Vanilla-flavoured bus times

Great excitement this week as our new travel helpdesk has opened in Eastleigh Bus Station. Mikey’s main job is supposed to involve helping the public in the bus station, but since the demise of Fair Oak Flyer, our departures are now concentrated at quarter past and quarter to the hour. This makes for long periods of inactivity between departures, during which time Mikey was unable to do anything useful if he remained in the bus station.

Our new helpdesk solves this, as he can work productively on other jobs during the quiet times, while still being easily accessible to the public. We are hugely indebted to the Cafe at the Crossroads of Civilisation, as our helpdesk is situated in a corner of their newly opened ice cream parlour – could this be the only combined ice cream and bus information shop in the region?

The official opening hours are Monday to Friday 0930 – 1500 – basically Mikey’s working hours (on schooldays he also conducts the morning Thornden School bus first, but that’s another story!). However, I have realised that on a Saturday the helpdesk makes an ideal command post for me!

Usually on Saturdays, I run the operation with no other controller or spare drivers on duty, so any necessary operational support has to come from me. The new helpdesk is the ideal base from which to monitor the operation and be able to respond instantly to any problems. So yesterday I spent a fair bit of time there, much of it assisting a stream of Bluestar passengers who still haven’t worked out that their E service moved from stand B to stand E well over a month ago!

The ice cream travel centre is situated in the unit that used to be Bluestar’s travel shop, and I couldn’t help but reflect on the irony that when I left Bluestar in June 2007, little did I realise that just two years later I’d be back in that same shop dispensing bus information!

However, perhaps the most crushing comment yesterday came from a lady who wandered into the shop around midday, obviously mindful of its previous role.

She peered in from outside, then stepped warily in through the open door. She spent several moments scanning the ranked shelves of drinks, the brimming ice cream freezer, the cash desk with helpful smiling ice cream salesperson, the cheerily painted ice cream murals on the wall, the table stacked with bus timetables and me.

Then when she had finished contemplating all these various items, she looked all around again.

Finally I could bear the tension no longer and broke the silence with a cheery “can I help you madam”. At length, she turned to look at me and said, simply, “I suppose this place has closed down for good then?!”