Well silly me. I didn't realise that I would need to fill in a form, provide proof of identity and a couple of proofs of address before I can get a replacement Oyster card.
Nor did it occur to me that although Ilford station will sell me a card and allow me to top it up there if anything goes wrong with it I need to use the card that won’t work (except, being flaky it actually worked one last time) to travel on the system to an Underground station and deal with it there.
I thought I knew about bureaucracy, but this has me beat. I'll have to put a tenner on the PAYG card for tonight and tomorrow and remember to bring my passport and a couple of utility bills in with me tomorrow! And can you fill in the form online, or download and print it yourself?
No. You cannot.
So now I have a form (that you can't download, or fill in online or anything useful like that) to apply for a replacement card. And the form asks if the card to be replaced is registered and then asks for my password.
What?
I suppose that Transport for London picked the name ‘Oyster’ for other reasons, probably related in some artsy fartsy way to the concept of romance. Well, it’s accidentally appropriate for other reasons: the whole thing stinks of fish and if you have one that goes bad, it makes you ill.
All I want is to replace an annual travel card that I have already paid for. I don’t want to buy a house, travel abroad, open a bank account or take out a huge unsecured load. I do not want access to secret files or people’s personal information, so why do I need to go through all these bloody hoops with an unrestructured Stalinist system?
Did you ever wonder where the Vopos and Stasi went when the Berlin Wall came down? I think I know…
I could spit tacks!
Apart from that, tra-la-laaaa.
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