The Easter weekend approaches, with promise of chocolate, extreme sloth and copious home-cooked culinary delight. Fyse is traveling down to Devon for a few days with family and so experiencing once again the joy of the British railway. The sun beats down on the train as it slogs through the verdant countryside. Every seat is taken and humanity crams all available space in walkways and corridors. The air-conditioning is not coping and there are no windows.

Cheerful and oh-so-helpful railway employees have explained the situation in terms even the most heat exhausted traveler can understand. The lack of windows ensures no interference with smooth operation of the train’s cooling system. The cooling system only functions when the doors between carriages are shut. The doors are opened by motion sensors. These sensors can detect the twitch of a rabbit’s whisker at 70 yards, leaving the doors flapping manically back and forth if someone in the carriage so much as coughs. The fabled air-conditioning only activates when the carriage doors have been shut for few moments, which thanks to the all-seeing eyes has not happened since the train left Paddington two hours ago. All this means the sheets of impenetrable glass transform the train into an effective high-speed greenhouse.

Such basic lack of functionality never ceases to amaze Fyse. Objects that have presumably been through some sort of design process and yet fail to perform their primary purpose. Staggering lack of common sense and a certain twisted logic.

“Well Alice,” says Bob, “air-conditioning functions best in sealed environments, right? If you let air in directly from outside it is inefficient.”

“That’s right Bob,” says Alice, “so lets make sure that if the system can’t function at maximum efficiency then it wont function at all! Brilliant!”

“Yeah. What sort of sicko would want to be less than optimally cooled?”