Notes from underground

"How much do you get paid basic?" I asked my supervisor after he'd shown me a wage slip bulging with overtime.

"I don't know," he admitted.

Overtime addiction is a common—although controversial—phenomenon on the underground. The unions hate it, since it allows the managers to get away with understaffing, but their married male members love it since it keeps them away from their wives. I wondered what my supervisor's wife thought of him never being home, but he maintained she was unconcerned. "I don't see her much even when I'm there."



It transpired that this kind of marital bliss included such accommodations as separate televisions, bedrooms and holidays. But he seemed happy enough.

It was certainly better than Brian's marriage, the source of much sniggering since I'd first arrived. I had met him a few times before a colleague asked me, "Did he talk about his missus?"

I said I didn't know anything about his wife.

"Ask about his missus," he told me and cackled.

Brian, it seemed, had a secret. He didn't have a wife, or if he did she was long departed. In fact, everyone else knew the secret and Brian was the one in the dark, since he was always talking about what he and his missus had got up to at the weekend, while we all looked at the ceiling.

Wives and girlfriends are always leaving guys on the underground. It seems as much an occupational hazard as getting electrified, or spat at. It is the bank holidays at work, the unsocial hours, the same boring stories.

And finding new love is a problem too. You see quite a few guys—on respectable money and perfectly decent to look at—reaching their late thirties and getting a worried look in their eyes. The shift-work is the first problem, since dating is not so easy when you have to get up at five the next morning. Or else you're working evenings, nights and weekends.

The other problem is meeting people. In theory, working with the public should offer great opportunities but somehow it doesn't work out like that.

The ticket clerks have the best chance, since they meet nearly everybody. Window work becomes a kind of intensive speed-dating, where you have 15 seconds to get a phone number. Although it is possible, it is fraught with difficulty. For starters, just telling some people the price of a ticket can put them off you. On the other hand, paying for a £2 ticket with a credit card, as a lot of pretty women seem to do, can also be quite a passion killer.

The barrier staff have more room for manoeuvre, literally, since they can disappear for 20 minutes if the mood takes them. At one suburban station I worked at, the clerks constantly cursed the amorous station assistant, who'd be entertaining one of his apparent harem in the mess-room on an almost constant basis. I stood with him once and watched one lady patiently waiting—almost queuing—while he finished sweet-talking another. "How do you do it?" I asked, impressed. "Just say a bit of nonsense in their ears," he told me.

Elsewhere I met a station assistant who had written his phone number—along with a variety of corny lines—on a load of tube maps and was surreptitiously handing them out to female passengers who took his fancy. He drew a blank, however, except for the station cleaner, who was besieging his phone.

Of course, the ever-present danger with all these techniques is an accusation of harassment. I have seen more of these would-be Lotharios cut down in their prime by a letter of complaint than by any femme fatale.

In any case, such a romantic approach is not for everyone. I was told about a bloke who boasted that he'd masturbated in every ticket office on the Northern line and beat the safe timer's countdown (one minute) in most of them.

Another colleague decided that the underground was chock-full of latent homosexuals. "It's a combination of the smart uniform," he declared, "and having no power." Impossible, I said: even though there are a lot of men down there, none of them went to private school. He was unperturbed, convinced he could unearth a hotbed of Wildean excess beyond the usual screaming queens. Our supervisor, Gary, an otherwise robust Essex lad, had surprised us that morning by acting unwittingly camp, so I thought I'd test the theory out on him.

He skipped right past the important bit about gays being everywhere on the underground and asked, with seemingly wounded pride, "What do you mean we've got no power?"

"Well, we haven't got any power," I said, as another kid bunked through the gates. "We can't do anything."

"We've got lots of power," he insisted. "I could shut down this station if I wanted to, just like that, kick everyone out and close the gates."

"No you couldn't," I said, "how could you do that?"

"I'd just close the gates, ring up the line controller and tell him to make trains non-stop here."

"What would you tell him?"

"I'd say I was feeling a bit faint."