Some reports suggested an Arriva Yorkshire driver discriminatorily prevented the couple from travelling because of their attire. Others suggested that the driver and indeed the operator should be concerned about the on board safety of a woman with a metal chain around her neck and the safety of other nearby passengers.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, the media love this sort of thing and its readers get to form (indeed reinforce) views of the bus industry that are often polarised or disproportionate. It’s one more example of how hard it is to run a bus company and drive a bus. No matter how the company’s PR people deal with this, they cannot win. All the good work following training, NVQs, performance indicators and so on can so easily be unstitched in a moment.
We’re not presuming driver or the company is innocent or guilty. What is interesting is the comments people have been leaving on this story, on the internet. We’d estimate that 37-40 per cent accused the driver of discrimination, a high proportion of which wanted him disciplined or sacked. About 25 per cent felt that the couple were either “freaks” or “scroungers”. Only about eight per cent supported the driver in his behaviour and these generally didn’t mention safety issues. In fact just two per cent of comments mentioned safety.
A high proportion of comments had at least some humorous element and some 12 per cent were purely joke replies.
Pardon us for adding to that humour, but does the goth expect to buy a cheaper dog fare for his girlfriend? Always providing of course that she sits on the floor and not on a seat...
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Sorry Tale
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4 comments:
I tracked down the original event to a Dewsbury newspaper - It happened on the 8th December - hardly fresh breaking news is it...
The article implies the driver asked the couple to remove the chain before boarding, (on health and safety grounds), which they refused to do...They then sat down on the bus and refused to move, despite the driver asking them to leave the vehicle...
The driver declined to leave the bus station, called the police, who on arrival, removed the couple from the bus...
Not quite as the Nationals present it eh?
As an aside, I did wonder whether they'd made any facetious suggestion about free fares for dogs...I suppose anything is possible...
These goths have achieved what I suspect was their intention, ie: to have their 15 minutes of fame. Witness at least one national daily newspaper which did a double spread interview with them.
The driver is bing made out to be some kind of ogre, but surely on PUBLIC transport there should be some attempt at maintaining some sort of standard of behaviour. This behaviour - while it does not appear to be damaging to either the girl or boy - isn't really normal is it?
OK, you could say it's individualistic and not something that should be stifled. But then drug-taking is regarded by many as individualistic too - should drug takers be welcomed on buses? (Not that you don't get enough boarded all ready:-)
Where do you draw the line? While some passengers would find these goths amusing, some undoubtedly are going to find it disturbing. The driver has a duty to those passengers too.
Which is why I find Arriva's comment that they take "discrimination" very seriously rather gutless in this case. The driver probably should be supported openly at an early stage rather than suggesting he might have let it all go.
And as it is, two young people have got themselves a nice bit of free publicity. Well, it beats queuing up for the next X-FACTOR auditions, doesn't it?!!!!
Personally I couldn't give a cuss about either their garb or their "standard of behaviour" - just so long, that is, as their behaviour, (ie dressing strangely), wasn't actually harming anybody else.
As far as I'm concerned, character judgements of this kind have no place in deciding who travels and who doesn't... that road leads to fascism...
What matters is whether the driver had a valid reason for not permitting travel on 8th December...and if the couple did indeed refuse to take off the chain, then IMHO, on health and safety grounds, he did...
It's an unfortunate feature of our point and shoot media though, that only one side of a "news" story like this is ever heard...
Well its caused much amusement with me being the office Goth.
But then again if you have a look at goth messageboards you'll find opinion is divided there too, (along the lines of is it damaging the PR of the goth scene - bearing in mind that a friend's nephew and his girlfriend were attacked for being gothic - while he survived his girlfriend later died of her injuries - have this couple taken things too far with public S&M, or are they just after 15 mins of fame)
I've seen worse S&M couples wondering around (cowboy and gimp out for a walk one evening)
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