London Underground Rules - A Humorous guide to tube travel - 5

I feel like Fox Mulder, but this cautionary tale comes from Nicki Reynolds who signed my guestbook recently. "Last week I had an unfortunate incident at Kings Cross station involving a rip-off merchant and a LU employee and would welcome an official response of LU. Basically what happened was a woman approached me, told me a sob story about having snapped her train ticket in half, needing to get home to Brentford and having no money. She hung me a convincing line and I, to my shame, took it and ended up giving her a fiver to get home. We, of course, swapped addresses and phone numbers and went our separate ways.

"At that point, an LU employee (a supervisor) asked me if the woman was claiming she was stranded. At my response he remarked "she's down here doing that every night". I was astounded that this guy had just stood there and watched me being taken for a mug. When I questioned him about this, he said when he had previously intervened he had been told to mind his own business. He also said it was the job of the police and not LU. I disputed both his comments - he was there representing LU and its customers and part of that role must be to protect us. I am in the Customer Service industry and I can't believe that an employee can just turn a blind eye to criminal activity going on underneath his nose. I am, in fact, far more incensed by the LU employee's attitude and lack of action than I am by the woman who ripped me off!

"Preferably I would expect compensation from LU for this incident (not just losing £5 but giving away my personal details). At the very least, I would expect an apology and/or some kind of expectation. The employee in question wasn't manning a desk or barrier so if his role wasn't to protect the customers and the station from criminal what exactly was it. I find it worrying that he is a supervisor so can influence his staff to behave equally incompetently!"

Just be careful out there folks.

Lesson nineteen - Giving money to buskers

Should you give more money to to bad "musicians" on the London Underground or to good ones. I've just joined a few newsgroups about London Transport which I've found fascinating. Here's one opinion on the standard of buskers, how does it compare to yours?

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