Wrong Kind of Snow

The job

Nadia writes the passenger information messages for a train operating company.

Not the automated ones. The ones a human writes when something has gone wrong and a real sentence is required, and which then appear on eleven hundred screens and are read aloud at ninety-four stations.

She has eleven to fourteen words. That is the character limit on the older display boards and the older display boards are the constraint, and the constraint has not moved since 2011 and will not move until the boards are replaced, which is scheduled for 2029.

The rules

1. Say what is happening.
2. Say what the passenger should do.
3. Do not apologise in the first message. Apologise in the second.

Rule 3 is the one that gets challenged by every new manager and it has survived four of them, because the evidence is unambiguous: a first message that leads with sorry is read as evasion, and a first message that leads with information is read as competence, and the difference in the complaint volume is about forty per cent.

4. Never use a word the industry uses and the public does not.

This is the hard one and it is where her predecessor came unstuck.

On the incident

Everybody knows the phrase. It has been a joke for thirty years and it will be a joke for thirty more.

What almost nobody knows is that it was true and specific and correct: there is a kind of snow — fine, dry, powdery — that behaves differently from wet snow, that is drawn into traction motors and melts and shorts them, and it genuinely was a different problem requiring a different response.

It was also, as a sentence to put in front of four thousand people at seven in the morning, catastrophic.

Nadia has it printed out and pinned above her desk. Not as a warning. As a reminder that the person who wrote it was not stupid; they were accurate, and being accurate in eleven words to an audience that is standing in the cold is a completely different skill from being accurate.

A Tuesday in February

06:41. A points failure at a junction eleven miles north. Everything through the corridor is affected. Four thousand people at nine stations, rising fast.

The technical description that comes to her from control is: Points 47B failed in the reverse position, detection lost, S&T attending, ETA 40 mins.

She has eleven words.

Draft one

Points failure at Marsden Junction. Delays of up to 40 minutes.

Ten words. Accurate. It went out at 06:43.

06:52

Control updates: S&T on site, fault worse than thought, no estimate.

This is the message that matters. Everyone in the industry knows it and nobody outside does: the second message is where trust is won or lost, because the first message set an expectation of forty minutes and the forty minutes is not going to happen.

Draft two, rejected

Delays continuing at Marsden Junction. We apologise for the disruption.

Nadia deleted it. It says nothing. It is the message that makes a platform go quiet in the wrong way.

Draft three, rejected

Points failure worse than expected. No estimate. Seek alternative routes.

Accurate and honest and it would cause four thousand people to move at once, which at Bevan Street at 06:55 is a crowding problem and possibly a safety one.

What went out at 06:54

Fault worse than first thought. No new time yet. We'll update at 07:15.

Fourteen words. Over the limit; it truncates on the old boards to …We'll update at 07, which she knew it would, and which she judged was still better than the alternatives.

The last five words are the whole message.

Why

Because the thing people cannot stand is not delay. It is not knowing when they will next know something.

If you tell four thousand people that you have no information and that you will speak to them again in twenty-one minutes, and then you speak to them again in twenty-one minutes, you have given them the only thing you actually have.

07:15

She updated. No new information. She said so, in nine words, and gave the next update time.

07:38

Points fixed. First train through at 07:44.

08:20

The complaint volume for that morning was the lowest for any incident of comparable length in four years.

Nadia is aware that this is a small thing and that trains were still late and that four thousand people still had a bad morning.

The email

She got one email about it, forwarded up from customer relations, from a woman at Bevan Street.

It said: Thank you for saying you'd update at 07:15 and then doing it. I stood there for forty minutes and that was the only reason I didn't cry.

Nadia has it in a folder.

The folder has eleven things in it and she has been doing this for nine years.