Voice of the London Underground canned for blogging funny fake announcement audio
The woman who reads the London Underground next stop announcements has been fired for keeping a blog where she records and posts her own funny fake announcements, like "We'd like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loud" and "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read a paper, but is actually staring at that woman's chest, please stop. You are not fooling anyone. You filthy pervert" and
"Residents of London are reminded that there are other places in Britain outside your stinking shithole of a city, and if you removed your heads from your arses for just a couple of minutes, you may realise that the M25 is not the edge of the Earth" and "Here we are again, crammed into a sweaty tube carriage. And today's Wednesday - only two more days until you can binge drink yourself into a state of denial about the mediocrity of you life. Oh, for Goodness sake, if you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He probably hasn't had sex for months."
Link
(Thanks, Mark!)
the latest
latest episodes
This reminds me of the fake announcements that were made in London's Heathrow Airport (I think), when the announcer used made-up passenger names that sounded like swear words and so on. I wish I could remember the details.
Brillant! If only there someone like the Dutch hacker who could actually play these MP3s on the PA systems!
http://scophy.com/2007/11/23/random-fridays-hacking-electronic-public-signs/
Anybody know a guy?
There is an announcer for NYC's F train that likes to give passengers fun facts about every stop in a really goofy voice, like, "Rockefeller Center, home of the biiiig treeeee." He used to make my day.
Does anyone know if he still works there?
My... who is that handsome chap who posted the item on Metafilter...;)
She's not actually been fired, given how she was never an employee of London Underground. They've indicated that they won't be using her services again in future.
And it wasn't for the funny announcements (to which London Underground has no objections), it was apparently because she was (mis)quoted as saying that the London Underground is horrible.
Mike Scott is right... read this interview she got fired over.
Mike scott is right... after the following interview, they didn't want her services anymore...
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=496165&in_page_id=1770
This is terrible. I've been on subways/tubes in many cities and she's the first one I could actually understand. (Perhaps Transport for London has a strict "No chewing taffy while recording announcements" policy.)
Does it really matter if she loves or loathes the tube?
She obviously does good a good job and I personally don't care whether the person who tells me to "mind the gap" is actually really fond of minding the gap herself. I want to understand her, that's all.
I still remember Munich in the 80s, before they switched to a softspoken female announcer the drivers had to make every announcement themselves and did so in a harsh, aggressive bavarian dialect. Couldn't understand a word.
I think they really fired her for not for the funny stuff, but for saying London was a shithole and that the underground is horrible.
"There's a line, dick, and you just crossed it."
I think the ones at Heathrow airport were pranksters calling in from their cell phones asking to page people with Arabic sounding names, which, when spoken aloud, said funny things, though some of them were kinda xenophobic (like "Miter bin Ismaelli" or something like that).
It looks like Mike beat me to it, I was also going to point out that she wasn't let go because of the funny/fake announcements, but for her "criticism" on the Tube.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/bizarre/5329188.html
TEAPUNK wrote...
Completely forgot that until you just posted !
I was in Munich during that time too and I remember the confusion. Like Emma Clarke you heard the recorded announcements but didn't take much notice.
Then one day we were on the train and the driver barked in a gruff voice as we arrived in the station: "Fröttmaning". Everybody stopped and looked at the speaker.
Here's a link to the Heathrow pranksters including audio.
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2003/s_heathrow-p1.php
My favorite of theirs is the announcement for "Makollig Jezvahted and Levdaroum DeBahzted".
She's being silenced!!! Any sane person knows the London underground truly sucks.
San Francisco MUNI has been installing loud speakers to broadcast when the buses are expected or how late they are (which is always) at various busy bus stops (including residential areas) for a month now and I was about to pay off some graf kid to dismantle the damn thing (the decibel level is deafening especially at night) but you're inspiring me to be more creative with a worthwhile prank or two.
I just recently flew on Southwest (which I hate, but not my choice), and the flight attendants and other employees were making really odd, corny pun/jokes with ALL of their loudspeaker announcements.
Like: "Please be careful when opening the overhead compartments, as items may have shifted during the flight. And as we all know, 'shift happens'!" All with that cheesy Phil Hartman-esque fake-announcer/law-talkin'-guy inflection in their voice.
It's as if the airline sent all their employees to bad comedy customer service training camp or something. They were all doing it, even at the boarding gate.
@ Fried Gold
There are (or were at least) a few MTA drivers with a sense of humor. You have to have a sense of humor in NYC. And they have strong enough of a union to express it with out fear.
and re: the airport announcements. When Phish tour was going strong I'd often hear prank paging in tour related airports. People would page names out of songs or band members nicknames. Average traveler would think nothing of it. Purely an inside joke.
Today they would probably arrest you. All the fun is gone.
The London underground is both horrible and wonderful and confusing and cool all at the same time.
If you no longer appreciate the good parts and only appreciate the bad parts then you have merely become a big pile of snot. Simply go blow yourself and all will return to normal.