For me, it was an excuse for an extra coffee as I flipped through my morning emails.

For her, it sounded like a job-threatening disaster. We were both on an empty platform waiting for a train that was never coming.

My would-be fellow passenger was not happy. She made that pretty clear to ScotRail staff, telling them, oh-so-robustly, how much trouble she was in from her boss. Their response? They rang up her office to explain the delay, the second of its kind this week.

That is the thing about Scotland’s train company: it is never so good as when it is bad. Sure, things go wrong with the trains. And the consequence for that can be serious: missed connections, lost meetings and raw stress.

But as ScotRail celebrates a new passenger survey showing it has recovered its old levels of satisfaction it is worth bearing in mind that passengers accept some inconvenience on the rails. They also expect grace under pressure from staff. Mostly, I think, they get this.

I should make a declaration of interest. I am a commuter, one of the hardcore, the two per cent of Scots who get on a train nearly every day. My line, which crosses both Glasgow and Edinburgh, has more delays than most.

It also has nicer trains, almost all with working wifi, toilets and and new power sockets. I am, by and large, a happy customer. For now. Last autumn, my mood, like that of many other commuters, was not so positive.

The reason ScotRail, or rather the ScotRail Alliance (which combines the privately-run train-operating company itself and the state-owned infrastructure giant Network Rail), is bigging up its satisfaction rating of 90 per cent is that things did not look so good last year.

Back then some of its trains were out getting those fancy sockets and wifi systems installed. The entire system was still recovering from an exhausting work-around forced on it by the closure of the upper level of Queen Street station. Cue some sore delays - above and beyond those caused by inevitable vandalism.

Mandatory performance indicators, like punctuality, fell from their normal heights. ScotRail routinely outperforms most UK operators.

Passengers revolted. One woman on my train was particularly cross about “skipping” - the practice of missing out a station to keep the train on time. That passenger was Jackie Baillie, the Labour MSP. Insiders confirm her niggling at officials had an impact, a classic example of effective opposition politics.

So too did pressure from Transport Minister Humza Yousaf. He was watching complaints in real time about crowding and delays on Twitter. He was not slow, I’m told, to feed that back to managers.

True, some at ScotRail felt they had been dragged in to the sometimes brutal politics of post-referendum Scotland.

But trains run to their own timetable, not one of nationalism, or unionism. In fact, ScotRail’s rolling performance measures have been getting better ever since it began a new one on December 11. Soon I might not get so many extra coffees of a Monday morning.