I like to go a-wandering with a laptop on my back
After having spent the whole week moaning and feeling sorry for myself, I have just been reminded that there are some nice people left in the world. A member of client staff, to whom I hasten to add I have never spoken before, has just pulled over at the side of the road and given me a lift to the train station. I was very surprised, and it was an exceptionally kind thing for her to do 
The place where I’m working this week is a 15 minute walk from a small suburban train station in East Birmingham. It’s not a good area, and the client is located on an industrial estate which is rather dark and lonely. I don’t mind walking through it in the morning, in fact I quite like a bit of exercise to clear my head, but in the evenings it’s slightly less fun.
One of my colleagues was commenting on it yesterday and saying that at the place where she used to work, I would have been told to take a taxi. In fact she told me to take a taxi and that she was sure the manager would reimburse it. At her old firm, they took the view that they were liable for staff getting mugged whilst walking to and from client premises, and that they would rather repay people the extra few quid for a taxi than have them become a victim of crime. She reckoned this particular manager we were working for would think the same, and possibly she would – I don’t know her so I couldn’t comment. But this girl annoyed me because she went on for half an hour about how dangerous it was for me to me wandering around an area like this in the dark carrying a laptop 
Yes, I know it’s hardly ideal. I look about sixteen and it’s blatantly obvious that there’s a computer in my bag. I’m scared of the dark too, and I actually have quite a horror of industrial estates. But how I get to and from work is my business and when I’ve psyched myself up to be able to cope with it, it doesn’t really help if other people make an unnecessarily big deal out of it and harp on about how *they* wouldn’t even walk around here on their own at lunchtime in case they got murdered.
Sometimes people with cars can be so terribly snobby and get the whole concept of walking totally out of proportion. It’s less than a mile, it’s not that big a deal, and no I don’t want to go to all the hassle of getting cash out of cashpoint, finding a local taxi number, waiting around for them to pick me up, wondering if they’re a weirdo who might abduct me, collecting the taxi receipts and begging a manager to reimburse me. Yes, I might get the money back but that manager will remember and perhaps not want to book me on her jobs again because I’ve caused a problem, and next year when it comes to my annual appraisal there’ll be a comment about me causing disruption and not having a proper regard for the budget. I can do without more black marks to my name. The whole problem will be solved during the year when I learn to drive. In the meantime, I intend to continue to take my chances walking through industrial estates the length and breadth of the country But I am very grateful to the random lady who gave me a lift, and it is noticeable that the colleague who objected so much to my walking drove off at half five without so much as a backward glance, never mind offering to take me to the station herself 