"I'll...cast you down with the sodomites. You'll think you got fucked by a train." - Warden Norton The Shawshank Redemption

Now, I don't know about any of you, but if I thought I was being under-paid, I'd ask for more money. If I didn't get it, I'd find another job that met my expectations. If such a job doesn't exist, I can only conclude that what I'm being paid is fair, and represents the market value. I certainly wouldn't hold my employer to ransom, and deliberately withold the services for which I'm employed from my customers. Because that not only smacks of throwing your toys out of the pram, but it's quite clearly illogical, and by rights should be clear cause for summary dismissal.

Why then, do the rail workers get away with it?

Because they have the ultimate employee trump card - a union. With a Union, you can hold your employer to ransom. With a Union, you can force public opinion in your favour through organised press releases and denial of service. With a Union you can sit on your fat fucking arse when you're supposed to be working, drinking cheap lager and smacking the unfettered miscreants you dare to label children, openly mocking the TV as news floods in of the disruption your greed is causing.

Thatcher didn't go far enough. Unions should be completely illegal. They're an affrontery to market forces, and allow employees to bully their employer into paying more for their services, when by rights the employees should find other work if they find their earnings to be unsatisfactory. That they do this via a denial of service, directly impacting their employers earnings, is a complete disgrace. They should be made to pay for the shortfall in income suffered during their 'industrial action'.

Of course, I'm sure you can guess why I'm ranting about this. I turned up to get a train into Reading on Tuesday, only to find that the entire service was shut down due to strikes, and no replacement service was available. After swearing in the face of one of the fatuous bastards smugly stood in his illuminous SouthWestTrains jacket, I was left with the reality that I had 70 minutes to travel to Reading via the only realistic alternative - my car. Given that it's a 30 minute walk back to my house to pick up said car, and given that it's a 45 minute drive from there to Reading in clear traffic, and given that it was past 7am, and clear traffic on the M25 and M4 motorways at that time is a class A hallucinagen induced pipedream, it was clear that I was now short on time.

So, despite being clad in jeans and a sweatshirt, and carrying a not insignificant weight in my rucksack, I had to run back home at what pace I could manage given my garb and burden. On arriving home, I was practically soaked in sweat, but didn't have time to do anything about it. Instead, I got in my car and got moving. The traffic made an absolute mockery of my haste in getting home. Bumper to bumper for 15 minutes doing 20mph on the M25. Hurrah for the national speed limit (70mph).

The only way to make up this shortfall was to quite deliberately ignore what laws we have on motorway speed limits and push my new car (which has never been over 60mph before since I'm wearing it in) to 85mph on any clear stretch of motorway along the M4.

For my efforts, I managed to arrive a mere 15 minutes late for my CIMA course, so I didn't miss an inordinate amount of learning. Unfortunately, however, I did suffer the indignity of having to sit in a crowded classroom stinking of sweat, and had to go into town to buy some deodorant at the first opportunity.

Of course, that wasn't enough for one day. While making my way back at the end of the day, coming off the M4 onto the M25 (during rush hour, and feeling privileged to be moving at 40mph), a sizable chunk of stone was somehow flung at my car, kicked up by the passing traffic. It smacked into my widscreen at pace, and left a rather large crack in it for its effort.

A large crack in the windscreen. OF MY BRAND NEW FUCKING CAR.

Needless to say, I was not best pleased. It also goes without question that I lay the blame for both the windscreen and the undoubted engine damage suffered to the car during this episode on the lazy bastard rail workers sat at home eating pot noodle and sipping special brew when they should have been doing what they get paid for.

I also blame them for the BO that my fellow classmates had to endure for the early part of the morning.

Unfortunately, the physical abuse of rail staff is something that has been clamped down on in recent years. Unfortunately for the rail workers, verbal abuse is still an open avenue for my riposte. So watch out you fuckers. Because the next time I see one of your fatuous, smug, overfed faces, I will deliver an assault of bilious verbiage the likes of which you never dreamed possible. The ultimate tragedy being that your oafish and untutored brain will utterly fail to comprehend the greater part of it.

Bunch of fuckers.

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