#4: Traffic

Today, in my role as roving IT bod for a travel software company (i.e. one part of my job), I am at my company’s Redhill office. Redhill is about a 75 mile drive from my normal office, so usually I would get the train here. However I needed to bring a printer and some NAS with me, so I decided that driving would be better than sitting on a train cuddling a large Brother laser and a LaCie Ethernet Disk.

This morning, I left my house at 7:45am. I arrived in Redhill a bit after 11:30am. For the non-mathematical or lazy amongst my readers, this means that it took me nearly 4 hours to travel 75 miles. That’s absolutely fucking ridiculous.

The reason for this delay was pretty much fourfold. Firstly, it was raining cats and dogs this morning, which means everyone has to drive a bit slower and there are usually more accidents than there would be on a lovely sunny day. Secondly, there was heavy traffic on the A1(M) approaching the Hatfield tunnel. Thirdly, it took exactly one hour for me to travel 0.3 miles towards M25 junction 21A at Chiswell Green. Finally, there was a lorry blocking two lanes of the M25 at junction 12, which caused me a further 45 minutes delay.

On top of all that, the colour laser printer that was my primary reason for coming here hasn’t actually been delivered yet. If the traffic is anything like this bad on the way home, I will probably be home at around 10pm.

Christ :(