On Friday, I set out early for my weekly trip to Tuttle. When I'm a Steemit bazillionaire, I will not care about peak/off-peak/super-off-peak travel, I'll just get in my Steem-Driven-Automobile and be whisked off to London with a couple of clicks. However, for the time being, I need to get the train and pay for it with my Visa Debit card and look after the pennies so the pounds can look after themselves.
So I got their early because I wanted to speak to a friend on the phone before getting on the train and getting stuck in the mobile black hole between Guildford and Woking. But, the gods of smooth payment were not working for me.
First some fare structure explanation. If I leave after 10am I can get a super-off-peak travelcard for £20.60 - this is the best deal because it gives me all the travel I might want in London as well as the trip there and back. The only pesky point is that I can't get a train back from London until 7pm, but a 11am to 7pm day in London suits me fine. But for Tuttle, I want to be in town well before 11am - the next best ticket is an off-peak return for £20.00 as long as it gets you into London after 10am, so the 9.34 works well. I don't have a travelcard with this, but I usually only go to Bank and back again on Tuttle days or walk around a bit, so that comes in under £5 which is better than buying a travelcard at this time which is £26.60. Travelling before 9.30 is just silly money in comparison so we don't even go there until we are rich.
OK. So I turn up around 9.15 to be able to make my call. Most of the ticket machines aren't selling off-peak tickets yet and the queue for the meatware ticket dispensers is long and fraught with the risk of having to actually speak to someone. So I stood around a little and then noticed there was one other machine that was a little different and looked like it might be able to help. I went and ordered an off-peak return. It asked for my card and my pin number. I did that and removed my card and then it froze... and I froze, staring at it... and it just didn't do anything for long long minutes and then it just flashed up OUT OF SERVICE and turned itself off - having taken my money but not discharged my tickets.
There was no alternative but to queue up and talk to a person. We crawled forward. I missed the opportunity to make a call lest I be summoned to the guardians of the ticket queue too early. I got there and the operative behind the thick glass sat looking over my shoulder as I waited for her to actually acknowledge me and start our transaction, but she was much more interested in someone slightly to the side. Eventually she said "Yes, how can I help you?" So I explained my situation. She said "Ah yes, well you see it's gone into what we call Limbo." I said I'd looked at my bank and could see that the payment had gone through, could she just issue a ticket based on that? "Oh no, you can't do that, you'll need to buy another ticket." So today was going to cost me £40 after all... I started to say something about whether it was right that I should be lending South West Trains £20 for the day and possibly the weekend, but I realised I was starting to be "that guy" in the queue and between the dumb stare of the operative and the cold ice beams burrowing into my back from the people behind me in the queue, I thought I'd let it go.
So yeah, they've still got £20 of mine "in Limbo" - I'm fortunately just solvent enough to be able to take this on the chin for a few days, but many people aren't. It's one of the ways in which the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. We need a better way of dealing with these things, these little annoyances that crop up between people, machines and money where mistakes have been made and arbitration over how they get sorted out is not dependent on frosty exchanges with over-worked and over-abused customer service staff.