlier, some treat me the same as any other passenger, a rare few treat me worse.

Something I really hate is how the general public think we have it good in infrastructure. "oh, but you must get free travel, right?" ahahaha, no, we get nothing. when I'm on a train exhausted after a night shift and dressed as a tangerine, I'm paying as much as anyone else to be there.

more work training today, I've thankfully been able to leave early, what a miserable experience.

bah humbug!

booooooo

Environments where you objectively do not belong are a bit more complicated. The friendly sort are a lot harder to reckon with, the nakedly hostile ones are ironically a bit easier.

I don't think I'll ever feel like I truly belong anywhere. Good way to get empty platitudes – of course i belong! how could I ever think otherwise! – but I think the only approach you can really take is a more pragmatic one. You have to try to not care.

something I think people don't realise about autism is how totalising the loneliness can be. It's not just a feeling, it's so much more difficult to form deep connections, to know what to say or to do or to think. Sometimes it feels better, sometimes worse, but it never really goes away.

oh yeah right i never said, yeah turns out they needed me after all, funny that

not sure it was them being fussy either at that, several of the lads were there on TVPs, which is the only thing noobier than being blue

pineapple is a dangerous one too, there's a lot of it in the tin and surely only some of it needs to go on the pizza

just been told that a shift I was hoping I'd get over the weekend won't take blue hats. considering they need this competency and they need it on saturday, good fucking luck lmfao

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