« May 2005 | Main | September 2005 »
July 11, 2005
Kill Kill Kill
Finally installed Outlook on here, and after over five months of using Webmail, I've downloaded the 2008 emails that have accumulated over these months. Except for the ones Lycos nabbed a while back, about 600 emails or so. Haven't been able to check Lycos in months, as I haven't wanted my emails ending up stuck on there. Have been stuck with this Webmail etc. situation for so long as I stupidly believed some prat when he said he'd give me a laptop months ago.
And guess what? Because I've been waiting so bloody long, not only has Lycos deleted all of my home emails - but also everything else from four years of having had that account.
If I wasn't so tired, and there weren't so many clothes hanging on the punching bag, I'd punch the crap out of it. And wait to be able to do the same to the person in question...
Posted by chantal at 10:20 PM | TrackBack
July 08, 2005
PS
Having very few functional braincells left after today, I forgot to add a particular thought.
I'm aware that most of my friends have lost track of which country I live in at any given time - London for the last six years - much less them knowing that I'm working in King's Cross these days, but after the events of today, what stands out are the people, friends and family both who haven't been arsed to get in touch.
Lovely people.
Posted by chantal at 12:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bang
It started with a bang.
More accurately, it started with a phonecall from my boss. In the last few weeks, she’s evolved – not very flatteringly – into an Incredibly Important Person. She phoned at 9am to complain that Liverpool Street station was closed, and insisted that, if I couldn’t find out anything useful off the Transport For London website, I was to phone them and find out exactly what was going on and how she was going to get to work. In the absence of information from TfL, I noticed on BBC News that a ‘bang’ had been reported at Liverpool Street station. ‘Bang? What sort of bang? What caused the bang? What did the bang do? etc.’
Our simple-minded local IT guy had overheard this conversation, and told me that King’s Cross had been evacuated, that passengers had been diverted to Euston until Euston too was evacuated. Victoria was evacuated. I phoned Ruth back to let her know that this was a slightly larger issue than just Liverpool Street and adjacent bus stops; she tried to pump me for additional information, which Tariq had unfortunately failed to give me. She sulked her way back home.
From then until 10am, I was sprinting between my office and the other, down the hall, each time there was an additional piece of news about the situation. As there are only two networked PCs in the other office, our three researchers were mostly unaware of the situation. I’d check the news on one of their two useful PCs, sprint back to my office with the latest news, then surf the web till something sent me sprinting back to their office. It was in their office that I heard an explosion; when I got back to my office, the two people there were standing by the window looking puzzled.
I was back in the researchers’ office when our Head of Unit and the Communications Assistant (the two people in my office today) turned up unannounced; it was time for our monthly Team Briefing. Not only was it a bloody inappropriate time to hold such a meeting, it was also extremely absurd to listen to various ramblings amidst a backdrop of ambulances, helicopters and other sirens. Throughout. We were interrupted by someone ordering us to the basement asap.
In the basement, they started serving coffee, and some people pulled out a Monopoly board. Not only did we have no idea what we were doing down there, we also had no idea how long we were likely to be down there for. Also, having been offline for over half an hour by then, we’d had no idea if there had been any significant incident in the meantime provoking this evacuation. Gareth, the Comms Assistant’s girfriend works for TfL, and had texted him to say a bus had ‘gone up’, but without any further details. Eventually someone was handed a microphone and informed us that the Police had advised them to remove all staff from offices with windows, and to keep us in a centralised location. As soon as he added we could return to our offices briefly to retrieve our stuff, I sprinted upstairs to check email, the news, and grab my bag and cigarettes. Gareth takes the bus into Russell Square; the printouts said that that was where the bus had exploded.
In the basement corridor, people were crowded around a radio. It seemed I needed to go up the stairs, then back down again to reach the smoking room; before I’d even lit up, a woman told me that three buses had gone up. I sprinted back to my colleagues to tell them. When I struggled back to the smoking room, a woman was talking on the phone in Spanish to her mother, reassuring her of the situation. I chatted to the group of smokers, then, when they left, to a Kenyan woman who was worried about her mother’s reaction if she didn’t manage to reach her first. Her boyfriend worked for London Underground, and had told her that a major electrical substation had been hit, as well as five buses. Once I’d decided I’d had all the nicotine my body could handle, I went back to the radio in the hall until my colleagues decided it was safe to leave.
Part of the problem with mass panic is that mobile networks get heavily clogged. I texted Matt as soon as we reached the basement, to let him know what was going on and to beg for external news of what was going on; it took about five attempts for the text to get through. I’d been waiting to phone my mother, to reassure her that even though all these explosions (nobody’d mentioned bombs as yet) were going off all around me, and although I’d been evacuated, really I was fine. I finally phoned at 11am. John, who she was staying with, was reasonably awake. She wasn’t, promptly went back to sleep and lost all recollection of having spoken to me. I then tried my father, who, after many attempts to phone him, seemed not to be at home.
Back upstairs, our Head of Unit informed us that, given where each of us lived, if we wanted to leave immediately, then we should. Instead, all of us stayed on, hounding the Internet for news and train times. I found a train in ten minutes’ time for Avneeta, who lives in Enfield, but by the time she’d finished dithering, it was too late; there was no indication of another train for her. In the researchers’ office, Simon managed to access BBC Live on one of the PCs, so I remained glued to that, again running between offices according to announcements, but also painfully aware each time I ran back into my own office that I was spending my time browsing the news and not doing any actual work – say, arranging cancelling tomorrow’s industry launch.
I had commented frequently about how the Iraqi War had been carried out as a media event, bordering on reality TV; today was much the same. What had actually happened seemed less important than immediate updates on the news, scouting other news websites when all the available news was more than a few minutes old. Actually, the bombs, the rumours and the news were all far less significant to all of us than the matter of how we’d get home. The smokers I chatted to throughout the day felt much the same: yeah, terrible tragedy, how the hell do I get home. As I emailed my uncle, there was an intense morbid excitement about the events, but they were ultimately secondary to commuting issues.
I’m trying to remember when London was last bombed. I remember the bombings of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when bombings were more or less a part of everyday life, and the only variation was in the country attacking us at the time. And when bombings are so commonplace, life reroutes itself around them and carries on, with little attention paid to the near-misses or actual-hits. Today was the first major attack in probably over 10 years, and maybe that was why there was so much media attention; the paucity of information would be another reason. As a prisoner-of-war, interviewed by the BBC while on his way to a POW reunion, more or less said, ‘Been here. Doing it again. Won’t let them beat us.’
My first thought, at the news of the multiple attacks, was that it was linked to the Olympics, intended to demonstrate how inefficient our public transport system is; it was only after a few hours of mild hysteria that we realised that today was the first day of the G8 summit. The Summit is being held in Scotland, which makes it a far more logical target, but maybe London was selected because of the disruption which could be caused, the mortality rates, and the impact it would have around the world. The obvious comparisons have been made with the Madrid bombings, however it’s notable that in Madrid, there were far few targets and a far higher death rate; in London, the targets effectively circled Central London, and the death rate has been comparatively negligible.
The end results: minimal infrastructural damage. The only overground image is that of the exploded bus on Upper Woburn Place. Apart from the deaths and injuries, the disruption is much the same as if there had been a combined Tube and bus strike. No photos of rubble and extensive damage for the press and politicians to capitalise on, to base future wars on; just an increasing yet small minimal death toll. The G8 summit is now apparently fixated on today’s attacks, away from debt relief and global poverty; with no groups claiming responsibility besides the website affiliated to Al Qaeda, you have to wonder who would benefit from today’s events. Obvious candidates would be the G8 countries resistant to the above themes: the States, Germany and Japan. Qadaffi has protested against African countries appealing for aid, immediately drowned out by other African leaders.
In the absence of concrete news, all we really know is that a city far from the G8 summit has been attacked, the G8 agenda has shifted significantly as a result, and it has been carried out in a way to minimise media coverage.
I guess we gotta watch this space.
Posted by chantal at 12:13 AM | Comments (1)