Advanced Listening Practice

Rachel: Again. This is the third time this week.

Tom: Tuesday was signal failure, yesterday was a points problem, today is "congestion ahead." I don't even know what that means, really. There's another train in the way?

Rachel: Basically, yes. They've all bunched up because one was late, so now they're all late. It's like a motorway tailback but on rails.

Tom: The 7:42 hasn't been on time since March. I've started keeping track on my phone. Fourteen out of the last twenty journeys have been delayed by at least ten minutes.

Rachel: You actually track it?

Tom: I started doing it because I wanted to claim the delay repay thing. You can get money back if it's more than fifteen minutes late. But the form is so long and tedious that I've only actually submitted it twice.

Rachel: I've never bothered. By the time I get into the office, I'm too annoyed to sit down and fill in a form about why I'm annoyed.

Tom: That's probably what they're counting on.

Rachel: Almost certainly. How long have you been doing this commute now?

Tom: Seven years. Maybe eight, actually. We needed more space after the second kid, and there was no chance of affording anything closer in.

Rachel: Same. We looked at flats in Ealing before we moved and just laughed. Two bedrooms, no garden, and they wanted nearly half a million.

Tom: And now you spend, what, four hundred a month getting to work instead?

Rachel: Try closer to five hundred. The annual season ticket went up again in January. I worked it out the other day and I'm spending nearly six thousand a year just to sit on this train and be frustrated.

Tom: Six thousand. For this. For lukewarm coffee and someone's backpack in your face.

Rachel: Speaking of which, have you noticed the coffee cart on the platform has stopped stocking milk? It's been black coffee or nothing for the last two weeks.

Tom: I had not noticed that, but it doesn't surprise me. They took the bins away last month too. There's nowhere to throw anything away on the platform now, so people just leave cups everywhere, which looks terrible, and then the train company sends out a tweet asking passengers to be more responsible. It's quite something.

Rachel: Does your work let you do any days from home? Mine keeps saying they're open to it, but every time I ask, there's a reason it doesn't quite work.

Tom: I get one day a week, officially. Fridays. Which is nice, but it's the day that matters least. I'd rather have a Monday or Wednesday from home and actually avoid the worst commuting days. But my manager likes having everyone in the office for the Monday meeting, which could very easily be a video call, but apparently we need to be "present."

Rachel: Ours is the opposite problem. They did allow remote work for a while, but then too many people started doing it, and the office felt empty, so they pulled it back. Now it's four days minimum in the office.

Tom: Which means four days of this.

Rachel: Four days of this. My husband works locally. He cycles to his office in about twelve minutes. Twelve minutes. He has absolutely no sympathy for me. He just says, "move jobs," as if I haven't thought of that.

Tom: Have you thought of that?

Rachel: Of course. But the jobs that pay what I need aren't in Reading. They're in London. And the jobs in Reading that I could do would mean a pay cut that would basically cancel out the saving on the train ticket. So I'm stuck.

Tom: That's the trap, isn't it? You live where you can afford to live, and you work where the work is, and the train is the thing that holds it all together, badly.

Rachel: Very badly. Do you ever think about what you'd do with the time if you didn't have the commute? I've worked it out. It's roughly two and a half hours a day, door to door, both ways. That's twelve and a half hours a week. Over a year, not counting holidays, that's something like six hundred hours.

Tom: Please don't tell me that. I was almost at peace with it.

Rachel: Six hundred hours a year, Tom. Sat on a delayed train, reading the same free newspaper, breathing in someone else's breakfast.

Tom: When you put it like that, this is basically a hostage situation.

Rachel: With a season ticket.

Tom: We're moving. Signal's just gone green.

Rachel: About time. Watch, we'll get to Paddington and the Tube will be down too.

Tom: That would be very on brand for today.

Rachel: See you tomorrow? Same time, same delay?

Tom: I'll be here.