Journeys by Bus

I phone the 'customer service' number for the Cardiff-Swansea Shuttle 100 bus, 01792 572255. I ask if the timetable on the website is current, since it has the words 'winter timetable' in the URL, and I can't find a corresponding 'summer timetable', and even here in rainy Wales, I'm fairly sure that the beginning of July must be classed as 'summer'.

"As far as I know, the timetable is current," comes the reply. It's not a very reassuring answer. "If it's the same one I'm looking at."

Well, how big is that 'if', exactly?

"It says 'winter timetable' here," I reiterate, "so I just wondered if it was still valid."

"Does it have May the 6th on it?"

I look. I can't see any date written anywhere.

"I can't see any date anywhere," I say. "I'm looking at the Firstgroup website. Is that right?"

"Yes."

"So, that should be the right timetable then?"

Throughout this exchange I have sensed – without too much surprise, unfortunately – a general unwillingness to communicate. It's almost as if this man resents that fact that people should phone a number that is advertised as being for 'customer service' asking questions. And now there ensues such a poisonous silence in answer to my tentative question that I can virtually see the fissures in the cancerous old man's greying lips as he presses them tighter. It's possible that the man hates me because he's Welsh and I'm English, and I'm just ridiculous enough to feel guilty for that. It's also possible that this concentrated sulphur of silence is simply due to the fact that the man is British and works for a bus company. Service, in Britain, is… well, there's an old joke that goes like this: "I didn't come here to be insulted." "Well, where do you normally go?" British 'service' is basically where people go to be insulted.

I made my excuses and hung up, reminding myself how foolish I had been actually to expect anyone to be at all helpful on the end of a British 'helpline'.

This whole process of planning my journey to London by bus has taken me a few days. I did not expect it to take so long. Things have changed. Of course, I did start by looking things up on the Internet, but all the 'journey planners' turned out to be entirely useless. Like bureaucracy in the film Brazil (and in actual life), each webpage I found simply referred me to another. The actual task of planning a journey had been 'out-sourced' so many times that there was nothing left but the process of out-sourcing; the service itself, which should have been at its end, had been forgotten.

The assumption in this age being, however, that everything is done instantaneously at the click of a mouse, human service has atrophied shockingly. No one knows how to answer a phone any more, or answer a question. In the past, if I wanted to plan a coach journey, which I often did, I would simply make one phonecall, ask a number of questions of one person, who had the amazing ability to tell me times, prices and the locations of stops, and my journey-planning, and booking, was complete. The people were not always cheery – this is Britain, after all – but at least they could do their job.

I've had to resort to photographs of timetables in bus shelters and bus stops to help me fill in the final pieces of the puzzle. There is something refreshing in walking to a bus stop and seeing, laid out clearly, all in one place, the times and destinations of buses, without having to be redirected to anything, without having to turn a switch or click an icon, and without having to talk to some sour old cunt who is determined to find some reason to hate you because he hates the job he's too shrivelled and pickled with resentment and mediocrity to be able to do.