On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 03:45:27PM -0800, MIG wrote:
On Nov 21, 11:19=A0pm, Richard wrote:
On Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:37:59 -0800 (PST), Mr Thant
wrote:
On 21 Nov, 15:17, David Cantrell wrote:
Bus usage is reasonably heavy here too, but TfL doesn't seem to care.
People who use the busses a lot are *forced* by the penalty cash fares
to either have a Travelcard (which we can get from the local railway
station) or an Oyster card. How inconvenient Oyster is doesn't matter,
it seems.
Auto top-up, yo.
Exactly. It's inconvenient, but only once, or less if you have
internet access and buy on-line.
And you have to sign up with full details, to be electronically
tagged. No thanks.

I too object to that. However, I'd probably hold my nose and do it anyway
*if* there wasn't one other big problem with Oyster. That is that when
it goes wrong it goes badly wrong. And it goes badly wrong in two ways:

First of all, to even know it's gone wrong you either have to keep a
running total in your head (and I have lots of other things to remember)
so you can spot when more money has been taken from your card than
you expected, or you have to religiously check the web site the day
after every journey so that you can compare the journeys it thinks you
made with the journeys you actually made. There's no real fix for this,
other than them SMSing me as soon as possible after every transaction
with my current pre-pay balance, or something of that ilk.

Second, to fix the problem you either need to phone an expensive 08
number or visit a tube station. The first is Wrong because I don't see
why I should pay to fix TfL's screw-ups*; the second is Wrong because
it's damnably inconvenient. They *must* introduce an 020 number for the
Oyster helpline, or they *must* make it possible to fix Oyster problems
at every railway station in London.

* even if, strictly speaking, I screwed up, I still blame TfL, because I
wouldn't have screwed up if they hadn't designed such an over-complex
system. Certainly if *I* designed a system as complex at work with so
many weird edge cases and complex conditions that the users were
regularly making mistakes, I'd have a great deal of explaining to do
if I wanted to keep my job.

--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

I don't do .INI, .BAT, or .SYS files. I don't assign apps to files.
I don't configure peripherals or networks before using them. I have
a computer to do all that. I have a Macintosh, not a hobby.
-- Fritz Anderson