Her: You want medium coffee? (Handing me one she just made as I entered)

Me: No, I haven’t ordered anything yet

Her: Oh um… Goes back to serving first person

Her: You want this coffee?

Me: No, I haven’t ordered one yet…

Her: Oh, what you like?

Me: Small latte please.

Her: Rings it up on register, gets distracted by LCD screen listing all the shop orders.

Her: $4.15 thanks…

Me: No, I ordered a small latte

Her: Oh, um, Medium… (Me: No).. Oh, um $3.15

Me: Paid and waited… and waited…

Her: Here is coffee.

Me: Thank you, do you have any sugars?

Her: Um, oh, um.. I put one in.

Me: ok, thanks..

Me: Tasted, burnt tongue.

Me: Waited until it was much cooler.. Um, hello taste..

I would say almost no coffee and no sugar was in it, this is not a decent experience or result.

Me: Can I have the dozen assorted and a latte please?

Him: What?

Me: A dozen of the assorted donuts and a latte please…

Him: You want… (something I couldn’t understand)

Me: Pardon?

Him: Just me select? One of each?

Me: Yeah, sure, a bit of anything…

Him: Three bags selected, assemble a box, start picking…

Me: Not quite one of each in the box, so I ask for a couple of pinks ones.

Him: In the box, in the bag,… Is that all?

Me: Well I still want the latte

Him: Makes a latte

Him: Do you want a discount card?

Me: No thanks

Him: You wanna 50% off card?

Me: No thanks

Him: You wan sugar?

Me: No thanks

At last, why is it so hard to make it easy?

I was about to get this done at my local service place along with the big engine service, when I happened upon a professional suspension place, and Izzy told me he would be happy to do a special deal.

While getting serviced, the forks went down to suspensions-r-us where the kit was put in and the springs replaced. All tuned up for me, customised and done right.

I now have “the best suspension for a 250 Suzuki in Victoria” and how can I argue, it is wonderful to ride, pulls up great, turns effortlessly and rides over those nasty speed bumps unnoticed.

Thanks Izzy.

Contact him at www.suspensionsrus.com.au or Phone 03 5998-1021

The Connex group who has the primary contract for running metropolitan railways services here in Melbourne, after months of discussing options on how to ferry more passengers, after amending their timetables to help just a little, who back-stepped on rejecting bicycles on trains, who haven’t yet delivered on their promise to remove seats and call commuters land sardines, have now come up with a brilliant plan to make rail commuting a wondrous thing…

They are going to change the seat covers.

Yes, bright new seat covers to some 43,000 seats are going to make the conditions better. No more sitting on torn seats, or ones with holes, they will now be comfortable, at least to those who can actually get a seat, we still have many more standing-sardine commuters yet to satisfy. Perhaps some new floor coverings for those on their feet?

These new covers are the latest technology in hard wearing materials, they will last longer, better, stronger and faster, we hope. Really? Has there been some materials manufacturing revolution in the last 5 years that I wasn’t aware of? Is it really possible to make cloth covered foam better now than at the turn of the 21st century?

Will somebody actually do something to improve public transport in Melbourne?

Something, somebody, anything… No new services, no new carriages, no extended services, no new ticketing system. All of these things have been discussed and considered and even truckloads of money spent on developing and investigating and yet… Nothing.

Speaking of passenger comfort, what is with these bus drivers and how smooth they drive?

I have been using them for a while now, going to the city for work every day, the regular commute. It is not the sardine can that the train system has become or the nightmare of the tram network but it does have it’s issues and when you see it and use it every day it’s easy to start to find fault. This is what I do and I don’t mind saying so when it gets to me. This blog is my way of getting irritations of my chest even if nobody reads it.

Are all bus drivers bad drivers? Can they not understand that bouncing your foot up and down on the gas peddle like your peddling the thing along is harsh for the bus, bad for the fuel economy and an all round pain for the passengers? I sit on the hard seat trying to enjoy the ride (reminds me, we could do with some new seat covers) while the bus lurches from the stop, new passengers still walking to seats are flung down the isle toward the rear and then when up to speed, not the road speed limit, just some arbitrary speed the driver decides, pulls the foot off, then plants it again, then off, and on, then on one big final time before hitting the brakes, pulling up short, then pushing forward again, 3 feet past the waiting passengers to a stop, almost with a screech. Pchshshsh… Passengers get on and then are flung down the isle.

It’s painful, my back hurts trying to hold myself in the seat, people are flung all over the place, it is not very customer friendly.

It must be bad for the fuel bill to, using that accelerator like a water pistol, squirting diesel into that straining motor again and again. The drive train stretching from push to pull, grunting the bus forward and back.

And then there are the traffic lights, pulling up behind a few cars at a red light and stopping. Then for no visible reason launching forward all of 6 inches and stopping again, closer to the stationary car in front of us, and again, another 3 inches. Then the lights go green, there is a pause, but the bus goes anyway and then in a realisation the car hasn’t moved yet, slams on the brakes, as the car takes off with the traffic and the bus is there, stationary for another moment before taking off again. What a waste of effort.

There is no feedback system, it doesn’t matter if a driver screws up, if the busses are late, if they continue to miss their stops or just not arrive at all. If they are bad drivers or are abusive it doesn’t matter because the companies above them don’t care. Seriously, they don’t want to know, they don’t want to listen and god forbid, if they actually knew enough about reality to do something constructive for their clients, the p-a-s-s-e-n-g-e-r-s.

Their business is to maintains their rolling stock, employ the number of people required to drive them and above all else, negotiate contracts with the government to own the situation. Nothing more.

They don’t provide a service to the public, never have and never will and they don’t care what happens because they are not accountable.

What a fucken liberty!

Big downloads later and some screen refreshes, all the software that I never use updated.

The updater asked if I wanted to restart, thanks Adobe, this is why I upgraded to Vista so I didn’t have to restart after every application update, and since I am in the middle of doing other things, no I don’t want to restart thanks. Cancel is my option (what ever happened to Yes and No answers to simple questions?), and off goes the program, checking for other updates…

What? Didn’t we just go through this?

Oh yeah, I forgot, another reminder about installing Safari 3.1.1.

No, I don’t want this software, I have unchecked it before, I have IE and I have Firefox thanks, I don’t need another 23Mb of unused crap on my hard disk that I will eventually need to update.

But what got me even more today was the description of this item (See Pic).

OK, looks a little broken, and if they can’t make a read-about-me text file work in their recently updated updater then how can the application be trusted?

Look Apple, I don’t want this program, I don’t even want iTunes, I need quicktime only because I have a great olympus camera that records in mov format.

Like the DOJ said to Microsoft, “The People don’t want all these other things included or else you will deemed to be anti-competitive”!

How can one company get away with this when another can not, and has already been convicted and sentenced for doing exactly the same thing?

So now I uncheck the Safari item, the Install button goes gray leaving me with just the ‘Quit’ option. Apple, please add another option for me…

‘Leave Me Alone’ – Save my options and my preferences and close the program so that I am never bothered by your application based spam again please. Is that too much to ask?

So if anybody wonders what it’s like, for those that are in a long queue on a major road (another symptom of the overall problem) then over the next few weeks I may take and post some photo’s here, showing the extent and reality of the situation. Like this one…

About 5.45pm I returned back to flinders street from Brighton to catch a train out toward Sydenham. This is what I was presented with, and it is NORMAL! The trains were not late (much) and this is what was waiting. It actually shows two problems, one that the situation for transport is bad and also the other, that Australians, and Melbournians are leaving work well after 5pm, if they haven’t left town after closing, why are they still waiting for trains at almost 6pm?

So yeah, unfortunately I didn’t take a picture on the train that I caught, so many faces staring at me from a standing position I felt I would have been beaten to death for even thinking of taking a photo. Really, in that next train that left from Flinders Street it was packed, and through the tunnel it got worse, more people loading on at every stop. Past Footscray we went with few people getting off there, it got no better. I didn’t see anybody that I could point to as a politician, I think they all had chauffeur driven cars getting them home earlier than the rush hour so it went without saying, the people responsible for this fiasco do not know what’s going on, they don’t have to pay for the tickets to ride on this cattle service, and speaking of cattle, they get treated better than the people do.

The UK has begun banning Australian wool because of mulesing, well they should stop using Australian products because of exactly the same reason, this country is treating it’s workforce like cattle and then smacking them with a red hot branding iron to make a point. So wake up, get more trains and busses and improve the situation because our states and cities are not coping with the flood of population increase and if you want more babies, then they better have somewhere to live, work and commute when they grow up. Stop talking about options, stop introducing new ticket schemes that never actually get started and operating, just DO SOMETHING. Oh and this great idea of removing seats so we can cram more people into a carriage is (dare I say it) reminding me of a German transport system of the 40’s…

So I will take more pictures, just camera photo’s to share and perhaps a new section of this site might soon appear to take your submissions also, or perhaps, like the one above, send them through to the newspapers and other places from your mobile to get the actual picture, the reality and the situation out there to the people that matter.