Bloody Jeff.

Bloody Bracks and Brumby too, for using him as an excuse to spend nothing on public transport in the years since he left.

Living in St Kilda and working in the city, I at least have access to public transport, unlike all the poor schlubs in the growth corridors and new outer suburbs, where every family is forced to own at least two cars.

I read recently about a newish suburb near Pakenham where the bus to the city runs once an hour. Strangely enough, nobody bothers with it. So there’s no demonstrated demand, so they won’t increase services to this suburb.

Connex’s logic with the trains is similar: they’re so overcrowded that they take way too long to load and unload at each stop, so they can’t squeeze more services into the timetable. Except that they could, if the trains weren’t so overcrowded, because then they wouldn’t take as long at each station. But that would entail doing something and spending some money on something other than press releases and herding the media onto a 2pm Werribee train that’s been specially cleaned so the world’s most incompetent Transport Minister can get a seat and project her blank-eyed smile onto the rest of us and give us the “See? It’s a great system, when you’re a government minister who has a taxpayer-provided car with a driver and doesn’t ever have to catch these stinking fucking things but look at the nice new posters we’re putting up because We Have A Plan.”

Which leads me into my Monday to Friday experience.

My station is only four stops from Richmond, so the train’s generally chockers by the time I get on it; if there’s been a cancellation, it is not physically possible to get on board the next one, and sometimes the one after that. When they had that issue with the brakes they were cancelling every second train, which meant that everyone from Ripponlea to South Yarra had to go and get a tram or something, or just wait until about 9 o’clock before they were able to board.

As I approach the station, I’m always looking for the whiteboard that the nice, but slightly odd, Connex meet n’ greeters put out when there’s been a cancellation. This tells me at what level of hatred I can mutter under my breath, and whether I’ll have time to pay $2.80 for a cup of dark brown luke-warm urine in a polystyrene cup.

I get to the gate, and see the usual line of people at the two ticket machines. Well, actually they’re only at one of the ticket machines, because someone decided that a weekday between 7.30 and 8 am is the best time for Armaguard to come and empty the cash boxes from the ticket machines, so everyone’s lined up at the machine that only takes coins and the poor girl at the luke-warm urine cart isn’t allowed to give change, so people can either walk down to the 7 Eleven to get coins, or take the chance of meeting one of the friendly Troglodytes who call themselves Authorised Officers and wait in packs at your destination (more on them later).

So I’m doing the sudoku and I’ve got Tool on the headphones but I can still hear the dozy schlapper five metres away honking into her mobile phone to some other dozy schlapper (who’s probably just up the other end of the platform) and I’m quoting Scotty in my head: “LIKE is not a fucking preposition”, and I’m going further than that because I really don’t fucking care who’s fucking whom and where she’s getting her nails done and whether the little fuckwit in skinny jeans she’s been seeing really likes her or not and whether or not they can afford to go to the snow and we all know she’s late for work and I hope she gets fucking fired for it and goes home and kills herself.

So I turn up the volume because I think everyone on the train will learn more from Lateralus than they will from being unwilling eavesdroppers into the life of a strangely orange receptionist.

The train arrives and I’m lucky enough to find somewhere to stand where I’ve got something to hold onto, and even if I haven’t at least I’m tall enough to reach the ceiling to brace myself when the train brakes or accelerates or turns a corner or just lurches for no good reason.

Look down the carriage and you see dozens of arms braced against the ceiling of the train because they didn’t build anything into the fucking things that you can actually hold on to, because the idea is that nobody’s meant to be on the train, passengers just go and fuck the whole thing up for everybody.

The only place you can comfortably stand is in the doorways, so it’s a lot of fun when that bloody woman comes over the PA telling us to “stand clear of the doorways”.

At the next two stops, a lot of schoolkids push their way out, but strangely, their absence doesn’t make much more room. These two suburbs have more than their fair share of self-important twats with loud voices who like to announce to the rest of us that there’s plenty of room down the aisles could we all move up a bit so they can get on, thank you. Go fuck yourself, I’m already having sex with this ugly woman’s armpit and someone else’s briefcase is doing a prostate exam on me and why the fuck do I always end up standing really close to the fucker who had Dim Sims and Sauerkraut for breakfast and washed it down with fermented yak milk?

My office is near one of the loop stations, but Sandringham trains don’t go there, so I need to change at Richmond. Which means, along with most of the other passengers, I have to elbow my way off past the stupid motherfucker with the giant backpack who’s standing in the doorway and won’t just get out to let us off then get back on again until I tell him he’s a stupid motherfucker, at which time he gets partially off and stands with one foot still in the doorway so people are tripping over as they get off and he’s such a stupid motherfucker he really thinks the train will just suddenly leave within a split second and he won’t be able to get back on in time, despite the fact that he’s been on the fucking thing for half an hour and seen how fucking slow the fucking thing goes.

You have to go down a big pile of stairs to get to one of the Loop platforms at Richmond and there used to be a big board you could read as you walked down the stairs and it told you which platform to go to for the next Loop train, but They Have A Plan, so they’ve got new TV screens with this info, which are BEHIND you as you walk down the stairs so you have to twist your neck around or walk backwards to read this information, which is fun when you’re jammed together like you’re in a mosh pit.

Of course, they installed the new TVs behind the old TVs, and of course it’s one department that Installs New Shit, and another department that Uninstalls The Old Shit, so you can’t actually see what’s on the new screens for a couple of weeks until the Uninstalling Old Shit department get a briefing note and funding and have signed off on the work certificates and consulted with their stakeholders Going Forward and put up the new posters about their Plan, then given a couple of blokes a ladder and a screwdriver and some beaut fluoro vests to do the Uninstalling of Old Shit at peak hour.

I can choose between Platforms Three Five and Eight for a loop train, knowing that as I stand at one, a train will pull in at one of the others, then the train that eventually arrives for me will be so crowded that I get to have more fully-clothed sex with people I don’t know, and of course the train will pull out of Richmond then stop for five or ten minutes, allowing me to ponder just how many people in Melbourne have Dim Sims and Sauerkraut (washed down with fermented Yak milk) for breakfast and the train’s so crowded I can’t even manoeuvre my arm into my jeans pocket to get at my iphone and answer the call, which of course is Jane asking where her car keys are oh fuck they’re in the glovebox of the locked car and I’ve got the other car key so, great, I have to send my keys home to her in a taxi as soon as I get to work and then remember that my USB stick with that huge submission I wrote last night is on my keyring so now I’m gonna have to ad lib the whole submission with the help of shadow puppets and an empty cigarette packet.

I eventually get to Flagstaff and climb off the train and there’s two sets of escalators to go up and it’s a simple fucking rule, isn’t it? Stand on the left side of the escalator so people can walk past you on the right, unless you’re a fuckwit, and there’s always one who doesn’t seem to give a fuck that people need to get to work and people hate fuckwits and he or she still manages to get self-righteous, as if “I didn’t know” is an excuse when if you’d open your fucking eyes you’d see that’s how it worked until you planted your giant stupid arse on the right-hand side of the escalator and this is how people DIE, Goddammit.

Top of the escalators, and the Authorised Officers are standing there waiting to harass people. Ooh, look, they got one, fuck me where do they train these fuckheads in dealing with people? Some squarejohn didn’t have time to validate his ticket (why validate it for fuck’s sake? It’s bought and paid for, it expires in six hours, but I didn’t stick it in the “validator” at my station???) so two of them get in his face about his crime and take his details, and another three stand AROUND HIM IN A CIRCLE. If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to generate tension, and the fight or flight reflex in a subject, it’s surrounding him from all sides.

I deal with cranky people for a living and I can see that what they’re doing is likely to end up in violence, so I go up and offer this advice. Of course there’s metal blasting out of my earphones, I’m in my uniform of jeans, boots, t shirt and leather jacket and I’m not the world’s friendliest looking scruffy person, so they don’t really listen to what I have to say, they start demanding my ticket and my details, and a couple more come over to take up the incredibly friendly Stand Around Him In A Circle formation, putting me on edge and figuring that I may end up getting charged and copping a beating once they’ve got me on the ground but I can break at least three of their noses before that happens and that would almost make it worth it, then I remember what I do for a living, so I show them the required documentation, then go stand next to the poor schmoe they’re desperately trying to goad into swearing or swinging a few punches, and I watch his back and give the world’s biggest shit-eating grin to the cave-creatures until they’ve got his details and have to let him go.

Then I finally get to my office and I switch the coffee machine on and remember that it’s my turn to buy coffee and I bought some last night on the way home and it’s very helpfully sitting on the bench at home, next to my lunch.

People will die today. And it’s all Jeff’s fault.

Like everything is.

Bloody Jeff.

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