If I wanted wall-to-wall coverage of Glastonbury, don't you think I'd've gone to it?
Love,
Bah
Monday, 25 June 2007
Sunday, 24 June 2007
egregious use of the word refreshing
this word needs to be exorcised from the speech of poncey middleclass English as it is only ever used to express the newfound experience that poor/ordinary people are not as untouchably unintelligent or uncultured as they thought.
Saturday, 23 June 2007
On the rubbishness of modern rail tickets
There's really little hope that Britain's privatised rail industry will ever get the trains to run on time, not if my experience of one of the smallest, simplest parts of the system is anything to go by. I mean, if they can't even get the physical tickets right, what hope is there that they'll ever sort out the trains?
My esteemed employer offers an interest-free annual season ticket loan, so ever since we moved to sunny Medway I've bought an annual seasonal ticket from Gillingham to London. I'm now on my fifth annual season ticket, and so far I have yet to have one that actually lasted the whole year without having to be replaced.
OK, they're only little rectangles of magnetically-encoded cardboard, and they take some punishment - being extracted and run through the ticket gate machine at least four times on every work day - not to mention the effects of mobiles and other electro-magnetic devices. So I accept that I'll probably have to replace my ticket at least once during the year (I think I did have one last about nine months before the magnetic stripe died).
No, my complaint is that recently Gillingham station had its ticket counter machines "upgraded" to spiffy new ones (you may have seen them at your local station, you know the sort - now have a full PC keyboard and monitor and take about twice as long to issue the tickets as the old machines). These machines issue their ticket on different "stock" to the old ones, and its rubbish. Firstly the magnetic encoding is much more sensitive than on the old tickets, so I've had to move my staff swipe card out of my ticket holder after having a series of failures, almost on a daily basis. But what's really inexcusable is that the ink smudges so badly that I've had to replace my ticket after just three months due to the expiry date in the centre becoming illegible. Now when I go through the gates I'm taking care to grasp the ticket by the corners and now the printing there is getting faded after just three weeks.
Is it really too much to expect a ticket that's valid for a year to actually last a year?
Bah.
My esteemed employer offers an interest-free annual season ticket loan, so ever since we moved to sunny Medway I've bought an annual seasonal ticket from Gillingham to London. I'm now on my fifth annual season ticket, and so far I have yet to have one that actually lasted the whole year without having to be replaced.
OK, they're only little rectangles of magnetically-encoded cardboard, and they take some punishment - being extracted and run through the ticket gate machine at least four times on every work day - not to mention the effects of mobiles and other electro-magnetic devices. So I accept that I'll probably have to replace my ticket at least once during the year (I think I did have one last about nine months before the magnetic stripe died).
No, my complaint is that recently Gillingham station had its ticket counter machines "upgraded" to spiffy new ones (you may have seen them at your local station, you know the sort - now have a full PC keyboard and monitor and take about twice as long to issue the tickets as the old machines). These machines issue their ticket on different "stock" to the old ones, and its rubbish. Firstly the magnetic encoding is much more sensitive than on the old tickets, so I've had to move my staff swipe card out of my ticket holder after having a series of failures, almost on a daily basis. But what's really inexcusable is that the ink smudges so badly that I've had to replace my ticket after just three months due to the expiry date in the centre becoming illegible. Now when I go through the gates I'm taking care to grasp the ticket by the corners and now the printing there is getting faded after just three weeks.
Is it really too much to expect a ticket that's valid for a year to actually last a year?
Bah.
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