Dr Ivan D. Reid wrote:
On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:31:18 -0600,
Tristán White
wrote in 45:
Sending this on behalf of someone else. Her Oystercard, suddenly, stopped
working at about 11 pm last night

I assume something's happened to the card and as she still has the paper
receipt for the yearly season ticket, she'll get that replaced. But what
about the excess on top of the card? Will they honour it if she has no
receipts? Will they somehow be able to read it? How did it happen?

Mine failed a while back, although more slowly than your friend's.
When I filled out the form for a replacement it asked for an estimate of
the pre-pay balance. Since I knew it had £17.60 on it the last time it
shiwed a balance on the bus I put down £18. The chap in the ticket office
then credited the new card with £18 as well as the £3 deposit. I presume
that somewhere down the line there will be a reconciliation of data and
the balance adjusted for any discrepancy, but I really have no way of
knowing if that's happened or not.

Same thing with mine. It didn't stop working, just worked erratically;
sometimes it would let me out of the gates or beep on the bus, and
sometimes it wouldn't. I went through the same process as Ivan to get
a replacement. I was quite surprised that I was just asked to estimate
the amount of prepay on there and believed; I'd have thought they'd
have been able to look it up in some way.

Patrick