Re: City Rail barriers often wide-open

["David Proctor" <daproc@bigfoot.com>]

brett.fitzpatrick@employment.gov.au spouted socialist claptrap when he
spewed forth:

>David, I'm one of those people who will not use the "nutcracker" gates if
>there is a staff member on the WEG.
>
>The reason that I do this is because I believe that CityRail staff are
there
>for a purpose - checking tickets being one of them.

The gates are there for a purpose - checking tickets. The magnetic stripe on
the ticket has a purpose - to operate the gates. The staff are there for a
purpose - to open the WEG who cannot (as opposed to will not) use the gates,
due to luggage, disability, etc.

>I believe that by using
>the WEG, there will be an imbalance between magnetic tickets sold and
>magnetic tickets "scanned", helping to provide justification for these
>people's jobs.


And the railways will continue to lose millions of dollars a year providing
jobs when they do not need to be provided. Maybe if these people did the
jobs they were paid to do (like directing people to use the automatic gates)
they might have some job security.

>Why do I hold this belief?  I work in the CES, and know how hard it can be
to
>find suitable work for people, so whatever I can do to help keep a person
in
>a job (ie, not replaced by a machine) I will do. Perhaps this is a bit
naive.


It is extremely naive. I presume then that you use bank tellers during
banking hours, rather than ATM's, as this keeps tellers employed - stuff the
inconvenience of having to queue and pay the extra fees. I also presume you
use operators for long-distance phone calls, rather than dial direct, as
this keeps Telstra telephonists employed - again, bugger the extra cost. Or
does this fall outside your defintion of "whatever it takes"?

The system is not currently working properly because CityRail staff and
management have not taken the time and trouble to make the system work
properly. If they had bitten the bullet in the very beginning and forced
people (including little old ladies, etc - no ageist slur intended) to use
the gates, they wouldn't have half the problems they have now - perhaps
then, they might be able to roster people so that the gates are manned all
the time - it is not unusual to see the gates at city stations (Town Hall
excepted - I wonder why) open from about 20:00 onwards. If they didn't have
to have huge numbers of staff during th day, they might have been able to
have people on at these times.

Regards

David Proctor
daproc@bigfoot.com