#31

When I was a young, wet behind the ears new graduate, I travelled down south for a job interview. On the way back up I had some time to kill and stood for a bit in WH Smith’s reading job adverts in New Scientist. Train arrives and I go to my purse to get the tickets and I can’t find my purse. Search everywhere and it’s gone. Have a mild panic attack that I’m stuck in London with no tickets and no money. I end up going to the ticket office and actually cried in front of the clerk and said my purse had been stolen (as I assumed that was what happened). They thankfully took pity on me and gave me a new ticket and I got on the next train. Got a phone call the next day - my purse had been found on the shelf in Smiths where I’d been reading magazines and handed in. :joy::joy::joy: doofus.

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#32
1 Like
#33

err, didn’t mean to post that :joy:
have it anyway

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#34

I like it. It’s a mid-thread palate cleanser.

#35

2nd doing of the day.

'sake.

#36

Was getting a bus from Malaysian Borneo to a city that’s basically at the frontier of the jungle in Indonesian Borneo, and you have to change buses in the middle of nowhere at this crossroads with a restaurant on it. The bus we got off there was a modern air conditioned job and the second one was like a tiny mini bus with people hanging off the sides and crammed in two to a seat etc.

Anyway the bus actually drops you off miles outside of the city, everyone else had lifts waiting for them. We didn’t. This 14 year old girl who was there for some reason took pity on us and gestured to us to wait here, fucked off on her moped and came back 30 mins later with her friend, and the two of them gave the two of us a lift to her parents house, where we were apparently invited to stay.

Her parents did not agree. They gave us a look which indicated that it wasn’t that uncommon for their daughter to pull this kind of shit.

On to Google translate and they tell us “not concern, we friends also of Dutch”. OK? Back on the mopeds from whence we’re deposited on some random house’s front porch and told to wait there. Eventually this Dutch woman turns up and is all like “oh hi, yeah, I always get dumped with whatever white people happen to turn up here with nowhere to stay”.

Pretty boring story that./

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#37

Tried to hike up a mountain in Kerala when I had the runs and ended up shitting in the middle of a tea plantation. On the way day I was still suffering so our guide asked a dude by the side of the road if I could use his loo. Obviously it was just a hole in the ground next in a shed next to his house, but I was very grateful for it. Don’t think I left it in a very good state though.

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#38

Mine are drinking stories.

Talked with a wasted local in Gothenburg at a pub. Good bloke. Had a pub crawl with him around small quirky bars.

I had one night to spend in Montreal a few years ago. It was a connecting flight between Vegas and Heathrow. Ended up drinking with a Californian couple until around 4am. Brilliant night.

Dull pointless stories when typed here but bought back excellent memories.

#40

just like Indiana Jones

#42

Very kind.

(I let her go ahead of us in the queue at the train station ticket booth and then she noticed our troubles and offered to take us home)

#43

My work once sent me to the wrong side of Italy.

Usually they just give me cash and I book the transport myself. Someone in the office tho must have seen cheap deals for sleeper trains and just gone ahead and booked one. They booked me and my co-worker tickets on a Vienna-Milan sleeper train, then an early morning ticket to a small town called LegnaNo where we were supposed to be working. (Please note name of place).

The train turned up, and was an Italian train rather than an Austrian one. Italian trains are often shit. The cabin was horrible. Peeling old vinyl bunks, no aircon, and you had to share it with a load of strangers, and basically sleep on top of your valuables.

So after a crappy night’s sleep and 6am arrival on a Sunday at Milan station before anywhere to eat was open, we arrived in Legnano. We’d been given directions that the hotel was on the same street as the station, but we just couldn’t find it. I asked a local for directions. He had never heard of the hotel, and asked to look at the address. When he read it, he told me it was actually in a totally different part of Italy, and I should be in LegnaGo in between Verona and Venice.

So we went to the train ticket office. The ticket man told me it happened all the time- if you started typing “Legn” the train website defaulted to LegnaNo, a much bigger town. To get to where we should have been going on a Sunday required five different trains and a whole sheaf of seat reservations and tickets, and €50 of our own cash.

When we were finally on the last leg of the journey, we then got a €20 fine from a total jobsworth ticket inspector. Four of the five tickets were already stamped with a reservation time, but the final ticket for the last 10 miles or whatever had to be stamped at the ticket gate, and we hadn’t realised.

The kicker was that if I had arranged my own travel I would have been able to have a nice weekend in Venice, Trieste or Ljubljana and I would have been given expenses money for a hotel for Saturday night. Also had to hassle the office to give me the €70 in a timely manner.

I have always booked my own travel and claimed it back since, esp as the person in the office who does it now is basically fresh out of uni, not always the most full of common sense, and has never actually been anywhere much.

#44

I enjoyed it.

#45

Whoever booked the tickets clearly didn’t check Wikipedia

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#46

good story - made me think of this

#47

They didn’t bloody check anything.

This was the same person who once decided to book every employee travelling to Germany that week on the same flight to Berlin out of laziness. On the grounds that places like Dresden, Munich etc are “all in Germany so it’s all the same really”.

That person doesn’t work there any more. Instead there is the 22 year old who knows even less about any place it seems.

#48

^This sounds like top, top banter. Not as good as making someone get on a plane wearing their pushcycle hat, but funny nonetheless…

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#49

I swear that no-one actually co-ordinates the list of staff and where they’re going. The job is running workshops in schools, and the staff are pretty much interchangeable. There’s a couple of different course options for each age group and everyone can cover any of them. So it would make sense to assign teachers in regional blocks, but nope they never seem to do that.

In February I ran into some co-workers on the train to Innsbruck. I was going from Vienna to Lustenau/Bregenz on the Swiss border (400 miles) and breaking the journey in Innsbruck. They were going from Linz to Innsbruck (200 miles). Nobody had a clue why they didn’t just send me Vienna-Innsbruck (300 miles) and them Linz-Lindau (also 300 miles).

This means I’ve been to every region of Austria this year now though, mind. (Right now on the border between Styria: Arnie-land marked in pale blue, and Burgenland: no-one-gives-a-shit-land in orange)

#50

ok.

2 Likes
#51

Ta.

#52

This post is titled…
The Kindness of Strangers

Last weekend I gave a complete stranger a lift from, and then back to, Exeter Airport.

It all started when we both had to change planes at Manchester on the way down from Edinburgh. I got chatting to this lady who was on the way down to visit her injured daughter in the navy. She didn’t seem that sure about how to get to the station, so I explained that there was a bus, but it wasn’t that regular. Feeling generous, I added that if she had trouble with the bus then I could offer a lift to the station on behalf of my mum, who was picking her up.

She missed her bus so then came over to me and my mum as we were getting coffee at the airport Costa (my mum is a coffee fiend). My mum was quite perplexed at first but, being the generous soul she is immediatly insisted that we would drive this lady all the way to Plymouth (my parents live in a village nearby).

It THEN transpired that I would also be on the same plane back to Edinburgh as the lady - so my mum said "well if you show up at ours at 7.30pm we’ll give you a lift back as well. So we did.

One of the reasons I was feeling so generous was down to an incident two weeks previous during my travels in France. I had been bumming around the country in my old volvo estate and sleeping on a matress in the back, pure wild camping every night in the pines of the west coast. It was my habbit to lock the car with myself within over night, for peace of mind. One morning I emerged from the boot, and in my dopey post-sleep state I closed the boot behind me: I was locked outside the car in only my white lonsdale boxer shorts.

In a panic I tried to work out how to remedy this disasterous situation. I was in a car park by the beach in a highly remote spot. There was no one around and only one other car in the park. However, I had left a rear window open about a fingers width so I grabbed a stick and started trying to work it through the window and down to the door handle.

It was in this state that the owner of the other car found me. He was a british fellow and unlike me, he had opted to camp on the sandy ground among the pines. He immediately offered assistance. After trying varous sticks we found this to be a non-starter, but had filled my volvo with a number of broken branches. I then suggested he try a tent pole. Gradually, we worked out a method, using a doubled up tent pole and piece of string that successfully opened the door!

I never found out his name and we parted company with a handshake shorlty afterwards. Thanks for saving me, random British guy! (maybe you’re on DiS?)

Here endeth my woeful tales.

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