Captain Procedures and the Annual Depot Pilgrimage

 London Underground is a peculiar beast, but few of its annual rituals are quite as delightfully dystopian as the Competency Verification.

Every twelve months, without fail, frontline staff are dragged off to a windowless depot tucked away in the absolute middle of nowhere... always a minimum of an hour further than anywhere sensible, to prove we haven’t completely forgotten how to do our jobs.

On arrival three written exams await. Rules and procedures, fire safety, and the rather sobering protocol for catastrophic emergencies. And should you miraculously survive this paper-based gauntlet, your reward is... yet another pilgrimage to another distant depot. There, you get to haul out actual kit and physically demonstrate to a watchful assessor that you can perform basic tasks without accidentally hospitalising yourself. Glorious.

As a senior supervisor, the pressure is quietly immense. I am, theoretically, the wise fountain of procedural knowledge; the resident Captain Procedures to whom junior colleagues flock when a rule baffles them. Falling short of the mandatory 80% pass mark because I inadvertently picked option B instead of option A would be a tragedy of biblical proportions. It would mean a humiliating resit, another grueling trek across the network, and a severely dented reputation.

So, for the next few days, I shall be deeply buried in the intoxicating literature of Opening Section Switches and Wrong Directional Moves. Wish me luck, naturally.