Helen Deborah Vecht wrote to uk.transport.london on Mon, 11 Oct 2004:

Buy your ticket from a sweet shop; the queues are shorter, the staff
friendlier, never short of change AND you can get a Mars bar...

Except that they know what they are doing even less than does the
average ticket kiosk person. My local man insists you have to have a
Travelcard to buy a weekly bus pass (because his stock of paper bus
passes still have a space for the photocard number), and refused
point-blank to sell me an Oyster card on the grounds that "Paper tickets
are better, the others don't work". So I've not been back to him.
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 26 September 2004