I work in an Underground station in a leafy(ish) part of north London. I am the ticket clerk - that sun-starved creature you'll find locked behind bullet-proof glass. It's not a great job, but it has its moments. I try to inject some humour into my act, mainly for my own benefit but also to cheer passengers up. It can help when the days pass slowly.
The London Underground response to terrorism is not a raft of training and evacuation exercises, nor a deployment of gas masks and tube marshals as in the US. The underground's response to terrorism appears to be roughly equivalent to its response to the Argentinian economic crisis.
The history of the underground can be divided very neatly into two completely distinct periods - before King's Cross and after King's Cross. With the exception of the creeping privatisation, most of the changes in working life underground can be related to the fire at King's Cross underground station on 18th November 1987, in which 31 people died. The Fennel report on the disaster made over 100 recommendations, nearly all of which were adopted.
Of all the reasons the underground service grinds to a halt, from signal failures to insufficient staff to derailments, none has as much impact as a suicide. Almost everyone gets involved. The police, ambulance and firemen all pitch up; the underground's own emergency response unit, station staff, station managers and train managers all crowd around on the platform and try variously to save the person, move the person and clean up bits of the person.
A new manager turned up the other day, keen as mustard. Another one. Aren't there EU regulations about this? Someone appears to have realised that most managers start out energetically but soon get absorbed into the malaise. So they've taken to moving them around, trying to get them going again, like rechargeable batteries. This one poked his head around the office door, made a few dark-sounding comments about overstaffing, and ended with, "You'll be getting very fed up of me before long." He was met with silence.
I was walking on the platform one morning when I slipped and jarred my back. I went to the supervisor's office and told him what had happened. Then I sat there for a bit, complaining about the pain radiating down my legs.
"You don't have to convince me, Daniel," he said.
Prospect commissioned this review but never printed it, without ever telling me why. Six months later the New Statesman commissioned the same review, and I was all ready to flog them this one, until they got cold feet when they realised it was the paperback run.
I got my "Investors in People" badge the other day. Everyone gets one, since the underground is officially part of the Investors in People scheme, which seems to consist mainly of giving people badges, like Blue Peter. This is to signify all the training they give us. "How nice," said one alert customer. "Pity it's not investors in signals."
When I first applied to work for the underground they sent me to Lisson Grove job centre to take reading, writing and map-reading tests. As this dragged on all morning, I became extremely bored, which, I later came to realise, was the most relevant test for the job. Those of us certified fit were signed up for our interviews and medicals and, to our horror, drug tests.
This hadn't been mentioned on the poster, which had said £16,000pa and not much else, and some of my potential colleagues had trouble believing it.
"All the staff have remained very calm," a customer told my colleague on the evening of the bombings.
"We were expecting it," he told her.
The best trailed terrorist attack in history finally arrived. The predicted horror, terror and grief were all present and correct. I have written before that the worst kind of disruption to the tube is a suicide. How much worse is three suicides, all with explosives attached?