[revsorg]

I had the dubious pleasure of spending some time at Preston train station today. Preston is in Lancashire, England, somewhere a little north of Manchester and Liverpool, up to the left a little above Wales. I say dubious pleasure because I had the misfortune to spend 40 minutes waiting for the train to London and experienced a public announcement system that plumbed new levels of unsatisfactoriness.

The basic problem is that Preston station was built some time in the late 1800’s when they probably didn’t need to worry about loudspeaker systems and echos, so it’s a great big iron and glass ceilinged hangar that lacks the charm of St Pacras station in London, or the beauty of the greenhouses at Kew.

Basically, it’s just not somewhere you want to be.

But I was there, and I waited, and then started to realise just how useless the announcements were over their PA system. The chap who was announcing seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that he was being paid to perform a pointless task, so tried to do it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the key problem was that the time of the echo around the vaulted ceilings was more or less exactly the same as the time between the words he spoke, so every word spoken jumbled itself with those before and after.

It was like the Ipcress machine with a northern accent.

I have to admit, I didn’t spend much time walking around the station sampling the different delays that might be experienced from the different loudspeakers, partly because I knew which train I was getting because it was shown on the monochrome television display that was some sort of throwback to an episode of The Sweeney in 1976. At least the television display worked though, whereas if I were poorly sighted I would have been in a state of psychedelic confusion from Mr Echo man barking confusion over the tannoys.