Not happy, Metro

I had a couple of bad experiences with Metro this week!

On Thursday, I headed to the city just after 9 am.   The train was about 8 minutes late, and although I squeezed on, it would have been difficult to fit another sardine on.

Before boarding, I noticed the whiteboard that the station hosts maintain (which is a good idea) indicated that in the couple of hours up to 9 am, 3 trains had been cancelled.   At that busy time of day, even when things are OK,  capacity is tight and the trains all have many standing room passengers.  As soon as there's a cancellation, not only are passengers delayed by having to wait for the next train, but the next couple of trains are sardine-like (people are literally sometimes unable to board and are left behind at stations close to the city).   The lack of three trains would have resulted in close to grid-lock for the whole time.  The knock-on effect was evidently still affecting  the train that I caught (even though the immediately preceding couple of trains had not been among the cancellations).

Then coming home on Friday afternoon from Flinders St, the train I planned to catch was over 10 minutes late.   Metro in its wisdom resorted to one of their little tricks to catch up time, and turned it into an express, so it didn't stop at my station.   Annoying though this was, at least the following train was close behind.  However, the announcements were really, really poor.    Yes, when things are running well, the automatic announcements are quite good, but when there's an unexpected change and hence proper announcements are needed,  the manual announcements about such changes tend to be garbled - at times incoherent - incomplete and infrequent.  There were certainly some very confused passengers getting on - and off - the stopping train that was turned into an express.

Although it didn't affect me, at the same time, there had apparently been some platform changes (I noticed a couple of trains leaving from other than their usual platforms).   Again, there were few, if any, announcements about these.