Be Excellent To Each Other

If you pay the Fire Train drivers more, then you'll have to do the same for the drivers of the Earth, Water and Air Trains as well. That's one area you really don't want falling out of balance.

Nursing pays terribly. There are also many terrible nurses, as the system is very easy to 'game'. The stuff some of the wife's colleagues get away with borders on the criminal.

That said, she might get another promotion soon, to take her to the level of a decent sized ward manager or something, and she's still paid significantly less than I get for posting on here.

They certainly don't.

One of Miss Malabar's friends gets paid £30k (a fair bit up here) for watching a robot all day at Airbus. If it goes wrong, he occasionally has to drill a hole, but nothing more complicated than that. He's 20 years old, with nothing more than a few GCSEs and the apprenticeship.



Very jealous, though it sounds boring as fuck. I quite enjoy my work, earning half as much as he does.

I'm starting to see a pattern emerge here

There are increasing numbers of nurse specialist type posts that pay fairly well, but as with teaching it does seem that a lot of the best nurses are destined to stop nursing in all but job title and effectively become managers.

Don't forget that a large amount of NHS nurses are 3rd party contractors.

I don't think that's particularly common is it? I know that most cleaners and some other ancillary staff often work for contractors but as far as I know the massive majority of nurses are NHS staff.

Don't know about outside London, but I've spend a good amount of time in London hospitals and every nurse below the duty sister is agency.

I wonder what happens to all the newly qualified nurses then. I assume that the government doesn't provide nursing training only to let them immediately work for contractors.

How many nurses did you meet who genuinely seemed to enjoy their jobs? I've had some bloody miserable nurses look after me in my time, and I've been pretty self-sufficient in my hospital stays. The bitching and complaining some of them had in-front of patients when having to help them out was disgusting.

edit: there have been a handful of lovely, excellent people, though. More nurses like this, please. And people in general, really.

Most of them seem pretty friendly and happy to be there. I guess it helps that I always see the same ones.

Also my consultant is a stunning aussie lady. The NHS is ace.

A lot of the time it's different from one ward to the next. Each one having its own manager and its own little culture.

Aye, I noticed that. Moving from one area to the next, there were some definite changes in atmosphere and friendliness.

I've always had a fairly nice experience, if there can be such a thing when you're stuck in hospital, though. I guess it's a pretty thankless line of work, and nurses can quickly become jaded – I've always been incredibly polite to people helping me, but no doubt there are many tossers around.

Oho. I'm playing OpenTTD at the moment, ridiculously modded up with a huge quantity of .grfs. Trams, proper tractor-trailer trucks, proper signalling, tis marvellous.

Incidentally, the appalling sequel to TTD, Locomotion, had a 'manual control' mode where you could drive one of your trains... yes, sliding a lever back and forth to control the speed. And it was BLOODY hard.



That's a Canadian Pacific engine...

As should have been reasonably self-evident given the rest of my posts on this thread, I think they should be paid more, and that post was a joke.

The average public sector pay is disgustingly low - I cannot believe there isn't scope for reducing the top end (and STOPPING USING HUGELY EXPENSIVE CONSULTANTS TO ACT AS FULL TIME STAFF ALTERNATIVES SO YOUR HEADCOUNT STAYS UNDER THE AMOUNT REQUIRED AFTER THE GERSHON* REVIEW, FFS), getting rid of some overpaid public sector employees entirely (e.g. half the pointless quangos we have - thanks for bringing most of those in as jobs for your mates, The Tories!) and using that money to pay for pay increases for the less well paid.


*I think. That one that said we had to trim the workforceby 80,000 or something.

I'm not reading twelve posts. Especially not yours.

I'm so not buying you a drink next month, you cheeky cunt.

It'd be flat by the time you shipped it up to Manchester anyway.

Or you, you lippy young whippersnapper.

I'm going to have a cheap night.

Except for tube drivers?

Is it easy to be a tube driver? I know that I'd freak the fuck out if I was just staring at tunnel walls rushing past my face all day.

Easy. Close your eyes.

Or, you know, pretend you're playing Descent.

5 pages without somebody mentioning the VAL?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9hic ... L%C3%A9ger

CDGVAL is awesome, but the system is tiny. I haven't ridden on any of the others.

There's no reason a system like this couldn't work for undergrounds, especially simple ones like Glasgow and Newcastle, or the smaller London tube lines.
But when the train is out in the open, has to interact with existing infrastructure and human controlled vehicles (and actual humans) I think it will be a long time before we robotise it.

Anyway, that's a refinement you do once a system is running at peak efficiency and reliability, and the main cost overhead and weak point is the driver. I doubt that the UK train network will *ever* be in that situation.

The DLR is 95% out in the open. Doesn't share rails though.

So is the CDGVAL, what I mean is it's very well separated from everything, no crossings, even the platforms have sliding doors on them which only open when the train doors are lined up.

Real trains, trams, and most above ground railways don't always have that luxury and it must be quite expensive to arrange.

The Glasgow Subway is computer controlled, the chap in the cab only operates the controls when entering and leaving the yard. The rest of the time he just opens and closes the doors.

For 40k a year

Still better value than your average newsreader.

Damn. Trumped again

I did not know that.

Would it be accurate to guess that automation and removal of responsibility (and presumably wage) from the drivers is what caused them all to end up being sacked and replaced?

Cos £18k isn't a lot. Minicab drivers probably make that much.

I'd say they work harder, though.

"I press the button, the door opens. I press the button, the door closes. Is it lunchtime yet?"

He's there in case something goes wrong, has to drive the train at certain stages, and has heaps upon heaps of responsibility upon his shoulders in case he closes the doors upon Hamish MacTavish's wee scottie.

Heh, one of those articles says that when the drivers threatened to go on strike, the company retrained a bunch of their CCTV operators to press the button (which took, one imagines, one lap of the track and a 10 minute talk on safety procedures). Disgruntlement ahoy!

Aye, I know this. But day to day, his job is button pressing. Like many jobs.

Security guards generally do nothing, but can be called upon to do some hairy shit, hence, valuable job. Same for train drivers.

Like with that proposed Joe Public CCTV monitoring scheme, a system of webcams and computers attached to Densha de go* controllers with bits of string should do it.



*In Googling that to check the spelling, I stumbled across the Google description for the official site - "Densha de go! is without any doubt one of the most famous videogames ever released." Er.. yeah.

It's often cited on slow news days when they do a 'ten naffest games ever' list. 'Hey, those craps JAPS play ARCADE GAMES about DRIVING COMMUTER TRAINS! ROTFEL!!!!!111 What a bunch of WEIRD LOSER NERDS. We Western gamers will never sink so low. Now turn to page 57 for our Championship Manager review...'

I should probably give one of them a chance - I've got the Saturn controller for it, but no game. I did have a little LCD handheld Densha de Go which wasn't bad (as LCD games go).

I did once try a bus driving game where failing to indicate lost you points. I ROFLED at that, a bit.

I very much enjoyed my time with Railfan on the PS3.

O.M.G

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Wii-DENSHA-de-G ... 45f036cb5c

*Is delighted*

I have both Densha 1 and 2 for the PSX (no controller, my dad bought them during trips to Japan and didn't have room for a huge pretend combined throttle!) and they're 'alive' in a way no other sim has yet matched in terms of making you feel like you're driving through a busy urban network.

MS Train Sim is a better simulator, though, while Trainz is great fun for building your own railway (but pretty shit when the time comes to drive around it).

RailSim or whatever it's called (and its sequel) is reportedly extremely pants.

Tokyo Bus Guide, meanwhile, was excellent. Once you get to grips with it it's very satisfying. Matron. The bonus disc in which a perky Jap-o-girl with slightly wonky teeth and crossed eyes garbles excitedly about... buses, probably... is nice too.

The Densha De Go games are really good in my mind. I've got a few of them on the PSP and one for the PS2 (can't remember what it's called, but you drive the bullet train in that one). They're far more than just a boring train driving sim, they're really often properly hard to play, requiring the skills to stop at your destination within seconds of the designated time, within inches of the correct stopping point, whilst making all movements silky smooth so your passengers don't get jolted around. They're great fun.

MS Train Simulator is the best 'proper' sim I've played. It's a shame the proposed sequel never happened, as it's looking very dated now.

MSTS2 has been canned TWICE now, the second iteration was looking really promising. Trainz is just Auran rehashing the same decrepit product over and over and over again (I bought the first ever release in 2001 and in 2004 much of the content was still there and already looking tired, I hate to think how people who bought the 2006 and more recent editions must feel). Rail Simulator (and the sequel, whatever it's called) made a big fuss of how realistic and immersive it was going to be, but instead you had only a few scripted activities, some dodgy gameplay and the railsim community shrugged and just carried on with MSTS.

The result is if you want a UK train driving experience, stick with MSTS and one of Making Tracks' excellent routes (I got my dad the Great Eastern one for Christmas last year and it is quite astonishing what they've managed to make MSTS do) or just drive the Birmingham CrossCity over and over and over again in BVE (which, incidentally, is the daddy for driving the Tube.)

Densha is good, but there's a few annoyances. Unless you drive absolutely perfectly, you'll haemmorage your 'points' (which get deducted when you screw up, run out and game over) at an alarming rate. Go too quickly and you start getting double yellows as you've caught up with the train in front, and this will delay you so much that you'll often ruin your game. Likewise, the stopping point thing is down to the centimetre (I've failed a perfect score because I was off by 30cm) which is infuriating. One Western journo who gave the game a proper review (instead of just laughing) said that in his time living in Tokyo, trains would regularly overshoot the point and reverse, something the game doesn't allow.

I wish there was a DS version, the GBC version is a valiant but ultimately ugly attempt.

Oh, I apparently have the Wonderswan version of Densha de Go too. Here is the exciting cover artwork -

Ha! Their interests differ from mine! What a bunch of cunts!

Good god. A thread about driverless trains has actually managed to get even nerdier.