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Oyster III: The Long and Winding Road
Friday, November 25th, 2011 10:53 amWell, finally I have my replacement Oyster Card. I am older, wiser, sadder for the experience.
I seem to be the only person on the planet who couldn’t sort it out online. I tried the transfer ticket option the website has, but it no workee. The Oyster I tried to transfer it to remains resolutely and unrepentantly Pay-As-You-Go.
So I queued.
I queued in Victoria. Had Dante known of such an earthly torture, he would have rewritten vast swathes of The Inferno. Beefed them up a bit to make them scary.
There are two ticket offices in Victoria (they are disrupting the whole area to build a new one so they can irritate more people, faster) and they are both understaffed. The queues wind with serpentine sloth and this being England, none of the staff speaks a single language other than Cockney English and few of the customers speak anything like it. So the queues endure and grow.
Above ground on the main concourse, there is a London Underground Travel Centre that acts in many ways as a third ticket office. You can queue there in a rather pleasanter environment and buy tickets, Oyster cards and Oyster card top-ups. But you can’t replace a broken one; you have to descend into the underground hell for that. It took me twenty minutes of queuing to discover that golden nugget of joyous intelligence.
I suggested that it might be nice to have a notice posted to tell people this, but apparently that is ‘negative advertising’ and not allowed. Apparently nothing is allowed to go wrong officially with Transport for London services or products and this has been the case since we went to war with Eastasia. And we have always been at war with Eastasia.
A further twenty-five minutes in a queue underground and I achieved my goal. I have my new Oyster card and the chap who sorted it for me was very helpful. He will doubtless be punished at some point. I hope they take it easy on him; anyone can be polite and efficient if they allow their mind to wander.
The proofs of identity and address that were so important and indispensable yesterday, that I had to dig out at home last night and bring in? Not even asked for. Completely unnecessary.
I seem to be the only person on the planet who couldn’t sort it out online. I tried the transfer ticket option the website has, but it no workee. The Oyster I tried to transfer it to remains resolutely and unrepentantly Pay-As-You-Go.
So I queued.
I queued in Victoria. Had Dante known of such an earthly torture, he would have rewritten vast swathes of The Inferno. Beefed them up a bit to make them scary.
There are two ticket offices in Victoria (they are disrupting the whole area to build a new one so they can irritate more people, faster) and they are both understaffed. The queues wind with serpentine sloth and this being England, none of the staff speaks a single language other than Cockney English and few of the customers speak anything like it. So the queues endure and grow.
Above ground on the main concourse, there is a London Underground Travel Centre that acts in many ways as a third ticket office. You can queue there in a rather pleasanter environment and buy tickets, Oyster cards and Oyster card top-ups. But you can’t replace a broken one; you have to descend into the underground hell for that. It took me twenty minutes of queuing to discover that golden nugget of joyous intelligence.
I suggested that it might be nice to have a notice posted to tell people this, but apparently that is ‘negative advertising’ and not allowed. Apparently nothing is allowed to go wrong officially with Transport for London services or products and this has been the case since we went to war with Eastasia. And we have always been at war with Eastasia.
A further twenty-five minutes in a queue underground and I achieved my goal. I have my new Oyster card and the chap who sorted it for me was very helpful. He will doubtless be punished at some point. I hope they take it easy on him; anyone can be polite and efficient if they allow their mind to wander.
The proofs of identity and address that were so important and indispensable yesterday, that I had to dig out at home last night and bring in? Not even asked for. Completely unnecessary.