Where have I been?

Greetings from Hampshire, where I am sitting in my living room surveying the view of the sunlit marina on this beautiful warm evening, sipping a glass of white wine and watching the cruise ships glide out into the Solent.

Various among you have commented on the lack of blog activity in recent times - and frankly you are right do so. Shameful performance!

So first and foremost, it's only 7pm, the night is young, why aren't I at work, I hear you ask! After all, it is daylight and it is the law that I should be at work during daylight hours (and most of the darkness ones too!). Well today was washing machine day! The washing machine that I inherited from my brother finally spun its last spin about two weeks ago and expired terminally. So I ordered a new one and it arrived today, so I had to stay home to say hello to it (and of course tell the delivery lorry where to come!)

In all the excitement I finally found out why the old one used to go careering round the floor at every opportunity, and it turns out it was for the simple reason that no one (least of all me) ever took the transit bolts out! Had I done so, it would apparently have sat there and burbled away quite happily in one spot instead of doing a scenic tour of the flat every time I wanted clean clothes!

Anyway the washing machine came at 0930 this morning but I - bad person that I have become - decided that I really didn't fancy going to the office and could quite happily work from home, so even at 2pm this afternoon I was telling my work colleagues that I had no idea when it would arrive and could be any time before 7 this evening! Let's hope none of them read this!!!!

To be fair, it is the first respite I have had after one of the most manic months in the history of history. Over the summer we expanded our fleet to ten vehicles in preparation for a new contract with Barton Peveril College in Eastleigh and on 1st September became responsible for transporting around 400 students a day into college on top of our other work commitments. Every day now six of our vehicles stream into the college just after 8 in the morning, and are lined up ready for the exodus at 4 in the afternoon.

One of the clinchers in us getting the deal was that we allow the students (most of whom live in the catchment area of our route A) to use their passes to travel around during the day, so in addition to the twice daily panic to make sure there are enough buses in the right places for all the students, we have had real overcrowding problems to deal with during the day. Luckily we have kept it together and I am proud to say that apart from day one when one of the buses missed three stops by mistake, every single bus on every single day has run faultlessly - on time, correct route, no complaints at all (apart from one lady who rung us every day for a week because her son insisted that the bus hadn't gone to his stop so he had to go home again, even though we knew full well it had because it picked up twenty other students there. We wondered how long it would take the penny to drop that he actually didn't have any intention of catching the bus. I don't know if it ever did or whether she simply got bored ringing us, but to be honest, tough beans!!!)

The downside of all this is that it is very time consuming. Apart from having our attention focussed on the college routes between 0630 and 0830 every morning and 1530 and 1730 every evening, we still have all our normal work to do as well, and apart from last Sunday which I managed to take off, today is my first day away from the office since August, and even then I've been working. But as time goes on and the students spread their journeys more and we get better at managing the hotspots so that we don't have to stay on top of it all the time, the pressure should ease and hopefully it will all work out.

Meanwhile, all these college buses sit doing nothing between 9 and 3 every day, so we decided to use some of the dead time to run a new service - the B. We worked hard to pick a route that avoided confronting Solent Blue Line in a competitive way and created something genuinely new. By linking a number of estates that Blue Line have dropped and providing new direct links that didn't exist before, we have created a route from Eastleigh to Southampton that manages to avoid Blue Line's main corridors.

Unfortunately for us, Blue Line have reacted as though we have marched into the Finance Director's office, held a gun to his head and demanded all their money. Immediately they found out about our new service, they registered their own route - also called the B - following an identical route with every single journey 3 minutes in front of ours. They branded it Beep! Bus B, use red buses that don't mention Blue Line or Bluestar anywhere on them, drivers wear red polo shirts and even the ticket machine 'till rolls' are plain white and do not mention Bluestar - all to try to dupe the public into thinking that Beep! is the innovative new service - not ours that we registered first.

They got over the fact that they were a week behind us getting their registration in (Because obviously it didn't exist until we registered it) by using a loophole to start on the same date but not charge any fares for a week. So, for a week, our brand new B route ran around with one of their buses running free of charge three minutes in front - and we still carried more passengers than them!!! Admittedly, not great numbers for either of us, but it's a start.

The balloon finally went up last Saturday when the Southampton Daily Echo made it front page news, and you can see it here...

http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/3690016.Bus_wars/

...but be sure to read the public comments below the article itself.

Since the press coverage, we have been getting more of the passengers because it took the newspaper article for many of them to realise that Beep! was in fact Bluestar in disguise. This week, the Beep! drivers have tried to get round this by pretending they are Black Velvet! But most of the passengers at least seem to have sussed it out and contrary to the widely held belief that passengers simply get on the first bus that comes along, it is a common sight to see people waving the Beep! bus past so they can wait for ours!

As if all the college work wasn't hectic enough, the b-b-bus wars have taken a fair bit of my time too, so 16 hour days have been the norm - sometimes more! Aaaaaaaah, I hear you all chorus!

So all the above, in a roundabout way, tells you why I haven't been writing much on the blog lately. So on that happy note, and with the oven bleeping at me to let me know it is dinner time, I shall wish all my impatient readers a happy weekend and hope to be back here soon :)