Yes, at the moment I have to do a commute to work. It's nothing special, just a bus and a tram, but it's the tram that annoys me, and it annoys me for one simple reason - the people on it. Now, I'm travelling about 10 stops on the tram line, it's not possible to commute any other way except by driving, so it's understandable that I'm sat on the bloody thing.

  But there's a whole bunch of people (well OK, I prefer to refer to them as "bone idle cunts", but that's just me) who stand at the tramstop and wait 5 or 10 minutes for the tram, and then only go one or two stops in the city-centre. So they've waited up to ten minutes, and paid about £1.20 or so to make a tram journey that they could have walked in about 3 minutes - maybe 5 minutes if they're slow-walking lazy bastards. I know this, because I walk that "journey" all the time, I walk pretty quickly, and I'm going slow if it takes me three minutes to do the distance.

  Maybe it's me that's the lazy one, because I simly can't be bothered to stand around and wait for the tram, I'd rather just get there and get on with whatever I want to do. Maybe that's me being lazy, I don't know. Maybe it's sane to want to stand in the fucking cold and wet (which is the weather more often than not in Manchester) and then pay for the priviledge of riding a tram when I could have got there 5 minutes ago anyway just by walking it.

  In fact, I'm sure it must be me, because every morning there's probably fifty FLCs just on my tram (and there's plenty more trams than just the one I'm on) who only ride it for one or two stops in the city centre, which means that for the first five to ten minutes of the journey, the effing tram is like the Black Hole of Calcutta, people virtually hanging off the sides of the carriage, and then as the tram starts going out of the city centre, the exodus occurs, and suddenly the entire thing is maybe half-full if you're lucky.

  I think maybe I need to get into civil revolutions - it's not like the service on the trams is even all that good (considering the overcrowding and so on) - Altram, the tram operator, ordered (or said they'd ordered, anyway) extra carriages to relieve the overcrowding. Has anyone ever seen these mythical beasts relieving the pressure of travel? Have they shite. They exist in the same parallel universe as the tram service that has working ticket machines, a sane attitude to ensuring customers have tickets, and also to making sure overcrowding never occurs on the plartforms. And we're now in the position where the tram operator is changing in six months time (a change that can't come quick enough, in my humble opinion) but that means that Altram aren't going to put any further investment into the system in that time, so we're never going to see the mythical tram carriages, the ticket machines will be even more knackered and shit than they are already, and yet we're stiill paying to travel on the system. I despair.

  The problem is, the only way the tram company and so on will ever listen is for people to stop using the system as much as possible - or maybe just not pay when the service is abysmal - but the FLCs won't stop using it for their little journeys, so the tram operator simply shrugs it's corporate shoulders, says "Well, the passengers are happy with it, because they're still using the service", and it'll never get any better.

  Come the revolution, I propose that Altram's board of directors is the first up against the wall to be shot

  Assuming, of course, that the firing squad isn't travelling by tram, and subject to unnecessary delays.