Young Jason who helps me at the station took these today in the snow.

A nice set of images and we will print some to display in the station in due course.

I have been sitting here this morning comparing customer support from different companies. I run my own business and also having been in customer facing jobs all my working life I know how important customer service is.

Well looking at all the companies today I noticed they all had one thing in common. On the phone they all offered an option to complain but none offered an option to praise their service.

You all know the story when you ring a company and you get the automated answer… Press 1 for sales……..Press 0 to hear these options again…. But as I say none had the option to let the customer praise.

Now I know that successful companies all take complaints seriously, if they didn’t then they would not be as successful as they are, but surely they can’t get so few calls of praise that they are worth ignoring?

Good staff thrive on praise, you get nowhere without praising your staff, and whilst praise from people above you is nice to receive nothing beats praise from a customer, especially when it’s unexpected.

I will complain when I think I am justified in doing so, but I also ring companies to praise service and it’s so darn hard to actually get to speak to a person who can take on board your praise and hopefully pass it on to those who are being praised.

It’s a strange old world is Customer Satisfaction.

-7c first thing this morning. Went down the railway as the civil engineers were out also a signalman was working as well.

Called it a day just before 1pm it is just too cold down there.

Here are a few pictures of the River Nene by the station, you can see the ice on the top of the water.

Driver experience out today as well with the Standard 5 running light engine, couple of pictures of it running through the station.

Not a day for being on the footplate.

Station building wont be open tomorrow, it’s just too cold, so next opening will be a week today at the start of half term.

Now to defrost and get warm again.

Every so often I go wild. I give the computer hard drives a spring clean. Yes I know it’s not spring but just go with the flow.

As I am regularly trying different software, editing and creating files the four drives (Three internal and one external) in the main system do accumulate for want of a better description “Junk”.

Now I am not on any of the drives especially short of space but every since I first started using computers with hard drives, which is more years ago than I care to remember I have always hated clutter. This I think stems from when we hade small hard drives and sometimes space was at a premium.

So normally in the first few days of the month I have a cleanout. That has been my excitement this morning. Remove the undeleted temp files and traces of programs long gone.

The one thing I never play with cleaning wise is the registry, in Windows 7 and for that matter Vista I honestly believe there is no point and I am not impressed with any of the so called registry cleaners anyway, having played with many most are over aggressive and clear stuff that maybe should not be cleared.

So now I have a squeaky clean main computer and also the same with the laptop, files are archived where necessary and all of course fully backed up.

Now to spend a busy month getting it messy again!!!

Well we have a service at the railway this Sunday and I must admit I am looking forward to it.

Hopefully the weather will be good, but as I am an atheist I suppose praying to the gods for sunshine is out!!

Only three services each way but at least it should be steam which will get a few out of the woodwork.

Plus as we are now running on new timetables it’s a fair bet somebody will turn up at the wrong time and also we will have a regular stream of people we only see each February who must just have a copy of the years timetable, they never of course travel but their year would not be complete without collecting one.

Now I am sure that many of you reading the title of this post will have expected something rude or smutty, well sorry to disappoint but if you want a bit of smut come and spend some money on Sunday when the locomotive is at the station there will be more than enough smuts for everybody!!

Now I can just imagine you sitting there thinking “What’s the silly sod on about now?”

Go on admit it, that’s what your thinking.

Well as the vet said to the cow “I will put you out of your misery”

When I said i was taking over the station again, which I will admit at the start of the year was not my intention. A few people said “If you want cover then just let me know”.

Well Monday will see those promises to the test as I will be sending out the ROTA list for February and March. No call me cynical if you like but as soon as the list goes out I will sit back and await the excuses coming in.

Now I am a great believer that you should only promise something if you genuinely think at the time that you will be able to keep that promise.

Watch this space as they say for the replies to flood in, and I am willing to be anybody a fiver that as always I will struggle to find cover at the station.

I just had an email from somebody saying as my mobile is not on how could they contact me, I suggested email and sent it back

Sitting here nursing a dose of the lurgi I thought back to a station visitor last Sunday, I wont call them a customer because they bought nothing and to the best of my knowledge in the last six years never have.

She stood and read the poster I have up saying there are no public toilets on the station. Then she walked up to me and uttered the immortal words “Do you have any toilets?”.

Now strangulation would at that stage been a tempting option but it would have got messy especially from the paperwork aspect and blood is a bugger to clear off the platform as it tends like dog crap to get everywhere.

So she got the only possible alternative and that was the single word “NO”. I have long since given up giving them the details as to how the local council closed the ones in the car park, they said it was to save money, but personally I don’t think they could give a toss to be honest.

Now I appreciate you can rarely educate stupid as they say but did she think in the 5 seconds between reading the notice and speaking to me we would have been able to build a toilet?

I have this feeling in my water (Excuse the pun) that yet again the lack of bogs is going to feature largely in the excitement of the day to day life of the station.

I mean if a clearly worded notice makes no difference then what will. short of just shooting them on sight or just shrugging my shoulders and then handing them a bucket and a bog roll!!!