Pulling my chain

Boy, what an interesting evening. I have counted myself quite lucky that everything so far has gone well and I've not had to deal with any problems. However, all that went out of the window today.

It all started innocuously enough, with a pulled communication cord on my first run up to London. Thankfully it was at a booked station stop and was almost certainly done by a group of teenagers in the rear coach as they got off the train. This was simple enough to rectify, but it still lost a couple of minutes.

After that it all went quiet until the last trip of the evening down to Hertford. We got cautioned out of Cheshunt because a train a couple of slots ahead of us had hit a sofa that had been placed on the mainline. Even when we got to location, there were still cushions and tatters of fabric littering the lineside but nothing much resembling furniture. Once onto the branch we managed to pick up a group of hardened door-pullers who proceeded to make my life a misery. My minder then had an entertaining ten minutes chasing them away while I changed ends. With a bit of manoeuvring, some technical shenanigans with the unit and the sound of an emergency service vehicle siren nearby (nothing to do with us), we managed to get away and leave the little (ahem) whatsits behind.

All of this got the old adrenalin going and has left me wondering if I'm cut out for that side of the job. Because we don't have guards or conductors on our trains, everything is down to the driver. Problem is that there's enough in the driving to keep me busy without having to worry about keeping the peace also. Without an imposing minder I'm not sure how I would have coped with this situation on my own, as I'm quite a timid person and slightly built which leaves me wary of confronting trouble head-on. In some perverse way, it would be good to expose myself to more experiences like this while I have the back-up of a minder so that I can develop strategies of my own. However, I could quite happily manage without the aggro.

Either way, I'm pretty certain that I wouldn't have tackled tonight's problems the same way as my minder did. It's just not my style.