sweek wrote:

I guess I'm part of that lucky elite group too! Living in London, use
my Oyster almost daily, and haven't had any problems at all. I love
that I just don't have to worry about buying tickets or queueing at all
with auto top-up on it.
I don't know of any friends that have had problems either. Are you sure
it might not just be you who's in the minority here,

It could be. I have a very bad track record with ANY technology from
after the early-to-mid-nineties. Anything more modern modern that can
crash, fail, or break down usually will when I start using it! I can't
be in the minority _every_ time that happens!

and are you sure
you haven't just walked through gates even though you got an error beep
or anything?

What gates? I only ever used it on buses. And I don't travel on them
very often, which is why I'd hardly used it.

Anyway, one day it just stopped working. It didn't respond at all to
the readers on the buses. It didn't even respond to the reader in the
newsagent when I took it back to complain. I couldn't prove there
should still be five quid on there, because the readers wouldn't even
acknowledge there was a card there, never mind how much money was on
it. And I couldn't even get a refund on my deposit, because the
newsagent claimed the damage must've been my fault!

Now maybe you're saying there's something special and different about
the readers on gates that lets them read faulty cards that other
readers can't even detect. No-one told me anything about that at the
time!