Skip to main content

Dodgy cashpoint

The Barclays cashpoint in the tube ticket hall at London Waterloo. You have to watch yourself.

The other day, the girl in front of me left the ATM in frustration and headed off towards the barriers. As I drew closer to the screen, I could see that it seemed to be hanging with the message "counting your cash". I waited a little bit, assuming the thing was out of order and wondering how I was going to fund my Pret habit. Then - blow Phil down with a feather duster - if the machine didn't distribute the £60 that the previous user had assumed was never coming out!

Now, I'm an honest kind of guy. I could have pocketed that money and ordered double-shot americanos all week long. But what did I do? I set off in search of the girl who'd been robbed of her takings. With only the vaguest of descriptions to go on - I'd seen the back of her head - I spotted her at a nearby ticket window. And good Samaritan Phil reunited an innocent Londoner with her hard-earned lolly.

At least, I think it was her.

I thought that she'd offer me a tenner as a reward. But no. Not even a thank you and a peck on the cheek. She just said something like: "Oh, I thought it was never going to come out."

Charming. You do someone a favour...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...